Talk:Astarte

Page move

(from WP:RM)

January 15

`Ashtart → Astarte or Ashtart

I'd do this myself, except that the page histories are such a mess that my privileges aren't sufficient to sort the whole thing out. No such thing as "ASCII spelling" exists; ASCII is an encoding mechanism, and the backtick, apparently used here to represent a glottal stop, has no meaning on its own—least of all in the English language. The English name of this well-known deity is most commonly Astarte (through the Greek) but more accurately Ashtart; both of these are widely used by scholars and either are thoroughly acceptable to me. ADH (t&m) 11:25, Jan 15, 2005 (UTC)

prima facie. Should go to Astarte. Rd232 00:48, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• Comments: (a) the mark you reference is being used to represent not the glottal stop but a pharyngeal consonant, more commonly represented (as in the rest of the article) with ‘ or ^c, and (b) ASCII is in fact a character set, and the author clearly means that, using only characters available in ASCII (thereby excluding the characters I cited), the name with the pharyngeal is best represented as `Ashtart, which is accurate, I would say. It needs clean-up (Englished), to be sure.
  — Ford 01:53, 2005 Jan 16 (UTC)
  • ... which I have now done. The version that ADH is referring to is here.— Ford 03:27, 2005 Jan 16 (UTC)
  • The pharyngeal consonant I'm familiar with, but only as a superscript letter c, and the backtick is not a left single quote. Even accurate transliterations are only preferable when an English-language name is not common (Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)), which is clearly not the case here. ADH (t&m) 03:31, Jan 16, 2005 (UTC)
    • Common transliteration in cases where ‘ (pharyngeal fricative) and ’ (glottal stop) are not available — when the character set is confined to ASCII, that is — is to use ` for ‘ and ' for ’. I have seen that convention for quotation marks, for Semitic phonemes, and in other situations as well. You may have missed it elsewhere on the web. But it was pretty clear from the article itself that ‘ (for the pharyngeal) was being used, so it could not have been too difficult to figure out what ` was standing in for. And your last comment may support Astarte, but it argues against Ashtart, which is neither as accurate nor as common.
      — Ford 03:46, 2005 Jan 16 (UTC)
• Support. I get 50 times more hits on the classical Greek Astarte than Ashtart (with or without the backtick), so I'd prefer a move to Astarte. Editors should avoid introducing ad hoc spelling conventions into Wikipedia, especially where, as in this case, the entity in question already has a well established name known to English language readers and in use by English language scholars. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 13:27, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I went to implement this, but got blocked by the compression bug. I feel there is significant history to Astarte so the following steps should be taken:

1. Delete Astarte
2. Move `Ashtart to Astarte
3. Undelete Astarte to restore history.
4. Edit Astarte to restore proper version, if needed.

- UtherSRG 14:42, Jan 21, 2005 (UTC)

• Support. Astarte was a godess known to several Semitic nations. There isn't much sense in preferring incorrectly rendered transcription of one of several variants of her name to the much more common Astarte. -- Naive cynic 01:21, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I've done a swap of the pages - I couldn't see much point waiting with the page in the 'wrong' place. if anyone feels strongly about merging edit histories, delete Astarte, move `Ashtart over it and undelete - but you'll need to wait for the compression bug to be sorted out first. -- ALoan (Talk) 13:48, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

NW Semitic?

The article says that Astarte was a NW semitic god, cognate to the Eastern semitic Ishtar, but the same god, Astar, was worshipped in Ethiopia during Aksumite and pre-Aksumite times (as well as in Sabaean Yemen). The lack of the final t makes the name similar to the Eastern semitic god, but the "A" instead of "I" at the beginning is closer to the NW semitic god. Either way, both NW and Eastern Semitic languages are geographically far removed from South Semitic languages, and it wouldn't make more sense on a geographical basis to include Astar in one or the other. Astar seems to be a god, and not a goddess, though, later associated with the Greek god Zeus. What should be done? Is there a third article for South Semitic that I'm missing? Should a separate article be created for it, cognate to both NW and E Semitic? Yom 23:48, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

External Links?

The second external link (to the 'Asteroth Rising' Tarot deck) has almost nothing to do with the content of the article and seems like an advertisement. --Sgorton 02:31, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Ashtoreth not Asherah

"The name Asherah may also be confused with Ashtoreth, but is probably a different Goddess." -- okay... why? brain (talk) 17:23, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

For one thing, the word ‘Ashtart etc. began with a voiced pharyngeal consonant written by the letter `ayin (ע), while the word Asherah begin with a glottal stop consonant written by the letter aleph (א), and these were two completely separate and distinct sounds in early Semitic languages. AnonMoos (talk) 23:23, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

Is Astarte cognate with Easter?

It is suggested on [| the talk page for Easter] (small relevant quote below) that Astarte is cognate or associated with Easter (which seems vaguely plausible), can anyone confirm or deny with extrenal references that Astre is Easter in old English? or make any other link, as it would allow links to the easter article to be added and perhaps that article to be tidied

Here is the relevant speculative quote from that talk page --"basing it on or confusing it with the Greek God Astarte. The word Eostre is obviously a take on the Latin word Oestrus; based on the Greek "oistros;" female sexual excitement. "Easter" in old English is "Astre". Given the pervasiveness of Astarte worship in the ancient world, is it that much of a stretch to suspect the worship spread to the Germanic tribes?"

Just found a discussion on the subject [here]

EdwardLane (talk) 20:54, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Actually, the most substantive discussion (such as it is) is on Talk:Ishtar, and the brief answer is "no". All reputable linguistic sources point towards the word Easter being connected with an Indo-European root meaning "dawn". AnonMoos (talk) 23:04, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Ashtoreth

The text states that the Hebrew "Ashtoreth" is deliberately mangled by the scribe doing the pointing by replacing the last two vowels with those from the word for "abomination" and suggests the expected form (based, I assume, on backformation from the plural "Ashtaroth") to be Ashtereth. Why is it, therefore, that the article credulously and unqualifiedly uses "Ashtoreth" elsewhere? 86.8.136.75 (talk) 17:10, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

In the nineteenth century some scholars went to great lengths in claiming that names of pagan deities and corresponding theophoric names were altered in Jewish tradition to impose the vowels of the word bosheth "shame" on them. I'm a little skeptical of some of the remoter extensions of the bosheth-theory, but I'm not sure what the details of the current mainstream scholarly consensus are on this point... AnonMoos (talk) 01:19, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Asherah

I removed this para from the lead - it's based on Mark Smith's Early history of God, but doesn't give a page number. I looked through the book and couldn't find anything Astarte being an Iron Age "incarnation" od Asherah, but I may be wrong. Smith is a good source.

According to scholar Mark S. Smith, Astarte may be the Iron Age (after 1200 BC) incarnation of the Bronze Age (to 1200 BC) Asherah; however, note that the word ‘Ashtart etc. began with a voiced pharyngeal consonant written by the letter `ayin (ע), while the word Asherah begins with a glottal stop consonant written by the letter aleph (א), and these were two completely separate and distinct sounds in early Semitic languages.

-- 16:28, 28 June 2010 User:PiCo

---

The name Asherah is certainly etymologically unconnected with the name Ashtoreth/Astarte etc. Whether there there is any other substantial connection between the goddesses, I don't know... AnonMoos (talk) 16:55, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

On page 129 of The Early History Smith talks about Astarte (1st millennium Phoenicia/Egypt/Kition) taking on some of the titles and characteristics of Ugaritic Asherah, Asherah herself having been forgotten. But this isn't the same thing as saying she was the "incarnation" of Bronze Age Asherah. Maybe the Smith material could be worked into the relevant section, but I believe this paragraph misrepresents what Smith says. PiCo (talk) 10:01, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

I believe that everything after "however" was cautioning against assuming that the names Asherah and Ashtoreth are connected, and was not intended to be a summary of Smith's views. If we change "may be the incarnation of" to "took on many of the attributes of", and break the sentence into two sentences at the semicolon (i.e. before "however"), I see little reason why the paragraph could not be restored to the article... AnonMoos (talk) 14:17, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Please check what I've done in the Astarte in Judah section (which I think is a better place for this materail). Please check my refs, as I'm not totally sure I've got it right. PiCo (talk) 08:37, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Ugartic fonts

I thought that Windows Vista supports Unicode, but obviously, this is not the case for old languages. What should I do to see the Akkadian, Etruscan or Ugartic characters? Sae1962 (talk) 10:32, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

I suggest you ask at WP:Help desk or WP:Village pump (technical). I'm not technically-minded, and I don't know that anyone else is paying attention to this page. A. Parrot (talk) 18:27, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Esther/Mordecai

Is Esther a cognate to Ishtar whereas Mordecai is a cognate to Marduk ?