Arabian as (). Assyrian records mention this god, referred to in Akkadian as (, reflecting the Aramaic form rather than the Ancient North Arabian ), as one of the Qedarite deities whose idols were captured as war booty by the Neo-Assyrian king Sîn-ahhī-erība and was returned to the Qedarites by his son and successor Aššur-aḫa-iddina. The worship of ʿAṯtar in his form of was also practised by the Qedarites, as attested by an inscription of the Neo-Assyrian king Aššur-aḫa-iddina mentioning this deity in Akkadian as (), with the dissimilation of the epithet into reflecting the influence of Akkadian () and Aramaic (), meaning "priest." In Palmyra At Palmyra, where lived a large Arab population, the Arab ʿAṯtar was assimilated with the Arameo-Canaanite great god, Baʿal, in the form of , later (), that is Baʿal-ʿAṯtar. In Canaan The masculine form () existed among the Canaanite peoples as an astral deity, which is attested by his mention along with the Moon-God Šaggar in the 9th or 7th century BC Dayr ʿAllā inscription, the subject of which is largely the Sun-goddess Šamāš, thus forming a triad of the Sun, Moon, and Venus similarly to the one attested in South Arabia, and suggesting a South Arabian religious influence in Moab. The hypostases of ʿAṯtar who appear among the various Canaanite peoples might have been an indigenous Transjordanian variation of his or local adaptations of the North Arabian variant of the god. In Phoenicia A possible Phoenician variant of might be attested as a theophoric element () in a personal name from Byblos, (). In the 5th century BC, under the Achaemenid Empire, a shrine dedicated to existed in the Sharon Plain in Canaan, at a location corresponding to the present-day Israeli town of Elyakhin, where he was worshipped by Phoenicians, Aramaeans, and Arabs. Arabian units of the Achaemenid army stationed in Canaan during the 5th century BC who participated in the cult of have left inscriptions recording his name, suffixed with a mimation to differentiate him from the Canaanite feminine form of ʿAṯtar, (), in the Phoenician and Aramaic scripts as and (). This form of the god's name was distinctly North Arabian, showing that the worshippers who had left these inscriptions were originally from North Arabia, possibly from Taymāʿ or Dadān. In Moab ʿAštar was attested among the Canaanite people of the Moabites during the 9th century BC, when he was identified