Istar was the chief of the Accadian goddesses, and she retained her rank even among the Semites, who, as we have seen, looked upon the goddess as the mere consort and shadow of the god. But Istar continued to the last a separate and independent divinity. She presided over love and war, as well as over the chase. She was invoked as 'the queen of heaven,' 'the queen of all the gods,' and there was often a tendency to merge in her the other goddesses of the pantheon. Her principal temples were at Erech, Nineveh, and Arbela, but altars were erected to her in almost every place, and she was adored under as many forms and titles as she possessed shrines. Her name and worship spread through the Semitic world, in Southern Arabia, in Syria, in Moab, where she was identified with the Sun-god, Chemosh, and in Canaan, where she was called Ashtoreth, the Astartê of the Greeks. But the Greeks also knew her as Aphroditê, the goddess whom they had borrowed from the Phœnicians of Canaan, and we may discover her again in the Ephesian Artemis. The rites performed in her temples made Istar or Ashtoreth the darkest blot in Assyrian and Canaanitish religion, and excited the utmost horror and indignation of the prophets of God. When the moon came to be conceived as a female divinity, the pale reflection, as it were, of the sun, Istar, the evening star, became also the goddess of the moon. Hence it is that 'the queen of heaven' (Jer. xliv. 17) passed into Astartê 'with crescent horns.' One of the most popular of old Babylonian myths told how Istar had wedded the young and beautiful Sun-god, Tammuz, 'the only-begotten,' and had descended into Hades in search of him when he had been slain by the boar's tusk of winter. A portion of a Babylonian poem has been preserved to us, which describes her passage through the seven gates of the underworld, where she left with the warden of each some one of her adornments, until at last she reached the seat of the infernal goddess Allat, stripped and bare. There she remained imprisoned until the gods, wearied of the long absence of the goddess of love, created a hound called 'the renewal of light,' who restored her to the upper world. The myth clearly refers to the waning and waxing of the monthly moon, and must therefore have originated when Istar had already become the goddess of the moon. The myth entered deeply into the religious belief of the worshippers of Istar. The Accadians called the month of August 'the month of the errand of Istar,' while June was termed 'the month of Tammuz' by the Semites. It was then that, as Milton writes, his 'annual wound in Lebanon allured The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorous ditties all a summer's day; While smooth Adonis from his native rock Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood Of Tammuz yearly wounded.'