Egyptian tradition maintained that she had come from the land of Punt, from those shores of Arabia and the opposite African coast from which the Pharaonic immigrants had made their way to the valley of the Nile. She was, moreover, the goddess of the Semitic nomads of the Sinaitic Peninsula; in other words, she was here identified with the Ashtoreth or Istar of the Semitic world.(122) Now the name of Hathor does not seem to be Egyptian. It is written with the help of a sort of rebus, so common in ideographic forms of writing. The pronunciation of the name is given by means of ideographs, the significations of which have nothing in common with it, though the sounds of the words they express approximate to its pronunciation. The name of Hathor, accordingly, is denoted by writing the hawk of Horus inside the picture of a "house," the name of which was Hât. A similar method of representing names is frequent in the ideographic script of ancient Babylonia; thus the name of Asari, the Egyptian Osiris, is expressed by placing the picture of an eye (_shi_) inside that of a place (_eri_).
The name of Hathor, therefore, had primitively nothing to do with either Horus or the house of Horus, whatever may have been the speculations which the priests of a later day founded upon the written form of the name. It was only an attempt, similar to those common in the early script of Babylonia, to represent the pronunciation of a name which had no meaning in the Egyptian language. But it is a name which we meet with in the ancient inscriptions of Southern Arabia. There it appears as the name of the god Atthar. But Atthar itself was borrowed from Babylonia. It is the name of the Babylonian goddess Istar, originally the morning and evening stars, who, an astronomical text tells us, was at once male and female. As a male god she was adored in South Arabia and Moab; as the goddess of love and war she was the chief goddess of Babylonia, the patron of the Assyrian kings, and the Ashtoreth of Canaan. When, with the progress of astronomical knowledge, the morning and evening stars were distinguished from one another, in one part of Western Asia she remained identified with the one, in another part with the other.