Allat — al-Lat in the Arabic form — was a great goddess worshipped from northern Arabia through Syria into the late Roman period. Her name is the feminine form of Allah, the Arabic word for God, and means simply 'the Goddess' (al + ilat); the cult was widespread among the Arabian and northern-Arabian peoples and was carried into Syria by the trading and migrating populations. Her character varied somewhat among the regions where she was worshipped: among the Nabataeans she was a mother-goddess; among the Palmyrenes she was identified with Athena and was a warrior-goddess of the city; among the more general Aramaean and Syrian populations she was a sky-goddess and a fertility-figure.

She was sometimes paired with Baalshamin as the divine consort of the sky-lord, sometimes with Hadad in the storm-god's domain, sometimes she stood alone as a great independent deity; the variability reflects both the long history of her cult and the complexity of religious networks in the region. The cult was already old at the time of Herodotus, who in the fifth century before our era named her (under the form Alilat) as one of the great goddesses of the Arabs.

We treat the major Nabataean and Palmyrene developments under separate entries in the books that follow. Here it is sufficient to note that the figure was a unifying religious presence across the Levantine borderlands, recognized in similar form by Aramaeans, Nabataeans, Palmyrenes, and the Arabs of the deserts and the northern Hijaz. After the rise of Islam, her cult was extinguished, but her name was preserved in the Qur'an (Sura 53:19-23) as one of the three goddesses (with Al-Uzza and Manat) whose worship had to be renounced — and this passage, the so-called Satanic Verses controversy, has remained a touchstone in Islamic theology to this day.