The Obituary
Astarte was the Phoenician and Canaanite goddess of love, war, and fertility, associated with the planet Venus as the evening star. Cognate with Mesopotamian Ishtar and equated by Greeks with Aphrodite, she held major temples at Sidon and across the Mediterranean, where Carthaginian and Cypriot worshippers honored her with rites of fertility. Condemned in Hebrew scripture as Ashtoreth, her cult eroded as the Roman Levant turned Christian, and her worship was extinct by late antiquity.
Worth remembering
- She was the Phoenician evening star, linked to the planet Venus and to fertility, sexuality, and war.
- Greeks identified her with Aphrodite and the Mesopotamians knew her counterpart as Ishtar.
Sources
- Astarte was a goddess of love and war worshipped across the Levant Wikipedia
- She was associated with the planet Venus and equated with Ishtar and Aphrodite World History Encyclopedia
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.