inland Syria. They were worshiped by Amorites in various cities located in the north of this region. According to Alfonso Archi, they spread through the Middle Euphrates area in the early second millennium BCE. They are attested in offering lists from Mari. They were also worshiped in Emar, though there is no indication that they had a temple there and they are absent from known theophoric names. Marten Stol also tentatively suggests that a relief from Tell Chuera depicting seven goddesses might be an indication that the Kotharat or a similar group of birth goddesses were worshiped in this location. The Ugaritic texts also mention the Kotharat. Wilfred G. E. Watson counts them among the principal goddesses of this city of local origin alongside Anat, Ashtart, Athirat and Shapash. In multiple lists of deities, they appear between the pair Arṣu-wa-Šamuma ("Earth and Heaven") and the moon god Yarikh. A single possible theophoric name invoking the Kotharat, bn kṯrt, has been identified as well. Uncertain and disproved attestations Dennis Pardee argues that the genealogy of deities presented by Philo of Byblos might reflect one of the Ugaritic deity list, in which the Kotharat appear after Ilib, Arṣu-wa-Šamuma ("Earth and Heaven") and El, before Dagan. The late Phoenician author mentions seven daughters of Elos/Kronos alongside Elyon, the pair Ge and Ouranos, and Dagon. He additionally argues that the Ugaritic list might reflect a tradition in which their father was El. However, Lluís Feliu concludes that the presence of Kotharat in this document might be the result of a scribal mistake: kṯrt in place of aṯrt (Athirat), the wife of El. He points out that in an analogous list written in the syllabic cuneiform script, the deity occurring between El and Dagan is designated by the logogram dNIN.MAH, which according to him never designated groups of deities such as Kotharat or Šassūrātu, and as such might refer to a singular deity, the wife of El, instead. Two purported attestations of the Kotharat postulated by William F. Albright, on a tablet from Beth Shemesh and in verse 7 of Psalm 68, are no longer accepted in modern scholarship. Mythology The Kotharat are among the deities appearing in the Ugaritic myth Marriage of Nikkal and Yarikh, sometimes referred to with the title Nikkal and the Kotharat instead. They apparently oversee the birth of a son of Nikkal and Yarikh, and might also be invoked to