Astar is the astral deity of the planet Venus inherited by the peoples of the northern Horn from the South Arabian god ʿAṯtar. In the kingdom of Aksum he stands at the head of the protective triad — Astar, Beher (or Medr), and Mahrem — that opens the royal inscriptions, and the Greek text of the Monumentum Adulitanum renders him as Zeus. In the earlier Dʿmt polity he is the foremost of a fixed group of deities invoked in dedicatory formulae. Aksumite genealogical tradition makes him the father of the war-god Mahrem and of the sea-god Beher, so that he functions as the progenitor of the active gods of the pantheon.