Athirat

Athirat is an Ancient South Arabian goddess. She was venerated in Qatabān and sporadically in the Jawf region and in Sabaʾ. She has been associated with the homonymous West Semitic goddesses – the Ugaritic Athirat and the Biblical Asherah.

Athirat (ʾṯrt) is a female Ancient South Arabian divinity, whose cult is mainly attested in Qatabān since the mid-1st millennium BCE until the beginning of the Christian era. Sporadic mentions of the goddess are found in the Sabaic and Minaic corpora.

In the Qatabanian territories, Athirat was venerated in various sanctuaries in both the Wādī Ḥarīb and the Wādī Bayḥān. In the city of Haribat (modern Ḥinū al-Zurayr), inscriptions attest to a vivid cult of the goddess in a temple called Yasal (CSAI I, 147), which might correspond to the vestiges found in the southwest part of the site. The capital Tamnaʿ (modern Hajar Kuḥlān) hosted two temples of Athirat. The location of the Qablān temple is unknown (CSAI I, 145), whereas the one named Yashhal was excavated by an Italian-French mission (de Maigret and Robin 2016). It was built around a pre-existing 4th-century-BCE well, and was in use from the following century at the latest until the 1st century CE. Even before this, the sovereign (mkrb) of Qatabān Yadaʿʾab Dhubyan son of Shahr commemorated, among other building activities on the Mablaqa pass between the Wādī Ḥarīb and the Wādī Bayḥān, the foundation of “a temple of Wadd and Athirat” (CSAI I, 21; CSAI I, 33).

The goddess was also associated with the cult of ʿAmm, the main Qatabanian deity, in the legal royal inscriptions registering “the pact of friendship, affiliation and devotion” of the Priests of ʿAmm dhu-Labakh “to ʿAmm and Athirat” (cf. CSAI I, 198). It is interesting to find a further association between the two gods in relationship with the naming of cult personnel in the inscription CSAI I, 117, the temple of ʿAmm Rayʿan in the city of dhu-Ghayl^um (modern Hajar Ibn Ḥumayd in the Wādī Bayḥān): two wizards of the god were also appointed priests (rby) of Athirat and they ordained their sons “collectors” (qẓr) of the goddess.

In the Jawf region, the cult of Athirat was practised in the city of Nashshān (modern al-Sawdāʾ) during Minaean rule, in the second half of the 1^st millennium BCE. There, priests (s²wʿ) were assigned to Athirat’s cult by royal decree (as-Sawdāʾ 30).

Athirat received dedications and requests of protection, frequently from women. On the basis of the frequent dedications of a category of objects called baḥat (bḥt), identified with the “votive phallus” (Bron 1998), she is assumed to have been a goddess of fertility. However, that translation of the term baḥat has been questioned recently and is now thought to signify “stone block, slab” (Multhoff 2010).

The inscriptions indicate that the cult of Athirat was connected with parenthood. A small incense burner from the temple of ʿAthtar dhu-Riṣāf outside the site of al-Sawdāʾ in the Jawf, was placed in the temple as a vow to the goddess for the birth of a healthy son (SW-BA 7). The Sabaic inscription al-Jaruw-Ḥājj 1 records a woman’s devotion after her life was protected by the goddess during delivery.

Athirat’s connection with motherhood is made explicit by the epithet “mother of ʿAthtar” that she bears in this very Sabaic text. This is one of the rare hints at the genealogies of South Arabian deities and is particularly interesting as ʿAthtar is the main pan-South Arabian god, and ʿAthtar is also known as an important god in Ugaritic literature, in the same way as Athirat. Her motherly role could also explain the appellation of the goddess as “his (probably, of the inscription’s author) mother”, in a fragmentary inscription from her temple Yashhal in Tamnaʿ (Yashhal 1). A further connection between ʿAthtar and Athirat is found in a Minaic text from the city of Nashshān, fixing a hierogamy ritual between the god and the women of the city during a month called dhu-Athirat (“that of Athirat”), which was probably the period of celebration of the goddess’s festival (as-Sawdāʾ 37).

On the basis of the aforementioned associations of the cult of Athirat with those of Wadd and ʿAmm, speculations have been made regarding the possible role of Athirat as a paredra of major gods and, in particular, as the solar goddess of an astral triad. However, this hypothesis has not been corroborated by the sources.

Besides the feminine epithets such as “his/her lady (mrʾt)” (Yashhal 4), the goddess is also endowed with masculine epithets such as “his/her god (ʾl)” and “his/her lord (mrʾ)” (CSAI I, 123), as is frequently the case in Qatabanic inscriptions.

The editor of a Minaic text written on the pedestal of an ibex sculpture (LuBM 2; Fig. 1) suggested interpreting the expression “ʾṯrt ʿlb” as “Athirat of the ʿilb-tree”, which would be the first allusion to the worship of sacred trees in Ancient South Arabia and a parallel to the cult of the Canaanite goddess Asherah in the Bible (Frantsouzoff 2006). However, caution must be applied to such parallels, not only because the interpretation of the South Arabian passage is hypothetical, but also because of the recent reassessment of the association of Asherah with the cult of trees (Wiggins 2007).

Irene Rossi

References and suggested reading

• Bron, F. 1998. Notes sur le culte d’Athirat en Arabie du Sud préislamique, in B. Amphoux, A. Frey & U. Schattner-Rieser Études sémitiques et samaritaines offertes à Jean Margain (Histoire Du Texte Biblique, 4): 76–79. Lausanne: Éditions du Zèbre.
• De Maigret, A. & C.J. Robin. (eds) 2016. Tamnaʿ (Yémen). Les fouilles italo-françaises. Rapport final. (Orient & Méditerranée, 20). Paris: De Boccard.
• Frantsouzoff, S.A. 2006. A Minaic inscription on the pedestal of an ibex figurine from the British Museum PSAS 36: 69–77. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41223882
• Multhoff, A. 2010. Phalluskult und Bilderverbot? Beiträge zur a ramitischen Sprache und Kultur. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 160: 7–40. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13173/zeitdeutmorggese.160.1.0007
• Wiggins, S.A. 2007. A Reassessment of Asherah, with further Considerations of the Goddess (Gorgias Ugaritic Studies, 2). Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press.

_{Alternate spellings: Aṯirat, Atirat, Athiratan, ʾAthirat, ʾAthiratan, 'Athirat, 'Athiratan, ʾṯrt, ʾṯrtn, 'ṯrt, 'ṯrtn}