answered my word" or "She answered the word"). This minor goddess is also attested in the Isin god list. The compilers of An = Anum additionally labeled Saggar as the spouse of Ishara. A further Mesopotamian deity associated with her was the incantation goddess Ningirima, who shared her connection with snakes and with the "scorpion star". A few sources attest an association between Ishara and the medicine goddess Ninkarrak, including an Old Assyrian treaty, a curse formula from Emar and a god list from Mari. Additionally both appear, though not next to each other, in Naram-Sin's treaty with Elam. This connection most likely was rooted in their shared origin in Syria. In An = Anum, the name Meme is applied both to Ishara and to Ninkarrak. Ishara and Ishtar Ishtar (written logographically as dINANNA or syllabically as dAš-dar) already appears alongside Ishara in the Ebla texts. In a ritual performed by the royal couple involving statues of both of them she is referred to as Labutu, a name cognate with the Akkadian word lābatu ("lioness"), a common epithet of Ishtar. A theophoric name, Ishara-ki-Ishtar, "Ishara is like Ishtar," indicates they were also seen as similar in popular religion in the upper Euphrates area. The association between both of them and the western Ashtart is well attested in god lists from Ugarit. Ishtar and Ishara were also associated with each other in Mesopotamia as goddesses of love. However, as pointed out by Joan Goodnick Westenholz, a passage from Atrahasis commonly used in modern literature to argue the two goddesses were one and the same in Mesopotamian perception does not actually state that Ishtar was Ishara, as the noun ištar is not preceded by the dingir sign, so-called "divine determinative," in it, and as such should be translated as the generic term "goddess" rather than as the theonym Ishtar. The use of ištar or ištarum or as a common noun which could refer to any goddess, a synonym of iltum, the feminine form of ilu ("god"), goes back to the Old Babylonian period. To differentiate it from the name Ishtar, it was consistently written without the divine determinative. Ishara and Dagan While Wilfred G. Lambert proposed in 1980 that Ishara was sometimes regarded as the wife of Dagan, and this theory is repeated as fact in older reference works such as Jeremy Black's and Anthony Green's Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient