Anat

The Ugaritic ’nt names the most violent goddess of the Bronze Age Near East. She is sister, consort, and avenger of Baal. She kills the god of death with her own hands, and an entire scene of her wading through blood up to her thighs is preserved in detail. The texts call her “the Maiden Anat.” The same tablets show her doing things that no maiden in any subsequent religious tradition is permitted to do.

The clay tablets from Ras Shamra preserve her two great sequences: the slaughter scene that establishes her character, and the resurrection of Baal that establishes her function. Both belong to the Baal Cycle. A separate epic, the Aqhat tablets, shows her in a darker mode, demanding a hunter’s bow and killing him when he refuses to give it up.

Appearance

Anat is described in the tablets as beautiful, young, and physically overwhelming. Her epithets are btlt ’nt, “the Maiden Anat,” and ybmt limm, usually translated “Wanton Widow of the People” or “Sister-in-law of the Peoples.” She wears henna and rouge. She washes herself in the dew. The same dew that washes her is described as the dew that fertilizes the earth.

The slaughter scene gives the longest physical description of any goddess in the Ugaritic corpus. She straps severed heads to her back and severed hands to her belt. She wades knee-deep, then thigh-deep, in the blood and gore of the warriors she has killed in two valleys. She laughs. Her liver swells with mirth. Her heart is filled with joy. The scene ends with her washing the blood off in dew and oil and dressing for a feast.

When she appears in Egyptian iconography, where her cult was carried by Levantine traders and adopted by pharaohs, she is shown seated on a throne, holding a shield and lance or axe, sometimes wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt. The Egyptian Anat is more royal and less feral than the Ugaritic one. The Egyptians toned her down.

Function

Anat has three functions in the Ugaritic material: warrior, hunter, and resurrector. The first two are constant. The third is the one the Mediterranean world remembered.

The slaughter scene is unmotivated in any obvious way. She closes the doors of her palace, meets the warriors at the foot of the mountain, and kills them. Some scholars read it as a ritual battle, some as a display of divine violence for its own sake, some as a misunderstood agricultural metaphor. The text does not explain. The point of the scene is that Anat does this kind of thing, and the rest of the cycle proceeds from that premise.

The resurrector function is the most consequential. When Baal is swallowed by Mot, Anat goes looking for him. She finds his body. She loads it onto her shoulders. She climbs to the summit of Mount Sapan, the holy mountain of Baal. She buries him there. Then she finds Mot. She does not negotiate.

The Ugaritic verbs for what she does to Mot are agricultural verbs: bq’, “split,” used of opening grain. šrp, “burn,” used of stubble. thn, “grind,” used of milling. zrq, “scatter,” used of sowing. She splits him with a sword, burns him in fire, grinds him with a hand mill, and scatters him across a field for the birds to eat. Mot has been processed like a harvest. Baal returns to life.

Anat is also the figure who confronts El, the high god, on Baal’s behalf. She storms into his presence, threatens to break his head and make his grey hair run with blood, and demands that a palace be built for Baal. El, who is described as the father of all gods and untouchable, gives in. The hierarchy bends because Anat is willing to break it.

Cross-Cultural Connections

Anat’s strongest sister-figure is the Mesopotamian Inanna/Ishtar, the Sumerian-Akkadian goddess of love and war. Both are erotic and violent. Both descend to the underworld. Both are associated with lions. Some scholars have proposed direct genealogical connection between Anat and the later Greek Athena, on the basis of name resemblance and warrior function. The case is contested. The structural parallel is real even where the etymology is not.

In Egypt, Anat became part of the official pantheon during the New Kingdom. Ramesses II called her his shield in battle and named one of his daughters Bint-Anat. Her temple at Tanis stood for centuries. She appears alongside the Canaanite Baal in Egyptian magical papyri, which often paired the storm god and his warrior consort as a single power.

In the Hebrew Bible, Anat appears almost not at all. The place name Beth-Anat (“House of Anat”) is preserved in Joshua 19:38, and the judge Shamgar is called “son of Anat” in Judges 3:31, suggesting that an Israelite warrior might still bear her name as a patronymic in the early Iron Age. The cult itself was suppressed. The vocabulary that the Baal Cycle gave her, the rider of the clouds, the slayer of the dragon, was transferred wholesale to Yahweh. What was not transferred was the violence. The biblical Yahweh is jealous, but his violence is judicial. Anat’s was joy.

Modern Survival

Anat survived longest in Egypt. The Bint-Anat name persisted into late antiquity. A Jewish military colony at Elephantine in the fifth century BCE worshipped a goddess called Anat-Yahu (“Anat of Yahweh”), preserved in the Aramaic Elephantine papyri. Yahweh, the destroyer of Canaanite religion, had a Canaanite consort in this community for at least two generations.

After the Hellenistic period her name fades from the cult record. The function did not. Athena holds the warrior side. Aphrodite holds the erotic side. Cybele and Artemis carry pieces of the wild and the violent. Christianity inherits the resurrector role and gives it to a male savior, with no female agent of the resurrection beyond Mary’s role as witness.

Modern scholarship has rebuilt Anat carefully from the Ugaritic tablets, the Egyptian inscriptions, and the Elephantine papyri. She is taught in courses on the Hebrew Bible, in feminist theology, and in the comparative study of warrior goddesses. The figure who hunted down Death and forced the high god to his knees has come back, three thousand years after Ugarit burned, in the form of footnotes and dissertations. She would probably not consider this a comeback.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Baal Cycle (KTU 1.1–1.6), clay tablets from Ugarit, scribed by Ilimilku (c. 1350–1315 BCE)
• Aqhat Epic (KTU 1.17–1.19), Ugaritic literary tablet
• Peggy L. Day, ‘Anat,’ in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Brill, 1999)
• Neal Walls, The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth (Scholars Press, 1992)
• Egyptian stelae naming Anat: Ramesses II’s daughter Bint-Anat (‘daughter of Anat’)