Shalash (Šalaš) was a Syrian goddess best known as the wife of Dagan, the head of the pantheon of the middle Euphrates area.
Both in ancient Mesopotamian texts and in modern scholarships a long-standing issue is the differentiation between Shalash and the similarly named Shala, wife of the weather god Ishkur/Adad in Mesopotamia.
[2] However, as noted by Alfonso Archi, there is no plausible Semitic etymology either, similar as in the case of other Syrian deities like Kubaba or Aštabi.
[2] It has been proposed that this deity can be identified with Shalash, and that the western scribes treated dNIN.KUR as a synonym of dNIN.HUR.SAG.GA based on similar meanings of the names.
[9] Shalash was the wife of Dagan, and together they stood at the head of the pantheon of the middle Euphrates area in ancient Syria.
[12] In the texts from Ebla, Shalash is also associated with Wada'an(u), a god distinct from Dagan, worshiped in Gar(r)amu rather than Tuttul.
[17] According to Daniel Schwemer, while a degree of confusion between the two goddesses is also present in some ancient sources, it is largely limited to scholarly Mesopotamian texts, and no older than the fourteenth century BCE.
[19] Lluis Felieu rejects the possibility that the two were originally the same, and especially that the confusion between them was caused by Dagan being a weather god himself and thus analogous to Adad.
[22] Additionally, the spelling of the name of the goddess paired with Adad in devotional inscriptions is consistent between various time periods and languages, and never ends with a sibilant.
[13] In the documents of the royal vizier Ibrium there is also evidence for an association between dsa-a-ša (Shalash) and DBE du-du-luki, "lord of Tuttul," a title of Dagan.
[25] In later periods the cult of Shalash is well attested in Tuttul, and Alfonso Archi goes as far as proposing that the view that she was the wife of Dagan originated in this city.
"[3] This epithet was derived from Piden (also spelled Bitin[3]), a settlement mentioned in the texts from Alalakh,[32] which was a cult center of this goddess.