Kotharat

The group-name kṯrt (vocalized in modern scholarship as Kotharat or Kôṯarātu) is attested in Ugaritic texts and in variant forms at Mari (Kawašurātum, Kûšarātum) and Emar (Ilū kašarāti). Ugaritic texts present them as a plural multiplet often treated as daughters of a male deity named hll; their name is most likely derived from the Semitic root kšr, 'to be skilled' or 'to achieve,' placing them in a semantic field of competence appropriate to deities who secure successful conception, formation of the fetus, and marital blessings.

Primary textual sources do not preserve a detailed physical portrait or consistent anthropomorphic attributes for the Kotharat. Some later secondary summaries describe swallow or lunar imagery (e.g., 'swallow-like daughters of the crescent moon'), but those portrayals derive from later interpretive traditions and are not securely attested in the cited Ugaritic texts; the surviving scholarly material therefore treats such associations as speculative.

Sources characterize the Kotharat as a group of goddesses associated with conception, pregnancy and birth who were believed to be responsible for forming human children during pregnancy and for blessing marriages. They are commonly compared to Mesopotamian Šassūrātu and Hurrian Hutena and Hutellura as divine assistants in natal and fate-declaring functions. Scholarship disagrees on the timing of their intervention: many modern summaries call them 'divine midwives,' but some specialists (e.g., Dennis Pardee as cited) argue that in the surviving myths they appear to intervene prior to pregnancy rather than during labor; this interpretive dispute affects whether they are best described as midwives or as pre-conception/formation goddesses.