intermediary period. Some think this deity is Athirat/Ashratu under her Ugaritic name. This Qetesh seems not to be either ʿAshtart or ʿAnat as both those goddesses appear under their own names and with quite different iconography, yet is called "Qudshu-Astarte-Anat" in at least one pictorial representation, aptly named the "Triple Goddess Stone". In the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods in Egypt, however, there was a strong tendency of syncretism toward goddesses, and Athirat/Ashratum then seems to have disappeared, at least as a prominent goddess under a recognizable name. Religious scholar Saul M. Olyan (author of Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel) calls the representation on the Qudshu-Astarte-Anat plaque "a triple-fusion hypostasis", and considers Qudshu to be an epithet of Athirat by a process of elimination, for Astarte and Anat appear after Qudshu in the inscription. In Israel and Judah Between the tenth century BC and the beginning of their Babylonian exile in 586 BC, polytheism was normal throughout Israel. Worship solely of Yahweh became established only after the exile, and possibly, only as late as the time of the Maccabees (2nd century BC). That is when monotheism became universal among the Jews. Some biblical scholars believe that Asherah at one time was worshipped as the consort of Yahweh, the national god of Israel. There are references to the worship of numerous deities throughout the Books of Kings: Solomon builds temples to many deities and Josiah is reported as cutting down the statues of Asherah in the temple Solomon built for Yahweh (2 Kings 23:14). Josiah's grandfather Manasseh had erected one such statue (2 Kings 21:7). Further evidence for Asherah-worship includes, for example, an eighth-century BC combination of iconography and inscriptions discovered at Kuntillet Ajrud in the northern Sinai desert where a storage jar shows three anthropomorphic figures and several inscriptions. The inscriptions found refer not only to Yahweh but to ʾEl and Baʿal, and two include the phrases "Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah" and "Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah." The references to Samaria (capital of the kingdom of Israel) and Teman (in Edom) suggest that Yahweh had a temple in Samaria, while raising questions about the relationship between Yahweh and Kaus, the national god of Edom. The "asherah" in question is most likely a cultic object, although the relationship of this object (a stylised tree perhaps) to Yahweh and to the goddess Asherah, consort of ʾEl,