Ishara (Išḫara) was the tutelary goddess of the ancient Syrian city of Ebla. The origin of her name is unknown. Both Hurrian and West Semitic etymologies have been proposed, but they found no broad support and today it is often assumed that her name belongs to an unknown linguistic substrate. Her cult had a wide reach across the ancient Near East. In addition to Ebla, she was also worshiped in cities such as Mari, Emar, Alalakh and Ugarit. From these Syrian cities the worship of Ishara spread to Mesopotamia. The Hurrians also adopted her into their pantheon after arriving in Syria, from which she found her way to the Hittite pantheon. In various time periods and areas different functions were assigned to her. In Ebla she was the tutelary deity of the ruling family, but also a love goddess. In Mesopotamia the latter function lead to an association with Ishtar, and later Nanaya, Kanisurra and Gazbaba as well. In Hurrian religion she acquired the role of a goddess associated with the underworld and disease, and in that capacity she was closely associated with Allani, the Hurrian queen of the dead. She was also regarded as a goddess of divination and a divine guardian of oaths. Name and origin Initially researches ascribed Hurrian origin to Ishara, as well as a number of other Eblaite deities (Adamma, Ashtabi and Hebat), but further excavations in Ebla have shown that all of these deities are present in documents predating the Hurrian migrations to Syria. In the case of Ishara, the theory that she had pre-Hurrian origin has been present in scholarship since 1971. While Wilfred G. Lambert considered it possible that Ishara's name was connected to early Semitic root šhr (dawn), going as far as proposing this as explanation for her association with Ishtar, Lluis Feliu in a more recent study notes that the proposed Semitic etymologies for the name of Ishara "do not fit (...) [her] profile very well." Today it is assumed that she originated in a linguistic and religious substrate which was neither Semitic nor Hurrian, similar to a number of other Eblaite deities like Ashtabi, Kura, Adamma and NI-da-KUL (Hadabal). Alfonso Archi proposes that she was originally worshiped in the area east of the city of Ebla itself, but within its sphere of influence. A bilingual lexical texts from Ebla explains the writing of Ishara's name as šara8(bara10 = gá×sig7)ra