Astarte & Phoenician sailors

[David Morris]

http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/8/0,5716,10088+1,00.html

Astarte 

also spelled ASHTART, great goddess of the ancient Middle East and chief deity
of Tyre, Sidon, and Elath, important Mediterranean seaports. Hebrew scholars
now feel that the goddess Ashtoreth mentioned so often in the Bible is a
deliberate conflation of the Greek name Astarte and the Hebrew word boshet,
"shame," indicating the Hebrew contempt for her cult. Ashtaroth, the plural
form of the goddess's name in Hebrew, became a general term denoting goddesses
and paganism.

King Solomon, married to foreign wives, "went after Ashtoreth the goddess of
the Sidonians" (I Kings 11:5). Later the cult places to Ashtoreth were
destroyed by Josiah. Astarte/Ashtoreth is the Queen of Heaven to whom the
Canaanites had burned incense and poured libations (Jeremiah 44).

Astarte, goddess of war and sexual love, shared so many qualities with her
sister, Anath, that they may originally have been seen as a single deity. Their
names together are the basis for the Aramaic goddess Atargatis.

Astarte was worshiped in Egypt and Ugarit and among the Hittites, as well as in
Canaan. Her Akkadian counterpart was Ishtar. Later she became assimilated with
the Egyptian deities Isis and Hathor (a goddess of the sky and of women), and
in the Greco-Roman world with Aphrodite, Artemis, and Juno, all aspects of the
Great Mother.
  
IMAGE:
http://www.teenwitch.com/DATE/YR/1999/08/P_08_10.HTM



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