Status Updates From The Myth of Sacred Prostitu...

I appreciate the very rarely brought up discussion on how interpretation grecia was rarely clean and obvious and Aphrodite was associated with a bunch of very different goddesses, but like, Ashtart was cognate'd with Hera because... Hera herself had many traits of Ishtar? It sounds wild but it's true lol. Aphrodite had the same role in Sparta and was seated alongside Athena, in a way recreating the Anat-Ashtart duo.

The scholarship is top but to say "Phoenician Ashtart was a protectress of the king and royal family", a "regnal goddess" meant she wasn't a sex goddess, is very silly and overstating the point - the notion that such a cognate with Ishtar wouldn't keep that essential trait is silly, specially because THAT'S ALL TRUE OF ISHTAR TOO! AND OF APHRODITE, FOR THAT MATTER! She was literally called Aphrodite Hera in Sparta!

"This, of course, brings up the possibility that the Punic women were acquiring dowry money by mugging people, literally an iniuria (assault) against the body (corporis). Maybe they threatened to spit at people who didn’t pay up. This seems unlikely, though, especially if Valerius Maximus was not, as I suspect, a Monty Python fanatic."