Relief on the lid of a pyxis from Ugarit (the capital city of the kingdom of the same name), modern Ras Shamra, on the coast of Northern Syria. The city was an important port and commercial center situated at the confluence of a web of trade connections which put in communication Mesopotamia with Egypt, the Anatolian plateau with the Mediterranean. The image represents a female goddess, that can be identified with Astarte, a Canaanite divinity widely documented in the ancient Near East. The goddess is pictured as holding branches in her hand and has two goats at her sides, in a composition recalling the typology of the “tree of life”. The superposition of the goddess and the tree suggests an identity of function, related to the idea of fecundity/fertility. Astarte was a leading goddess worshiped in all the Phoenician world and in the Hellenistic age she was identified with the Greek goddess Aphrodite (Holm 2005). The objects dates back to about 1700-1400 B.C. and is in the Louvre Museum, Paris.

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