The canonical register: ꜥAnat
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name ꜥAnat, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use ꜥAnat to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The name is attested as Ἀνάθ, in the attestation KTU (Ugaritic texts) and CIS give us. On the evidence, it means "Canaanite warrior goddess, sister and ally of Baꜥal". The canonical transliteration is ꜥAnat.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'AH-naht' — start with a rough, throaty 'ah' (like Arabic ع), then 'naht' with a crisp final t. The marks are what carry that sound to a reader who has never heard it spoken.
On the plain form — and I want to be precise, because you pushed on this. The plain form anat is not false — it is a fallback, and the register is exact about what that means. In systems that cannot carry diacritics (legacy databases, older tooling, parts of the address-bar pipeline) the flattened form is the accepted vehicle, and the rulebook names it explicitly as the final rung of the fallback hierarchy: full restoration first, circumflex where attested, macron-only by the academic standard, an attested variant, and only then plain ASCII.
What the fallback status forbids is promotion: anat may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
You will see other forms in serious books — Anát — and they are not errors. Not every non-canonical form is false. These forms carry real scholarly support — they are recorded in the lexicon as variants, with their sources, and the register presents them honestly rather than pretending unanimity:
- Anát — Stress-only alternate transliteration (previous Phoenician entry). Support: KTU, Coogan, De Moor.
Where scholars disagree, the register reports the disagreement. The canonical form above remains the temple's primary because the evidence for it is stronger — not because the others were never argued.
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. In Egypt, ꜥAnat was worshipped as a war goddess alongside her sister Aštart, especially at Tanis and Memphis; she appears on scarabs and in the Egyptian pantheon as ꜥnt(t). Greeks and Romans later identified her with Athena/Minerva in her martial aspect.
And it never stopped working. The name ꜥAnat echoes across millennia in unexpected ways. The Israelite town of Anathoth (Jeremiah's birthplace) carries her name.
The Convention's Own History
Every tradition in this register has its own scholarly transliteration standard, built by its own specialists over decades or centuries, and the register follows each on its own terms: Ugaritic/Phoenician scholarly convention with matres and gutturals shown. The principle that unifies them is the one the whole project stands on: a name is evidence, and evidence is not negotiable — not for keyboards, not for convenience, not for anyone.
Where Protocol Meets Practice
The technical answer is simple: the canonical marks are legal IDNA 2008 characters, encoded as punycode under `xn--`. The practical answer is messier: legal does not mean stocked (registrar inventory is partial), and stocked does not mean typeable (stacked diacritics defeat mobile keyboards).
So the register's rule is a hierarchy of attested forms — full restoration, circumflex, macron-only, attested variant, and finally plain ASCII for the systems that cannot carry marks. Every rung is defensible because every rung is attested. The forms this register rules against are not rungs; they are errors, and errors do not get rungs.
Write back when you have checked the sources; they are better company than I am.
— The Register
The Verdict
ꜥAnat is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form anat is sanctioned as the fallback vehicle and nothing more. The false forms above are documented so that no reader has to take the temple's word on faith — the violations are stated, the sources are named, and the register stands open to challenge on every line.
The temple of ꜥAnat stands at /sites/anat/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; 1 contested form recorded with its support; the attestation rests on 10 cited sources — KTU (Ugaritic texts), CIS, Coogan, Stories from Ancient Canaan.
The Register Continues
This is one of 287 entries in the Canonical Register — the authoritative reference for every flagship temple. The temple's founding dispatch tells the name's story; its Restoration File details the marks; its Resonance File reads the archetype into the industries. The blog index holds the whole archive, and the Rulebook states the convention this register enforces.
Continue the register — previous entry: Anánkē (read it) · next entry: Andromedē (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.