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Andarta was a Celtic goddess worshiped in southern Gaul. Inscriptions invoking her name have been found in and around modern Die, within the territory of the Vocontii in Southern France.

Wikidata facts

Instance of
Celtic deity
Gender
female
Said to be same as
Nike
Show 1 more fact
worshipped by
Celtic mythology
Sources (1)

via Wikidata · CC0

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Encyclopedic overview

3 sections
Contents
  • Name
  • Attestations
  • References

Andarta was a Celtic goddess worshiped in southern Gaul. Inscriptions invoking her name have been found in and around modern Die, within the territory of the Vocontii in Southern France.

== Name == The Gaulish theonym Andarta is traditionally derived from the Gaulish word for 'bear', artio, attached to an intensifying prefix and-. On this basis, the name has been interpreted as 'big she-bear' or 'mighty she-bear', or as Ursa Major. Blanca María Prósper finds this interpretation unconvincing on semantic and syntactic grounds, and instead interprets the name as 'Well-fixed' or 'Staying-firm', from a Proto-Indo-European prefix *h₂ndʰi- (or *h₁ndo-) combined with the participial element *-h₂-rtó ('fixed, composed, built').

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Andarta” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.