Shapshu
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Shapshu (Ugaritic: 𐎌𐎔𐎌 špš, "sun") or Shapsh, and also Shamshu, was a Canaanite sun goddess. She also served as the royal messenger of the high god El, her probable father. Her most common epithets in the Ugaritic corpus are nrt ỉlm špš ("Shapshu, lamp of the gods", also translated as "torch" or "luminary" of the gods by various authors), rbt špš ("great lady Shapshu"), and špš ʿlm ("eternal Shapshu"). In the pantheon lists KTU 1.118 and 1.148, Shapshu is equated with the Akkadian dšamaš.
Key facts
- Deity.type
- Canaanite
- Deity.name
- Shapshu or Shamshu
- Deity.god_of
- Goddess of the Sun, Messenger of El
- Deity.planet
- Sun
- Deity.gender
- female
- Deity.parents
- El (father)?
via Wikipedia infobox
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Article
11 sectionsContents
- Name
- Cult
- In Bronze Age Levant and Mesopotamia
- In Ugarit
- In Iron Age Phoenicia
- In Myth
- In the Bible
- Equation with Asherah
- See also
- Notes
- References
Shapshu (Ugaritic: 𐎌𐎔𐎌 špš, "sun") or Shapsh, and also Shamshu, was a Canaanite sun goddess. She also served as the royal messenger of the high god El, her probable father. Her most common epithets in the Ugaritic corpus are nrt ỉlm špš ("Shapshu, lamp of the gods", also translated as "torch" or "luminary" of the gods by various authors), rbt špš ("great lady Shapshu"), and špš ʿlm ("eternal Shapshu"). In the pantheon lists KTU 1.118 and 1.148, Shapshu is equated with the Akkadian dšamaš.
== Name == The original name of the goddess contained the consonant /m/, and this consonant appears in some of the Amorite theophoric names mentioning the goddess. In the Middle Bronze Age Alalah, a process of devoicing and denasalization of the consonant /m/ made it, as a result, a /p/; this process is only attested at Middle Bronze Age Alalaḫ and at Late Bronze Age Ugarit. While name in Alalah show a mixture of the forms (Shamshu and Shapshu), in Ugarit there is not one attestation, syllabic or alphabetic, to the form "Shamshu".