Al-Lat, the Arabian goddess who wore Athena's helmet in Palmyra
Long before Islam, a goddess called al-Lat was invoked from the Hejaz to Syria. Desert travellers scratched her name into rocks asking for good weather, Herodotus likened her to Aphrodite, and in Roman-era Palmyra she was carved looking just like Athena. Her best-known shrine, in Ta'if, was a cube of granite.
Her cult was strongest in northern Arabia and the Hejaz, reaching into Syria, while in the south she barely registers; two small amulets are nearly the only trace. Nomads writing in the Safaitic script invoked her constantly, asking for mercy, prosperity, safe travel and fair weather, and also for vengeance, loot from raids, and blindness or lameness for anyone who damaged their inscriptions. A silver bowl dedicated by a king of the Qedarite confederation bears her name.
The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, reported that Arabians worshipped only two gods, and named one of them Alilat, whom he equated with Heavenly Aphrodite. Where her own name comes from is still argued. Medieval Arab lexicographers tied it to a verb for kneading barley meal; others see a feminine counterpart of the word for god. Specialists in ancient North Arabian inscriptions disagree over whether related spellings name one goddess or are generic terms.
Under Greek and Roman influence she took on a warrior's look. The Nabataeans called her the Great Goddess and mother of the gods, sometimes pairing her with al-'Uzza so closely that the two may once have been a single deity. In Palmyra, where she was the Lady of the temple and worshippers cast lots from a silver basin, she was sculpted in Athena's style by the second century AD. The Palmyrene emperor Vaballathus, whose name meant gift of al-Lat, used a Greek version, Athenodorus.
In Ta'if the Banu Thaqif tribe revered her as ar-Rabba, the Lady, in a shrine hung with gold and onyx around a granite cube. The surrounding ground was sacred: no tree felled, no animal hunted. Islamic tradition records that the shrine was destroyed on Muhammad's orders around 630, when the tribes of Ta'if came to terms with him.
Source: Al-Lat
