or rarely "moon," is a cognate as well, as are Old South Arabian wrḫ, "month," and the word warḫ, "moon" or "month," present in Ethiopian Semitic languages. In early Amorite tradition It is presumed that the moon god was one of the major deities of the early Amorite pantheon. Daniel Schwemer outright states that next to Hadad he was the main deity of the entire area inhabited by the Amorites. He was commonly worshiped as a family deity. His presumed main cult center, attested in the Ugaritic texts, but located further inland in central Syria, presumably in the proximity of Ebla, was Larugadu (lrgt), identified with Arugadu from the earlier Eblaite sources. No references to this location from outside the Ugarit and Ebla corpora of texts are known. Since Yarikh himself is not attested in the sources from the latter city, it is presumed that he was only introduced to northern Syria by the Amorites. The Eblaites instead referred to their moon god as Suinu, similar as their contemporaries in Kish, and in addition to phonetic writing Zu-i-nu adopted the Mesopotamian convention of using dEN.ZU to represent the name of the moon deity in cuneiform. While Suinu's name is a cognate of Akkadian Sin, it is presumed that his cult developed locally and was not introduced from Mesopotamia. His cult center was apparently NI-ra-arki, a city located close to Ebla. A second possible lunar deity worshiped in Ebla was Šanugaru. Due to Yarikh's association with Larugardu, it has additionally been argued that the god Hadabal (dNI.DA.KUL), who was worshiped there in the third millennium BCE, had lunar character, but this conclusion is not universally accepted. Alfonso Archi assumes that the diffusion of Hadabal's cult, whose territorial extent is well documented in Eblaite texts, does not appear to match his presumed astral character. Yarikh (Erakh) is well attested in Amorite theophoric names. In Old Babylonian Mari, he appears in thirty nine individual types of names. Examples include Abdu-Erakh, "servant of Yarikh," Uri-Erakh, "light of Yarikh," Yantin-Erakh, "Yarikh has given" and Zimri-Erakh, "protection of Yarikh." Individuals bearing them came from various areas in the kingdom and near it, including the city of Mari itself, Terqa, Saggartum, the Khabur Triangle (where particularly many are attested), the area around the Balikh, Suhum and Zalmaqum. A certain Yantin-Erakh served as a troop commander under Zimri-Lim. Similar theophoric names are also known from Eshnunna. A document