ʾAṯiratu — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it
Evidence dossier 043 — ʾAṯiratu. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: ʾAṯiratu
- Original script: 𐎀𐎘𐎗𐎚
- Pantheon: Canaanite
- Convention: Ugaritic/Phoenician scholarly convention with matres and gutturals shown
- False forms on record: 2
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 43 of 287
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The attested form is 𐎀𐎘𐎗𐎚, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is ʾAṯiratu.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form athiratu 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: athiratu 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.
Exhibit 3 — struck from the record: 'Aṯiratu. Origin: the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself. Grounds: every substitution here (ʾ→') is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.
Exhibit 4 — struck from the record: atiratu. Origin: the anglicized respelling — the name written the way English guesses it sounds. Grounds: rewrites attested consonant clusters to fit English spelling habits; every cluster simplified this way erases a letter the sources write.
Exhibit 5 — the physical record. The tablets of Ras Shamra are her archive: the palace narrative of KTU 1.4, the succession scene of KTU 1.6, and Keret's vow at her Tyrian shrine were copied in the scribal school of ʾIlimilku in the fourteenth–thirteenth centuries BCE and buried when the city fell c. 1190 BCE. No temple of ʾAṯiratu has been securely identified at Ugarit — the queen mother seems to have shared the acropolis cult of Baʿlu and ʾIlu — but her worship is stamped across the Iron Age Levant: the tree-and-lion iconography of the tenth-century Taanach cult stand, the hundreds of Judean pillar figurines, the painted pithoi of Kuntillet ʿAjrud (c. 800 BCE) with their blessing 'by Yahweh … and his Asherah', and the Khirbet el-Qom tomb inscription — the finds that made the biblical polemic an archaeological fact.
Exhibit 6 — the continuing record. Her afterlife is an argument the Bible could not win. The Deuteronomists reduced her to the ʾăšērâ, a planted pole, yet the prophets' fury is itself the evidence: four hundred prophets of Asherah eat at Jezebel's table, women bake cakes for the Queen of Heaven, and Josiah must drag her image out of the temple to burn it at the Kidron.
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.
The Protocol's Position
Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.
The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.
The Verdict
Case closed on ʾAṯiratu: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form athiratu rides as the sanctioned fallback — and stays in that lane. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /sites/athiratu/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: 2 false forms ruled against, 'Aṯiratu first on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 8 cited sources — KTU 1.3–1.6 (the Baal Cycle), KTU 1.14–1.16 (the Keret Epic), Coogan & Smith, Stories from Ancient Canaan.
The Register Continues
Entry 43 of 287 in the Canonical Register. Around it: the temple's founding dispatch, the Restoration File on the marks themselves, the Resonance File on the archetype at work, and the Rulebook behind all of it.
Continue the register — previous entry: Athēnai (read it) · next entry: Atlantís (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.