Delebat (Dilbat)

Definition

Delebat (also written Dilbat; cuneiform mulDele-bat / MUL Dil-bat / dDil-bat / dEŠ4.DAR) is the Akkadian-Sumerian planet-name for Venus, used in late Babylonian astronomical and omen texts and theologically identified with the goddess Ištar. Distinct from Ištar-the-deity, Delebat picks out the visible planet — the morning-and-evening star observed astronomically — while Ištar foregrounds the deity-persona with its associated mythological domains.

In Tradition

In Assyriological scholarship Delebat is treated as the standard Akkadian planet-name for Venus across the omen and ephemeris corpora. Rochberg notes that, unlike the older logogram dUTU for the Sun, the name Delebat persists consistently in all late astronomical texts; Brown classes it as the A-name for Venus, used in every text group throughout the period c. 750-612 BCE and onward into the Diaries.

In Practice

For the student of Babylonian astral religion, Delebat marks the systematic distinction the scribes drew between observed planet and identified deity. In the BPO 3 Venus-omen corpus edited by Reiner and Pingree, every protasis opens with the sign-sequence for Dilbat — "If Venus (MUL Dil-bat) ..." — making Delebat the single observed body of the entire collection; the parallel deity-writing dEŠ4.DAR (Ištar) appears in apodoses whose content reflects the goddess's domains of love, sexuality, fertility, and war (Brown cites K.229 and K.2153 lines in this register). The Inana-Ištar-Venus identification is among the most ancient in Mesopotamian astral religion; an Early Dynastic seal already pairs Inana with the morning and evening star, and the morning-female / evening-male oscillation in some Akkadian texts echoes the goddess's gender-ambiguous astral character. The Delebat / Ištar double-naming lets the modern reader trace which interpretive layer — astronomical observation versus deity-mythology — a given line of the omen corpus is engaging.

Historical Origin

Delebat is attested across the late Babylonian astronomical corpus, including the -651 Diary and all subsequent Astronomical Diaries (Brown, Planetarium No.109); in the BPO 3 Venus-omen tablets edited by Reiner and Pingree; and in the Late Babylonian horoscopes edited by Rochberg, where it persists where other planet-names had shifted to abbreviated logographic forms. Modern critical treatments: Rochberg, *Babylonian Horoscopes* (1998); Reiner & Pingree, *Babylonian Planetary Omens Part Three* (1998); Brown, *Mesopotamian Planetary Astronomy-Astrology* (2000).

Further Reading

• Francesca Rochberg, Babylonian Horoscopes
• Erica Reiner & David Pingree, Babylonian Planetary Omens Part Three
• David Brown, Mesopotamian Planetary Astronomy-Astrology