= Iš-ḫa-ra. Another spelling attested there was dŠÁR-iš. Variants of the name include Ašḫara (in a treaty of Naram-Sin of Akkad with an Elamite king, possibly Hita of Awan), Ušḫara (in Hittite), and Ušḥry (in Ugaritic). In Alalakh, her name was written with the Akkadian logogram dIŠTAR. In some cases it is uncertain whether she, Ishtar or Shaushka (a Hurrian goddess whose name could also be written as dIŠTAR) was meant in personal names from that city containing the logogram. Name of a month and personal names from Ebla involving the sign AMA were proposed to refer to Ishara in publications from the 1980s, but this possibility is not regarded as plausible anymore. Functions The oldest attestations of Ishara from Ebla, such as these in documents from the reign of Irkab-Damu, indicate she was a tutelary goddess of the ruling house. She is also already attested as a goddess of love in texts from Ebla, and Piotr Taracha goes as far as suggesting it was her oldest function. She was represented in this role in Mesopotamia as well, in part possibly due to association with Ishtar, though Frans Wiggermann regards the two of them as independent from each other in this role. As a love goddess, Ishara was specifically connected to the institution of marriage, though incantations associate her with erotic love as well. In Akkadian texts she could be referred to as the "lady of love," bēlet ru'āmi.' Alfonso Archi notes that in Ebla she sometimes received weapons as offering (much like Hadad, Resheph and Hadabal), which might indicate she had an Ishtar-like warlike side too. He proposes that as a warrior goddess she was possibly associated with axes. She was also strongly associated with divination and prophecy, as evidenced by the epithet bēlet bīrim ("lady of divination") known from Syrian sources and the god list An = Anum and references to "Ishara of the prophetesses" in texts from Emar. A number of new functions were assigned to her in the Hurrian context, including an association with the underworld and gods dwelling in it. She was also invoked as a guardian of oaths. While she was generally not a healing goddess in her own right, she could serve as both a goddess of disease and of healing in Hurro-Hittite sources. Symbols Initially her symbol in Mesopotamia was the bashmu, otherwise mostly associated with underworld gods, such as Tishpak or