Astar

On an altar found at Yeha, in the highlands of Tigray, a dedication opens with the name of Astar, and immediately after it there is a scar. Someone took a chisel to the stone and cut away a small carved figure between the god’s name and the next word. Enno Littmann, who published the stone for the German Aksum Expedition in 1913, first took the damage for the remains of a head. He later decided, with the epigrapher Mark Lidzbarski, that it had been a crescent moon holding a disc. Whoever removed it did a thorough job. The name survived. The picture did not.

That is a fair summary of what is left of Astar. He is one of the oldest gods named in writing in the Horn of Africa, invoked by kings across something like a thousand years, and not one surviving text tells a story about him. He appears in lists of gods, in oaths and curses, in the formula that put a monument under divine guard. He is a name that kings said out loud when they wanted their work to last.

The name came across the Red Sea. In the centuries before 500 BC, rulers in what is now Tigray and Eritrea, the kingdom remembered as Dʿmt, wrote their inscriptions in the South Arabian script and called on the gods of Saba. Norbert Nebes of the University of Jena, who has edited much of this corpus, describes the standard royal invocation as opening with ʿAṯtar, the god honoured by every Old South Arabian people, and his consort Hawbas, followed by Almaqah, chief god of the Sabaeans, and two goddesses, Dhat Himyam and Dhat Badan. On one point the Ethiopian kings went further than Arabia. A king called Waʿrān Ḥaywat recorded that the gods, Astar first among them, had made him king. Nebes notes that South Arabian royal inscriptions of the same period never say this so plainly. In Ethiopia the gods did not merely bless a ruler. They appointed him.

The same kings built for these gods. Waʿrān dedicated an altar to Almaqah “on the authority of ʿAṯtar and Almaqah”, and the altar is a miniature model of the Great Temple at Yeha, the great stone sanctuary raised there around the seventh century BC. A later king named Laman set up an altar to Astar himself. Altars of this kind in Saba went most often to exactly these two gods, Astar and Almaqah.

Then the Dʿmt kingdom faded, and for centuries the record goes quiet. When the god’s name comes back it has moved into a new language and a new empire. In the middle of the fourth century AD, King Ezana of Aksum, still a pagan in his early years, set up stone slabs to announce his wars. One records a campaign against the Bega. Six of their kings submitted with their peoples, about 4,400 souls, and the Aksumites marched them home, feeding them twenty-two thousand wheat loaves a day with beer and wine for four months. At Aksum the captive kings were dressed, adorned and resettled on new land, each given 4,190 head of cattle. Ezana offered his begetter Mahrem a statue of gold, one of silver and three of bronze. Then he set up the stone and dedicated it to Astar, to Beher or Medr, and to Mahrem. Anyone who tore it down was to die, and his family and children be rooted out of the land. Anyone who honoured it was to be blessed.

A second inscription, from a place called Sado, tells how Ezana punished the people of Afan for killing a trade caravan. When the army came home, the king raised a throne at Sado and set it under the protection of Astar, Beher and Medr. Only one Aksumite text names all four gods together, Mahrem, Astar, Beher and Medr, and Littmann read them as a family of powers: Mahrem the tribal war god from whom the kings claimed descent, and beneath him the old Semitic triad of sky, earth and water. Astar was the sky. Medr, whose name means earth, was the ground under the throne. Beher, he argued, must once have been the sea.

The key to that reading came from a Greek copy. An Aksumite king, whose name is lost, carved his campaigns on a throne at the port of Adulis, and in the sixth century a traveller named Cosmas copied the text into his own book. That king went down to the coast to sacrifice to Zeus, to Ares and to Poseidon “for all those who sail the seas.” Ares was plainly Mahrem, since Ezana’s own Greek inscriptions use Ares where the Ge’ez has Mahrem. That left Zeus for the sky god and Poseidon for the sea, and so Astar acquired, in Greek dress, the highest name the Mediterranean had to offer.

Where Astar got the sky is less certain. Littmann thought the name had begun with the planet Venus, the star of the god whom the northern Semites knew in feminine form as Astarte, and had passed from the star to the god of the heavens and then to the heavens themselves. He found support in the Amharic name for the planet Venus, which still begins with Astar, and in the crescent and disc carved above the god’s name at Yeha, which elsewhere marked the star goddess. He also admitted the difficulty: on a second Yeha altar, the same crescent and disc belong to the moon god Sin. The evidence points two ways and stops.

Astar’s strength was the strength of a witness. He was called on to make a king’s word permanent and a king’s stone untouchable, and his power is the curse at the foot of every inscription: the vandal uprooted, his line erased. Many of Ezana’s stones were still at Aksum when a German expedition recorded them in 1906.

His weakness was that the kings who invoked him could stop. Ezana became a Christian, and his later inscriptions open “by the might of the Lord of Heaven.” His coins dropped the crescent and disc of the old gods and took the cross. Littmann suspected that many Aksumites pictured this new Lord of Heaven as not so different from their old Astar. The habits died slowly. Ezana’s Christian throne was still placed under the protection of “the earth that bears it”, an echo of thrones once guarded by Astar, Medr and Beher. On a Christian baptismal basin from Aksum, the old god’s name is simply the word for heaven: a King of peace in heaven and on earth. In the Tigre language of Eritrea, astar still means the sky.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Astar in Ethiopian mythology?

Astar is the sky god of the pre-Christian religion of Aksum and of the earlier Dʿmt kingdom in what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. His name comes from the South Arabian god ʿAṯtar, and he is invoked in royal inscriptions alongside Mahrem, Beher and Medr. King Ezana placed his monuments under Astar’s protection in the fourth century AD.

Was Astar the same as Zeus?

The Aksumites appear to have treated him as their Zeus. A Greek inscription copied at Adulis records an Aksumite king sacrificing to Zeus, Ares and Poseidon, and since Ares stood for the war god Mahrem, the epigrapher Enno Littmann concluded in 1913 that Zeus stood for Astar as god of the sky and Poseidon for Beher.

What gods were worshipped with Astar at Aksum?

In the pagan inscriptions of King Ezana, Astar is named with Mahrem, the war god the kings called their begetter, Beher, probably once the sea, and Medr, the earth. In the earlier Ethio-Sabaean inscriptions he leads a South Arabian group that includes his consort Hawbas, the Sabaean god Almaqah, and the goddesses Dhat Himyam and Dhat Badan.

What happened to Astar after Aksum became Christian?

After King Ezana converted, his inscriptions began invoking the Lord of Heaven and his coins replaced the crescent and disc with the cross. The god’s name lived on as an ordinary word: an early Christian baptismal basin from Aksum uses it to mean heaven, and in the Tigre language astar still means the sky.

Is Astar connected to Astarte?

The names are related through the Semitic god ʿAṯtar. Enno Littmann argued that Astar’s name first belonged to the planet Venus, the star of Astarte, before it passed to the Ethiopian sky god, pointing to the Amharic name for Venus and to a crescent-and-disc emblem once carved beside Astar’s name at Yeha.

Related Entries

Ethiopian Mythology, Angabo, Al-Lāt, Al-‘Uzzá, Manāt, Ishtar, Inanna, Sin, Anu (Mesopotamian), El, Zeus, Ares, Poseidon, Dyaus, Tengri