ʿAṯtar is an ancient Semitic deity whose role, name, and even gender varied by cultures of West Asia. In both genders, ʿAṯtar is identified with the planet Venus, the morning and evening star, in some manifestations of Semitic mythology. Name The name appears in various Semitic languages as: the feminine form () in Akkadian; the masculine form () in Arabic; and the masculine form () in Ethiosemitic. Attestations Among Amorites At Ugarit The Ugaritic masculine variant of ʿAṯtar, (), appears in the Baʿal Cycle. The Northwest Semitic feminine form of ʿAṯtar, the Great Goddess (), is often mentioned in Ugaritic ritual texts, but played a minor role in mythological texts. Among Aramaeans Among the Aramaeans, ʿAṯtar appears in a masculine form as the god (), in which capacity he was identified with the baetyl as (, ). Within the ancient Aramaean religion, the deceased ancestors of the clans, called , were worshipped as idealised figures who could become assimilated to ʿAttar, as evidenced by personal names such as (, ), and and (, ). The use of the name of the god ʿAttar as a theophoric element is attested in the name (, ), which is attested on an 8th-century BC stamp seal and was also the name of the earliest known ruler of Laqē, as well as (, ), which was the name of two rulers of the kingdom of Bēt-Gūš. The name of this god always appears in the masculine form even in women's names, such as ʿAttar-ramat and ʿAttar-ṭabat, thus attesting that the Aramaean ʿAttar was a distinctly masculine deity. One of the hypostases of the Aramaean ʿAttar was (), that is the ʿAttar of the Heavens: in this role, ʿAttar was the incarnation of the sky's procreative power in the form of the moisture provided by rain, which made fertile his consort, the goddess of the Earth which has been dried up by the summer heat. Due to ʿAttar's role as a provider of rain, and his epithet "of the Heavens" refers to his manifestation as lightning and thunder in the skies. The name of the goddess who was the consort of ʿAttar is itself not attested in Aramaic, but is recorded in Sabaic as () or (), which was derived from the South Semitic root (), itself a declension of the Semitic root , meaning "to be dry." The position of Hūbis/Huwbis as the consort