The Egyptian God Corpus
⇄duplicate

Ishtar

see Astarte

One goddess, three names, and Budge uses all three in one sentence

In Egypt Astharthet, or Ashtoreth, or Ishtar, was identified with Isis and with one of the forms of Hathor… [budge-1904]

Astharthet is Budge's transliteration of the Egyptian; Ashtoreth is the Hebrew Bible's form; Ishtar is the Mesopotamian one. The census carried the third as a separate deity.

Everything is on astarte — the title "mistress of horses, lady of the chariot, dweller in Apollinopolis Magna," the lioness head under a disk, the chariot drawn by four horses driving over her prostrate foes, and the letter in which Tushratta of Mitanni writes to Amenhetep III about "Ishtar of Nineveh, lady of the world" going down into Egypt, complains that her worship there has declined, and asks the king to increase it tenfold.

That letter is the reason this pointer is safe to make. It is not this corpus reasoning from a resemblance between two names (C381); it is a Mitannian king, writing to a pharaoh, using Ishtar for the goddess the Egyptians were worshipping. The identification is made in the primary source, by a contemporary, in a diplomatic letter.

See also the Foreign Gods.

Cite this entry

Research grade: ⇄duplicate — A second spelling or roster listing of a name entered elsewhere.

"Ishtar", The Egyptian God Corpus, graded duplicate, retrieved 2026-08-10.