The Levantine Ishtar, from Sidon to the Greek Aphrodite

Astarte (Phoenician Ashtart, biblical Ashtoreth) is the Levantine goddess of love, war and fertility, the western counterpart of Mesopotamian Ishtar and, like her, associated with the evening star, the planet Venus. Though a relatively minor figure in the Ugaritic texts, she became a major deity of Phoenician religion, with important temples at Sidon, Tyre and Byblos, and she travelled with Phoenician traders and colonists across the Mediterranean; in the Punic west she is closely tied to, or succeeded by, the great Carthaginian goddess Tanit. Her identification with the Greek Aphrodite was ancient: Herodotus in the fifth century BCE calls the temple of Aphrodite Ourania at Ascalon the oldest of that goddess's sanctuaries and says the Cypriot one was founded from it, and Greeks also at times equated Astarte with Hera and with Selene, a looseness that itself shows how freely such cross-cultural equations were made.