The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth

Neal H. Walls’s The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth (1992) provides a thorough and thoughtful, if not easy to read, analysis of the mythological character of the Ugaritic goddess Anat. Anat was a goddess in the pantheon of Ugarit, a Bronze Age city in what is now northern Syria, from which a corpus of cuneiform texts was discovered in 1928. Anat is an independent and headstrong young warrior woman who hacks men to pieces and wears their hands and heads, kills the royal heir when he refuses to give her his prized bow, and annihilates the god of death for killing her brother Baal. Refreshingly, Walls is dedicated to considering Anat in her own right, rejecting the scholarly tradition that would categorize Anat as just another Ancient Near Eastern “goddess of love and war” or interpret her as a mere Syrian Ishtar or West Semitic Artemis.

Walls reveals that the way Anat is often characterized by scholars—I personally have seen her described as the “sister and consort” of Baal—is not based in textual reality, but rather influenced by the outdated and incorrect belief of scholars that she must be a fertility deity and sexual partner of Baal, based on the false assumption that all Ancient Near Eastern goddesses “must” be related to fertility, sex, and love. Walls’s analysis, in contrast, is grounded not in preconceived notions but in the text. Unfortunately, though, the Ugaritic texts are far from firm ground; they are fragmentary and the language is not terribly well understood, with the result that different scholars can (and do) read the same text in many different, conflicting ways. For example, an epithet of Anat, transliterated as ybmt l’imm, has been translated as “widowed sister-in-law,” “patroness of warriors,” “progenitress of the peoples,” “sister of the Prince,” and even “wanton widow of the nations.” The lack of textual certainty can be quite frustrating, but I appreciate Walls’s candor in admitting when his own translations are disputed and providing alternate interpretations.

It's important to note that The Goddess Anat is not just based on Walls’s dissertation, it is his dissertation, with no revision of the text. As you might imagine, the writing is not particularly friendly to non-specialists (I had to repeatedly look up the use of the term “hypostatic” in mythological analysis to make sure I was following his analysis), and much of the argument is spent refuting the obscure works of other scholars fields. Walls also spends a lot of space on philological analysis that will be completely lost on anyone without knowledge of Ugaritic, Akkadian, and related languages.

While I did learn a lot about Anat and appreciated much of Walls’s approach, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that his analysis of Anat’s gender and sexuality left a bad taste in my mouth. He repeatedly defines Anat as a “tomboy,” a reductive, childish word that, in my opinion, is too modern to apply to Bronze Age society and too colloquial to appear in a serious scholarly analysis. More egregiously, he uses the tired and sexist concept of “penis envy” to explain why Anat wants Aqhat’s bow, and states that when Anat dismembers warriors in battle, the hands and heads that she chops off are “clear phallic euphemisms” that reflect her desire to symbolically castrate men in revenge for her lack of a penis. Setting aside the obvious refutations of these arguments—Anat could want Aqhat’s bow because it’s a great bow, and she is a hunter; heads and hands can also be symbols of intelligence and agency, or simply the best body parts to remove if you want to kill or incapacitate; Anat’s rage at men could stem not from a desire for a penis but a recognition of men’s oppression of women; and on and on—these interpretations just seem lazy to me. Rather than more deeply interrogating Anat’s position as a powerful and violent goddess in the specific patriarchal Bronze Age Ugaritic context, Walls just grabs onto a well-known (and heavily criticized) 20th century idea to explain Anat’s behavior. He also dismisses out of hand the possibility of even considering how ancient women would have thought about Anat or any other goddess—even though he quotes directly from the poetry of Enheduanna, a woman—while also basing his entire analysis of Ugarit’s “androcentric” mythology around assumptions about what Ugaritic men thought about women and girls.

However, I wouldn’t have spent so much time thinking about the weak point of Walls’s argument if I thought the book as a whole had no value. If you’re willing to skim the philological analysis and academic in-fighting and ignore the outdated gender analysis, this book is a great way to learn about Anat while engaging directly with the original texts.

The accompanying image is © The Trustees of the British Museum, released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. This 19th Dynasty Egyptian (1292-1189 BCE) stela depicts the worship of the goddess Anat. While originally a Mesopotamian deity, Anat was adopted into the Egyptian pantheon. The limestone on Anat’s face has been worn away; feel free to muse on how this reflects her uncertain identity.

This 19th Dynasty Egyptian (1292-1189 BCE) stela depicts the worship of the goddess Anat, who while originally a Mesopotamian deity was adopted into the Egyptian pantheon.