in a panther-skin; her feathered crown sometimes has a pair of horns at the base. She is called lady of heaven, or of the world, daughter of the sun, mother, etc., and is often paired with Astarte. ASTARTE found a place in several Egyptian temples. We also hear of her prophets, and a fragmentary myth apparently describes how, as daughter of Ptah, she entered the pantheon of Memphis. Here, as we learn from another text, Egyptian and foreign deities met together, and among the latter is a Baalath Saphun (B. of the North?), whose male counterpart appears in Baal-Zephon near the Red Sea (Ex. xiv. 2) and the equivalent Baal-Sapun, one of the gods of king Baal (see p. 72). The Egyptians depict Astarte with the head of a lioness, driving her quadriga over the foe; and as goddess of war she is 'mistress of horses and lady of chariots.' But that both Anath and Astarte were also dissolute goddesses is recognised in a text which ascribes their creation to Set. The prevalence of the cult of the goddess of love and war in Palestine is well known from the references in the Old Testament to Ashtoreth (an intentional perversion to suggest _bōsheth_ 'shame'), from the place-names, and from the plaques which {87} indicate numerous minor local types (p. 29). In the Amarna tablets Astarte (or rather the Babylonian Ishtar) coalesces with ASHIRTA who is sometimes written in the plural (Ashrati). Like the place-names Anathoth (the Anaths) and Ashtaroth (the Astartes), the different conceptions of the goddess in all her local forms seem to be combined in one term. Ashirta appears to have been essentially the goddess of the west. In a text of the First Babylonian Dynasty she is paired with Ramman as 'bride of the king of heaven, lady of exuberance (or vigour) and splendour'; later, she is called the consort of the 'lord of the mountain,' an appellative corresponding to the Baal of Lebanon. In old Arabia she was the wife of the moon-god, and the masculine form Ashir, on cuneiform Cappadocian tablets of our period, seems to be no other than the great god Ashur himself. Her name cannot be severed from the _Ashērah_, but it is not clear whether it was transferred to or derived from the object of cult (see p. 26). The intricacy of the history of the divine-names will be understood when the Assyrian equivalent of Beth (house of) -El becomes the name of a deity, or when the plural of Ishtar is used of goddesses in general, or when Resheph (above) in Hebrew denotes a spark, {88} flame, or fire-bolt. But the career of the goddess of love and war is even more complicated. The phonetic equivalent of Ishtar in old Arabia was a god (so perhaps also in Moab, ninth century), and Ishtar herself appears in Assyria with a beard and is likened to the god Ashur, thus finding a later parallel in the bearded Aphrodite (Astarte, Venus) of Cyprus.