#ugaritic miscellanea

[yamayuandadu]

I have a question regarding a list of gods in Ugarit. Who are Baal-of-Ugarit and Baal-of-Sapun? Which of them refers to the Baal from the Baal Cycle? And especially, who are the other 'b'lm' listed?

Dennis Pardee concludes that Baal of Saphon is probably more or less identical with Baal as a literary character, while Baal of Ugarit would be more or less the same Baal as worshiped in the city itself/its main temple (Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, p. 276-277). Daniel Schwemer (The Storm-Gods of the Ancient Near East: Summary, Synthesis, Recent Studies: Part II, p. 10-11) also assumes that these are two manifestations of one deity, probably worshiped in the same temple. Essentially the same sort of difference as between invoking Inanna in Uruk as “just” Inanna and as Nin-Eanna, as opposed to two fully separate deities. Spencer J. Allen shows some skepticism, since technically no text actually identifies the two with each other (The Splintered Divine, p. 205-207), though he ultimately also admits that it’s probably safe to consider the cult of Baal of Ugarit an offshoot of the cult of Baal of Saphon (p. 212). He also concludes all available evidence confirms Baal of Saphon is Baal the literary character (p. 214).Beyond that, things get progressively more murky. As you probably already noticed, in at least one case (KTU 1.118) we have Baal of Saphon and then six nondescript “Baaluma”. Allen recently summarized some of the past attempts at identifying them (The Splintered Divine, p. 204-205); these include treating them as unspecified hypostases of Baal of Saphon; as a reference to cult images present in the temple(s); or possibly as fully independent deities who just happen to share the same moniker and simply rank slightly lower than Baal of Saphon.

I am not sure if anyone tried identifying the anonymous plural Baals with the two enigmatic non-geographical Baals who appear in some offering lists, Baal-kanapi, "Baal of the wing” (Pardee on p. 276 of Ritual and Cult suggests that this is essentially the Ugaritic understanding of Seth - presumably he means the style of depictions of Seth as a “divine foreigner” modeled on a typical weather god, but with wings), and the completely enigmatic Baal r’kt. I found nothing.

The final and most distinct case is that of Baal of Halab, who is obviously the weather god of Aleppo and rather clearly a distinct deity in Ugaritic imagination; in KTU 1.130 he receives offerings separately from Baal of Saphon. This situation repeats in KTU 1.148, but interestingly there he is listed before Baal of Saphon, as if he was the higher ranked deity. To be fair, in terms of religious and political influence Aleppo would arguably indeed be well beyond Mount Saphon. I think there is no real reason to treat Baal of Halab as identical with the Ugaritic Baal; the two are functionally as separate from each other as they are from Mesopotamian Adad. Hurrian sources from Ugarit recognize Teshub as the god of Aleppo, which matches the cultural "hurrianization" of the city at the time, but I’m not sure if we can necessarily assume that’s what everyone thought of when they took part in rituals referring to the god of Aleppo as Baal. Perhaps the situation was similar to when Zimri-Lim and his contemporaries made offerings to weather gods of Kumme or Arrapha without necessarily even knowing they were locally referred to as Teshub - we may never know.

Some more notes on the weather god of Aleppo and friends (in particular Pidray) below the cut, since they’re not fully relevant to your question.

Obviously, beyond the recognition of Dagan as Baal’s father, there’s little evidence for Aleppine influence on Ugaritic conception of the weather god and his circle, as far as I am aware. Saphon is the residence of the gods rather than an actual personified fully anthropomorphic weather god, there’s no trace of a bull chariot, Hebat, Tenu et al are absent, etc. This being said - there’s an interesting possibility that Pidray might have originated over there which would have huge implications. One of the only references to her from outside Ugarit, the oldest one yet at that, has recently been identified in an Akkadian-Amorite bilingual list by Andrew R. George and Manfred Krebernik, and they suggest she might have specifically originated around Aleppo as a daughter of the local weather god (Two Remarkable Vocabularies: Amorite-Akkadian Bilinguals!, p. 139). 

For what it’s worth, the weather god of Aleppo, with a permanent spouse etc., certainly fits the profile of a divine father more than unmarried Ugaritic Baal who at best has friends with benefits (that’s not my interpretation, for clarity, Schwemer wrote this, without using the term “friends with benefits” though); Pidray and her sisters being an awkwardly incorporated part of a different theological system would explain a lot. Also, it feels important for the case of Pidray that no matter how many times they are misidentified as “Canaanite” online, Resheph, Anat and Yarikh were also deities more popular in Amorite areas around the Middle Euphrates (in Yarikh’s case attestations actually go all the way up to Eshnunna!) and largely or entirely (depending on location and time period) absent from coastal areas; so even though the conception of weather god differed, I don’t think the recent shift towards treating Ugarit more and more as a part of a broader Amorite (or, better yet, Hurrian+Amorite) world is unjustified.

[yamayuandadu]

Hi, sorry if this has been asked before, but do you have any reliable sources that talk about Ashtar? I'm also looking for articles that talk about El/Ilu; and Shalim and Shahar as well. I appreciate any form of help.

I've answered a similar Ashtar question a few months ago, refer to the bibliography here. I do not have much to offer when it comes to Shahar and Shalim because as far as I can tell most scholarship focuses on exegesis of the Bible, which is something I have next to no interest in. I've answered a question about them here; the main source to depend on is Pardee's Ritual and Cult in Ugarit. When it comes to El, the basic selection of sources dealing with Ugaritic religion should obviously be the start: Smith's Baal Cycle commentaries, Pardee's aforementioned book, Rahmouni's Divine Epithets in the Ugaritic Alphabetic Texts, Handbook of Ugaritic Studies, etc. For more specialized information I recommend: a) Il in Personal Names by Alfonso Archi (early history, and why names with the element il and its cognates do not necessarily refer to a specific deity in pre-Ugaritic sources) b) West Semitic god El in Anatolian Hieroglyphic Transmission by Ilya Yakubovich for the first millennium BCE c) The God Eltara and the Theogony by Anna Maria Polvani for El's Hurro-Hittite career (there's also the Elkunirsa myth but I do not think there's any recent treatment of it, so your best bet is to just read the translation in Hoffner's Hittite Myths from the 1990s) d) The Dwelling of ˀIlu in Baˁlu and ˀAqhatu by Madadh Richey for some lexical considerations regarding El's residence e) God (Ilu) and King in KTU 1.23 by Theodore J. Lewis for El's role as the king of the gods

Also, it's worth checking out Wiggins' monograph A reassessment of Asherah: with further considerations of the goddess since while hardly focused on El, it does discuss Athirat's relationship with him in the Ugarit section. Similarly, might be worth looking into this author's Shapash article.

[yamayuandadu]

mountain deities! tell me everything you know about them!

I was just reading one of the articles you made about a mountain god who was worshipped in an area far away from the mountain he personified and I was wondering.....

were mountain deities worshipped or "combined"/syncrestised with other similar mountain deities? or did the worshippers themselves associate the deities with any region or role they "personally" wanted?

also what exact role did these deities fulfil? were these deities worshipped for safety while crossing the mountain itself for an example ? or did the worshippers view mountains as generally sacred?

To the best of my best knowledge we have precisely 0 evidence for syncretism between individual mountain deities, which I think makes sense, since their core characteristic was usually tied to a single specific place whose name was identical with theirs. It really does seem to boil down to perceiving specific places as numinous due to unique factors in each case, even in the principle behind the worship of mountains was the same across a relatively large area.

We actually know relatively little about the individual character of many mountain deities but if Wilfred G. Lambert's theory about Ashur originating as one is correct then the answer to your question about assigning traits to them is "yes" at least in this case.

The primary role of mountain deities, at least as argues by Volkert Haas and Piotr Taracha, essentially just boiled down to some places being innately numinous and either suitable as a place of residence for gods or divine in their own right (or both). They both point out the link between mountains and weather deities as a factor - this one goes back to Ebla texts at least.

I have not seen any evidence for mountain deities being responsible for safe passage - there are prayers of that sort from Mesopotamia but they tend to invoke usual benevolent and/or apotropaic deities most of the time (ex. Shamash). It needs to be stressed that mountain deities were worshiped in Anatolia, across northern Syria (but not really in Ugarit for the most part - Mount Saphon was just the residence of deities) and in Upper Mesopotamia, but in lower Mesopotamia this was a rare phenomenon, and mountains, if personified, could be portrayed as antagonistic forces instead.

[yamayuandadu]

Do you have any articles or sources you’d recommend for reading about the Ugarit sea monster Tunnanu? I know it’s mostly mentioned in the Ba’al cycle and possibly one incantation for snake bites (though that translation is contested), but it’s also so often conflated with Lotan ;7;)

There isn’t much to know beyond what you already know, as far as I can tell. It seems you are pretty well versed in the topic. As far as I know most of the recent translations of the incantations do accept that Tunnanu is mentioned in it though, if we’re talking about KTU 1.82.

More about Tunnanu, and about its purported Akkadian cognate, under the cut.

Some recent treatments of the aforementioned text and/or other passages mentioning Tunnanu include ust How Many Monsters Did Anat Fight ( KTU 1.3 III 38–47)? by Wayne T. Pitard, A Study of the Serpent Incantation KTU2 1.82: 1–7 and its Contributions to Ugaritic Mythology and Religion by Adam E. Miglio and Yamm as the Personification of Chaos? A Linguistic and Literary Argument for a Case of Mistaken Identity by Brendan C. Benz. Sadly, none of them address whether Tunnanu can be firmly separated from Lotan. With the exception of Pitard, most do agree that the convention of treating this name as a title of Yam is erroneous though.

It seems part of the problem is that there’s an ongoing debate over whether there is a singular monster named Tunnanu or if tunnanu is a generic term for a mythical serpentine creature. Pierre Bordreuil’s and Dennis Pardee’s A Manual of Ugaritic recommends the later interpretation, for instance. Pitard and Mark S. Smith in the second volume of the Baal Cycle commentary argue that it is not impossible tnn is in reality two words, not one. Their argument rests on the fact that the vocalized tu-un-na-nu from the multilingual lexical list is a synonym of ordinary words referring to snakes in Sumerian (MUŠ) and Akkadian (ṣi-i-ru). On this basis, they tentatively suggest the monstrous tnn from the Baal Cycle and incantations might have had a different reading.

The only other matter I think worth addressing here is the argument over the purported Akkadian cognate of Tunnanu. The presence of cognates of the name in multiple other languages is obviously widely agreed upon. Most notably, tannin (and plural tannînîm) occurs in the Old Testament as a sea monster and/or a regular snake. While other variant forms and  cognates are attested in a variety of sources in Aramaic, Arabic and Ge’ez, they seem to reflect late adoption depending on the aforementioned source, as outlined by George C. Heider in the DDD.

Where does the notion of an Akkadian cognate come from, then, since it wouldn’t exactly fit this pattern? In 1998, Frans Wiggermann published his influential article Transtgridian Snake Gods (funnily enough in the same volume as Westenholz equally, if not more impactful Nanaya, Lady of Mystery). He convincingly argues there that some of Mesopotamian deities tied to the underworld can be grouped together based on their serpentine associations, an idea adopted by many subsequent studies (most recently by Irene Sibbing-Plantholt in The Image of Mesopotamian Divine Healers, I believe). 

In a footnote (p. 35), he argues that an association with snakes or outright a snake-like form can be attributed to the elusive Dannina, a deity listed in the god list An = Anum among the courtiers of Ereshkigal (tablet V, line 234). He depends on the assumption this name would be an Akkadian cognate of Tunnanu, in addition to being a variant form of the term danninu, one of the many sparsely attested poetic designations of the underworld.

However, as summarized by Anna Jordanova in her dissertation Untersuchungen zur Gestalt einer Unterweltsgöttin: Ereškigal nach den sumerischen und akkadischen Quellentexten notes that while the precise etymology of danninu remains uncertain, most other researchers did not accept Wiggermann’s interpretation. On one hand, tunnanu lacks any connection to the underworld. On the other hand, danninu and thus Dannina have another more plausible etymology. The word danānu, “to be strong”, is well attested, and would make it possible to translate danninu something like “the strong place”, “the stronghold”, a name perfectly in line with the image of the underworld as a fortified city evident in its descriptions in myths and in terms like urugal, “great city”, and the like. For what it’s worth, the only time I recall seeing danninu outside of god lists and formulas of the “heaven and earth/the underworld” variety was in a title of Nergal cited by Wayne Horowitz in Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography, āšir dannina sāniq nēr, “controller of the underworld, supervisor of the 600” (600 being the conventional number of deities believed to reside there in post-Kassite sources). Nergal obviously wasn’t associated with snakes, while the more commonly proposed meaning of the term does fit his general character. Therefore, I also think in this case Wiggermann is wrong.

[yamayuandadu]

is the deity mentioned in ugaritic sources milku a "predecessor" of some kind to the Ammonite deity milcom?

i know the neighbouring god chemosh might have have been a "successor" to the eblaite Kamiš. so i assume its a possibility?

btw im fully aware that the bible isnt a very accurate source when it comes to ancient near eastern theology (especially the cultures that were at odds with ancient Israel)

I actually do not think I've seen anyone address this in detail. Etymologically both seem to go back to the root mlk, same as a number of other theonyms. But Milcom was clearly a pantheon head and Milku is just one of multiple underworld deities. At the same time, it's worth noting it does seem Milku was associated with the Transjordan in Ugarit. Maybe he rose to prominence in the south after the Bronze Age collapse? It doesn't help that there is actually much less evidence from the south than from Ugarit or Emar in the Bronze Age. I cannot really give you a clear answer beyond "the names are clearly related", sadly. The connection between Chemosh and Kamiš is not actually proved, also. The recent discovery of the Akkadian-Amorite god list would indicate that there was more than one deity with a similar name. As noted by A. R. George and M. Krebernik in their commentary on this new discovery: "The equations of Kamiš with Enki/Ea in our text, and of Kammuš with Nergal in god lists, do not favour an assumption that they are all identical." W. G. Lambert already questioned if these are all variants of one name in the 1970s (source). Some more discussion can be found here.

[yamayuandadu]

Going to combine the responses to these two asks since the topics overlap.

Attar probably had -some- role in Mari early on but good luck figuring what was it. Proposed even earlier Ebla attestations do not seem to be accepted today (as a side note, if anyone is willing to offer serious advice on whether the upcoming Ashtart wiki article rewrite should include the Ebla attestations I'd be grateful. I mean actual advice from people who know something about Ebla, though). The Ugaritic evidence, whether from Baal Cycle or elsewhere, is pretty consistent and paints the image of a warrior god of small to moderate relevance. The trilingual edition of the Weidner god list gives Attar = Ashtabi = Lugal-Marada and while the last one seems, pardon the informal wording, lolsorandom (though I guess he was a war god too), the Ashtabi connection runs deeper. There's a double deity Attar-wa-Attapar who Alfonso Archi linked to Ashtabi, and there's of course the slightly overestimated parallel between Attar's substitute king adventure in the Baal Cycle and Ashtabi filling in for Teshub after the latter fails. I feel like most treatments of this fail to acknowledge that the context is different because Ashtabi is a member of Teshub's circle pretty consistently but Attar isn't really too closely linked to Baal. Attar also appears in Marriage of Nikkal and Yarikh but I do not think there's any real agreement on what is he doing there. All bets are on table. He might have either a daughter or a sister, ybrdmy, who is one of the prospective brides of Yarikh, but she might also be Baal's daughter or just an epithet of Pidray who's also in the same passage. Despite cognate names he never appears in association with Ashtart, and that seems consistent everywhere where he appears. They do both share an association with lions but that's not much. There is no clear early evidence for Attar having an astral character, afaik, especially if you do not subscribe to the astral etymologies of his name. Mark Smith went as far recently as speculating it might have been a secondary development. There might be an astral Attar at Emar already, "Aštar of the Stars", but due to scarcity of attestations and the fact there are evidently female Aštars there in addition to the usual AštarTs makes the very identification with him uncertain. As a curiosity it's worth mentioning there were attempts early on (in... 1980s? 1990s?) to identify the city god of Emar as Attar because... Ashtabi can be written logographically as NIN.URTA and Attar and Ashtabi are related and similar or something? I do not think it's very convincing and it's been a while since I've seen anyone repeat it. Aramaic and Phoenician evidence is basically nonexistent save for the occasional theophoric name, and that offers little insight. Ugarit is basically unique in being a coastal location where he had any presence whatsoever, as he is also absent from Amarna letters, other Egyptian sources, the Bible and Philo of Byblos' Lore Olympus forerunner Phoenician History. From Moab comes the single "Ashtar-Chemosh" reference which seems to double the martial prowess of the local head god by combining him with similarly warlike Attar. First millennium BCE South Arabia offers a lot of evidence, and it seems Attar might have even been the pantheon head around these parts. Both his astral and warlike roles are mentioned in inscriptions. He also was associated with irrigation it would appear, though this is seemingly a secondary development and isn't attested elsewhere. The elusive Axumite evidence for Attar also points in the astral direction, judging from the title "the king of tranquility in heaven and earth" and a Ge'ez-Greek bilingual where in Greek he's called Ouranos (sic).

Bibliography:

1.  Alfonso Archi, Studies in the Ebla Pantheon II (1997) 2. Noga Ayali-Darshan, The Role of Aštabi in the Song of Ullikummi and the Eastern Mediterranean "Failed God" Stories (2014) 3.Mark S. Smith, The God Athtar in the Ancient Near East and His Place in KTU 1.6 I (1995) 4. Mark S. Smith, ‘Athtart in Late Bronze Age Syrian Texts (2014) 5. Aren M. Wilson-Wright, Athtart: the transmission and transformation of a goddess in the Late Bronze Age (doctoral dissertation, 2016) +the usual selection of Smith's Baal Cycle commentary, Pardee's Ritual and Cult, Rahmouni's Epithets, etc which you can find in the bibliography of every Ugarit article I wrote.

[yamayuandadu]

Baal Cycle is an ancient shonen, as evidenced by characters having special attacks with dumb names

[yamayuandadu]

What is the difference between Ugarit and Canaan? I know that some consider Ugarit as belonging to Canaan, but current studies reject this view. Did they share any gods, and if so, were there differences between the two versions? Sorry for the stupid question, I just started studying this stuff.

Already answered a similar ask a year ago or so and subsequently posted a bit about similar matters (a, b). Canaan ends roughly in Byblos, Ugarit is much further north and shows strong cultural ties with places like Alalakh, Aleppo and arguably even Mari and Emar. My recommendation is to start further ventures with Pardee's Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, which offers most of the information you may need.

[yamayuandadu]

must admit that upon closer examination, despite being often repeated the kothar-ptah equivalence theory seems to have weaker foundations than i thought - “if a root I just imagined based on my speculative translation of a work only known in greek was understood as a pun on Ptah’s name then a god from a different culture 1000 years prior is basically Ptah” it's virtually all W. F. Albright fanfiction which is basically a rule with often repeated but not directly attested identification claims of this variety as it stands, the only real hard piece of evidence is that Kothar lives in Memphis according to Ugaritic sources. But he also lives in Crete according to literally the same passages the Memphis line comes from so I find the proposal this is just meant to reflect where the end of the world was from the perspective of ugaritic trade network rather than geographic reality more plausible. The prestige of both gods is hardly comparable too, and the connections Ptah did develop with imported northern deities in Egypt do not really match Kothar particularly well

[yamayuandadu]

Deeply unfortunate phrasing

[yamayuandadu]

Could you talk about Shalim and Shahar? I'm assuming there's not that much about them, but I think they sound interesting. I'm also curious about whether the info on their Wikipedia pages is accurate.

Yeah, sure thing. Shahar's just about the Bible so of course it is not accurate. Imagine if Siris' page was about tracking down every time the common word "wine" appears in the Bible! Shalim's has an absolute abomination in it, "likely Asherah (Athirat or Anat)," this level of depraved longing for full interchangeability of goddesses (coupled here with illiteracy) frankly should result in social shunning at this point. I'm tired of fixing it. I'm tired of it being present even in peer reviewed publications. Granted, in Ugarit studies this longing is so strong even male deities get hit by it, for example mr. N. Wyatt is apparently obsessed with proving Yarikh is El which to me seems like an echo of these christian fundie “moon god Allah” graphics which were all the rage in the Bush era, I genuinely can’t think of any other explanation for this nonsense existing. While I've seen MUCH worse, and honestly you can find 10x worse on wikipedia (which is part of why I did not really put these particularly high in my queue), both articles are weak because they are unconcerned with material evidence. You can't write a good article about a deity until you spent some time reading something like "grain distribution statistics from the Umma province" is what I firmly believe. A good term to use to describe Shahar and Shalim in Ugarit would be "sort of irrelevant." Shahar never appears on his own, only as Shalim's cognomen. Shalim does receive offerings alone in some of the KTUs (Keilalphabetische Texte aus Ugarit, the most common designation for Ugaritic text, next to RS, which just stands for Ras Shamra) but as far as I know he's often near the very end, alongside deified instruments and censers. I think he also gets livers a few times, no clue if this indicates anything specific though (liver was the favored type of organ for divination, fwiw). As a pair, they appear in a single myth which is considered particularly confusing and gets regularly retranslated so the only things which we can say for certain is that both are children of El and that they are voracious (?). That "globetrotting" ritual text where deities are invoked from their cult centers just places them in the heavens rather than in any specific city or mountain like most of the rest.

The Akkadian cognate of Shahar, Šērum, had a bit more clout. He has no twin, though. Also, he inexplicably appears in the Nippur god list with grain deities, though followed by Tiranna (Manzat) and Mahdianna (Kabta), who are obviously astral. Interestingly, a description of his statue would indicate he was not antropomorphic: he had wings, the forelegs of a bovine, the body of a lion, and the face of a man. Interestingly, it is possible that the name of Ashur's... daughterwife (they were already arguing if she's his wife or daughter in the Neo-Assyrian period!)... Šerūʾa either was derived from the same root or received a folk etymology based on it. Gebhard Selz also thinks the "Sumerian" counterpart of Aya, Sherida, was derived from the same word, and personally I find his argument sound, though note it is not universally accepted, see here.

[yamayuandadu]

So I was looking for articles about Mot and came across an article called "Hungry Like the Wolf: On the Image of Mot" by Robert D Miller II. Do you know this article, and is the author reliable?

This one? Never heard of the author before but with all due respect if a paper about a strictly Ugaritic literary composition randomly breaks into tangents about Prose Edda, Jung and so on to invent an "archetypal myth" about an animal with virtually no religious significance in Ugarit because there's a big wolf in Norse mythology it is not credible to put it very lightly. There are two mainstream views regarding Mot and animal parallels: the "comparative" approach is to go with evidence provided by the description Mutum, an obscure Akkadian cognate who appears in the court of Ereshkigal in Underworld Vision of an Assyrian Prince who is lizard-like (or rather, mushussu-like); and the, idk, "lexical" one, which basically concludes Mot is described acting like the contemporary ideas about behavior of lions, with the latter being favored by the authors of the most extensive commentary so far. Also, irrelevant to your question, but something that bugged me in this article: the Illuyanka myth does not have "Proto-Indo-European" origin, like most Anatolian myth it originated locally among the Hattians, who did not speak an Indo-European language. Hittite religion exists solely to remind you why PIE mythology reconstructions are basically almost entirely fanfiction at most trying to build something from cognate names, but usually with even less.

[yamayuandadu]

Putting aside the more or less famous quartet of Baal Cycle, Epic of Aqhat, King Kirta and Marriage of Nikkal and Yarikh aside, I think the most fun Ugaritic myth is CAT 1.114 just due to seemingly being almost entirely comedic:

El, the head of the pantheon, normally described as a venerable, sagacious elder, throws a party for the other gods

Yarikh, the moon god, possibly under the influence of alcohol crawls under the tables for... some reason, ending up compared to a dog. His friends, including the duo Ashtart & Anat well attested elsewhere, offer him food, while gods unfamiliar with him poke him with a stick

unnamed “porter of El’s house” seemingly has no issue with the poking but laments that good cuts of meat are wasted on a (dude pretending to be) a dog (presumably because if he’s committed to the act he could just as well eat the parts nobody wants, like a real dog would)

El seemingly does not care and instead gets drunk himself

the duo Thukamuna-wa-Shunama, who are otherwise sort of elusive but have some connection to El, decide to escort him out of the party, presumably so that he doesn’t make a scene himself

however, on the way to, I presume, El’s abode, they encounter a creature named Habayu, who is probably not a god since he has horns and a tail. His name might be derived from a root meaning “to babble” and he might be the demon of drunkenness.

Habayu, to put it very colloquially, smears El with shit

El falls down

The text ends with what is presumed to be a recipe for treating hangover

Sources for full or partial translation and some discussion: 1, 2, 3

[yamayuandadu]

Rather irresponsible comment courtesy of Nicolas Wyatt in the Handbook of Ugaritic Studies which also shows the general faults of relating everything to Greece, especially when we are talking about a culture which ceased to exist centuries before “classical” Greece even came to be. Comparing Baal with Zeus is surface level analysis which completely ignores that the Ugaritic pantheon does not work as an analog of the Greek one even just due to the presence of two pantheon heads, “active” Baal and “passive” and “senior” El, who were both actively worshiped, both appear as active characters in the “present time” of myths (this makes El unlike, say, Cronos and Ouranos and co. in Greek mythology) and both enjoyed similar level of popularity. This resembles the Mesopotamian model somewhat, with a passive nominal pantheon head in Anu and an active one in Enlil, though note that Anu was very rarely worshiped; maybe comparing it to the difference between Enlil and Ninurta would be more apt. To complicate matters further, the head of the Hurrian pantheon, Teshub, was also worshiped in Ugarit, and was not treated as identical with Baal - at best the “Baal of Halab” receiving offerings alongside “Baal of Saphon” (ie. the Ugaritic one) might be taken as Teshub filtered through a local lens, I suppose, since at the time of the Ugaritic texts, Halab (Aleppo) was firmly established as his cult center. He is also among the five most popular gods in theophoric names (the other 4 being Baal, El, Shapash and Resheph). Mot is hardly a god at all to begin with. Mot is quite literally akin to the modern notion of a “grim reaper,” so far the only sources which do mention him are literary texts, where he functions only as an antagonistic force. Sure, he gets a plenty of epithets in the Baal Cycle, and El is favorable towards him, but there is no trace of him in offering lists, theophoric names, theological texts; simply put, we are dealing with a figure whose god status is entirely a literary device to raise the stakes. There is also no strong indication that Mot was the king of the dead. Indeed, the dead seemed to be in the care of the god Milku, absent from the Baal Cycle and somewhat popular judging from offering lists and theophoric names. I’ve compiled what I was able to find about him for the sake of a wiki article recently. The matter is complicated further by the fact the Hurrian goddess with an analogous function, Allani, was also worshiped in Ugarit; also, a list equates the enigmatic Arsay with her which may or may not point at a similar character. I will give him one thing though, I think the Yam-Poseidon comparison does make sense as long as you remember there is a fair share of myths where Poseidon is presented as an antagonistic force (though Yam is, as far as the known texts go, somewhat less keen on sex pest endeavors). However, while for all intents and purposes Poseidon was worshiped frequently, the devotion to Yam, while attested, puts him among minor deities, as far as I am aware: in offering lists he appears somewhere around the likes of personified harps and censers, not with the big names like Shapash or Resheph. Also, he is not otherwise attested on the coast, the only other direct references I am aware of are from Emar, Mari (literally closer to the modern Syria-Iraq border than the coast!) and the Egyptian “Astarte papyrus,” and in all of these cases he matters less than in Ugarit. The closest parallel to Yam is Hurrian Kiashe (they even have similarly creative names, both mean “sea”)... who was also worshiped in Ugarit (and in nearby Alalakh). Tl;dr comparative mythology: rarely all that good of an idea, even if your goal is to make something more approachable.

[yamayuandadu]

So what are the differences between Phoenician Astarte and Ugaritic Ashtart? Btw, do you have anything interesting about Attar? Thx in advance!

geographical distribution is an obvious factor - Ugaritic texts exclusively associate Ashtart with the city itself, with the nearby steppe, and with Mari. I do not think anything from Sidon, Tyre, Byblos or Carthage does that with the cognate goddess.

as far as I am aware, in the (very few) Phoenician sources, she does not show the strong association with hunting that's the norm in Ugarit and i don't think the warlike role is particularly strongly pronounced either; she is actually fairly nondescript which probably explains why so many authors were keen to plaster the "fertility" hot takes all over her. We have no real idea how she was like in the second millennium BCE due to scarcity of sources from Byblos, Tyre etc. This article points out depictions of armed goddesses are entirely absent from Phoenician art, fwiw, but this is strictly about the first millennium BCE. Second millennium is a bit troublesome because apparently it can be dificult to tell what is a purely local product in egyptianizing style and what was used by Egyptians themselves in their administrative centers. Note the Egyptian Astarte -was- remarkably warlike like in Ugarit. Some discussion can be found here.

overall the closest match for the Ugaritic Ashtart is probably to be found in Emar on the Euphrates; the difference is that Emariote Ashtart is the #1 goddess while Ugaritic plays second fiddle to Anat (and, while this is rarely brought up, both of them actually seem less prominent in cult than Shapash). I think insisting she was a minor goddess in Ugarit is overdoing it though, she received regular offerings, had her own clergy and festivals, and does factor into myths (including a solo myth which imo just suffers from not being included among the tablets from first excavations and therefore stuck in specialist literature only).

As a side note: I think it is important to differentiate between strictly Phoenician Astarte and Astarte as documented in late Hellenized works like Philo's. The latter might just be an intellectual construct. I won't even comment on Lucian because he was a satirist (a really good one at that!)

Attar is incredibly elusive! Mark Smith wrote an article about him but I cannot access it by any means (even the Less Legit ones) since it was only ever printed in an old book celebrating someone's birthday or something along these lines. There is an article comparing his role with Ashtabi's by Noga Ayali-Darshan but it's not very in depth. Otherwise you are largely limited to having to pick up tidbits from publications about Ugaritic religion (ex. Pardee's Ritual and Cult in Ugarit) as a whole or from articles and monographs about Ashtart (which is ironic given the complete lack of associations between them; one good article is this one, it does discuss Attar in some capacity).

[yamayuandadu]

i think ugaritic studies have a bigger problem than analogous mesopotamia-related ones with authors trying to make the pantheon small and self-contained One particularly weird example is the late W. H. van Soldt trying to wish most the Hurrian deities in theophoric names away by asserting that they surely were only used as stand-ins for local ones. He took it to the logical extreme in the case o Hebat, who he asserted was just a stand-in for Pidray, which would be remarkably weird because Hebat appears in a statistically notable number of known names and Pidray in 0. I feel like the only reason why he admitted the Nupatik name might really refer to Nupatik is because he doesn’t neatly map onto any other god (because his character is entirely unknown). Note that there is no real indication that Ugaritic and Hurrian deities were fully conflated: Hurrian offering lists can mention Kumarbi, the Hurrian “father of gods,” alongside El, there are also rituals where both Yarikh and Kusuh or both Ashtart and Shaushka appear, on top of a degree of interchange (Hurrian Takitu in Ugaritic lists, Anat in Hurrian lists from Ugarit etc). God lists might “equate” Kumarbi with El but this does not necessarily imply more than that they were understood as gods of analogous standing (also, the Ugaritic god lists show a remarkable degree of scribal play, which is not exactly theological in character). Then there is the “usual” type of modern conflation (all goddesses are clearly the same, all underworld gods are the same...). The logical extreme of this are authors who assert Yarikh (the moon) must be El because... in one text Yarikh’s handmaiden is paired with Athirat’s handmaiden. Let’s not even go into the “Dagan is El” school of thought which is much more widespread and at least compares gods of similar nature.