The diversity of female divinities within ancient Near Eastern societies makes it impossible to arrange them into neat categories, and any attempt to do so would inevitably involve a great deal of simplification. There are two main reasons for this: the complexity of the religious systems, and the long period over which they developed.

One could and should ask, with some legitimacy, why female deities are singled out for separate analysis. The answer to this lies, to a large degree, in the history of the discussions on goddesses. The topic has sometimes been covered with academic rigor, sometimes with highly charged ideological arguments. In the cultures investigated in this article, goddesses were inseparably integrated into a complex divine world. No single fundamental pattern universally repeats itself even in the cultures of the ancient Near East. The...