Inanna

• 1. Introduction

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  Inanna, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of war, love, and sex, appears in more myths than any other Sumerian deity. She was worshipped as early as the Uruk period, roughly 4000 to 3100 BCE, a span of a thousand years before the earliest Egyptian pharaohs built their first monuments. What made one goddess accumulate so many contradictory powers? How did a deity worshipped in the single city of Uruk become one of the most venerated figures across an entire civilization? And what does it mean that her story, told for thousands of years, echoes through the Hebrew Bible, the Greek myths of Persephone, and the star we still call Venus?

• 2. Queen of Heaven

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  Her primary title was "the Queen of Heaven", and the temple that housed her cult in Uruk was called the Eanna, a name meaning "House of Heaven" in Sumerian. This was her main religious center, and in archaic Uruk she was worshipped in three distinct forms: morning Inanna, evening Inanna, and princely Inanna, the first two tracking the phases of the planet Venus.

  The famous Uruk Vase, found in a deposit of cult objects from the Uruk III period, depicts a procession of naked men carrying bowls, vessels, and baskets of farm products alongside sheep and goats. They approach a female figure standing before the two twisted reed posts that were Inanna's symbol. The male figure beside her holds the later cuneiform sign signifying the En, or high priest of the temple.

  Seal impressions from the Jemdet Nasr period, around 3100 to 2900 BCE, show a fixed sequence of symbols representing various cities, including Ur, Larsa, Zabalam, Urum, and Arina. Scholars read these seals as records of contributions to Inanna at Uruk from cities supporting her cult. From the Early Dynastic period, a large number of similar seals combined these city symbols with Inanna's rosette, and were used to lock storerooms preserving materials set aside for her worship.

  A bead inscribed in the name of King Aga of Kish dates to around 2600 BCE, and a tablet by King Lugal-kisalsi around 2400 BCE reads: "For An, king of all the lands, and for Inanna, his mistress, Lugal-kisalsi, king of Kish, built the wall of the courtyard." Even kings who ruled other cities felt the need to record their devotion to her.

• 3. A Goddess Without a Fixed Domain

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  Inanna has posed a persistent problem for scholars because her sphere of power contained more distinct and contradictory aspects than that of any other deity. She was the goddess of both warfare and love, yet she was not the goddess of marriage and was never viewed as a mother goddess. Andrew R. George states directly that "According to all mythology, Ishtar was not … temperamentally disposed" toward such functions.

  Two major theories try to explain how this happened. The first holds that Inanna is the result of a syncretism between several previously unrelated Sumerian deities with entirely different domains. The second holds that Inanna was originally a Semitic deity who entered the Sumerian pantheon after it was already fully structured, taking on every role that no other deity had yet claimed.

  Some early Assyriologists suggested Inanna may have originally been a Proto-Euphratean goddess accepted only later into the Sumerian pantheon, supported by her apparent youthfulness and the fact that she initially lacked a distinct sphere of responsibilities. Modern Assyriologists do not widely accept the view that there was a Proto-Euphratean substrate language in southern Iraq before Sumerian.

  Her name may derive from the Sumerian phrase nin-an-ak, meaning "Lady of Heaven", but scholars note that the cuneiform sign for Inanna is not a ligature of the signs for "lady" and "sky", which complicates this etymology. The Akkadian name Ishtar, by contrast, is of Semitic derivation and is probably etymologically related to the name of the West Semitic god Attar, attested in later inscriptions from Ugarit and southern Arabia.

• 4. The Poet's Daughter

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  Scholars believe Inanna and Ishtar were originally separate, unrelated deities. Their full conflation happened during the reign of Sargon of Akkad, whose conquests reshaped the region during the Akkadian period, roughly 2334 to 2154 BCE. The key figure in this fusion was Enheduanna, the daughter of Sargon himself, who served as Akkadian poet and wrote numerous hymns to Inanna explicitly identifying her with Ishtar.

  After Enheduanna's work, the popularity of the combined Inanna/Ishtar cult increased dramatically. In inscriptions of Sargon, Naram-Sin, and Shar-Kali-Sharri, Ishtar became the most frequently invoked deity. One hymn from this period addresses the Akkadian Ishtar as "Inanna of the Ulmaš" alongside Inanna of Uruk and of Zabalam, weaving the two traditions together in a single line of praise.

  Alfonso Archi, who participated in early excavations of Ebla, argues that Ishtar was originally venerated in the Euphrates valley. He points to an association between Ishtar and the desert poplar attested in the most ancient texts from both Ebla and Mari. Archi considers Ishtar, a moon god such as Sin, and a sun deity of varying gender to be among the only deities shared across the various early Semitic peoples of Mesopotamia and ancient Syria, who otherwise maintained separate and non-overlapping pantheons.

  The Assyrians eventually elevated Ishtar to become the highest deity in their entire pantheon. During the reign of Assurbanipal, she surpassed even the national god Ashur. Votive objects found in her primary Assyrian temple indicate she was a popular deity among women in particular.

• 5. Lions, Stars, and Doves

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  Inanna's most common symbol was the eight-pointed star, though six-pointed versions also appear frequently. By the Old Babylonian period, around 1830 BCE, the eight-pointed star had come to be specifically associated with the planet Venus. Starting in the same period, the star was normally enclosed within a circular disc. During later Babylonian times, slaves who worked in Ishtar's temples were sometimes branded with the seal of the eight-pointed star.

  During the Neo-Assyrian period, from 911 to 609 BCE, the rosette may have actually eclipsed the eight-pointed star and become Ishtar's primary symbol. The temple of Ishtar in the city of Aššur was adorned with numerous rosettes. On boundary stones and cylinder seals, the eight-pointed star is sometimes shown alongside the crescent moon of Sin and the rayed solar disk of Shamash.

  Inanna's association with lions began in Sumerian times. A chlorite bowl from the temple of Inanna at Nippur depicts a large feline battling a giant snake, and a cuneiform inscription on the bowl reads "Inanna and the Serpent", indicating the cat is intended to represent the goddess herself. During the Akkadian period, Ishtar was frequently depicted as a heavily armed warrior goddess with a lion as one of her attributes.

  Doves were also prominent symbols. They appear on cultic objects associated with Inanna as early as the beginning of the third millennium BCE. Lead dove figurines were discovered in the temple of Ishtar at Aššur, dating to the thirteenth century BCE. A painted fresco from Mari, Syria, shows a giant dove emerging from a palm tree in the temple of Ishtar, suggesting the goddess was sometimes believed to take the form of a dove.

• 6. Descent and Return

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  Two versions of Inanna's descent into the underworld have survived: a Sumerian version dating to the Third Dynasty of Ur, roughly 2112 to 2004 BCE, and a clearly derivative Akkadian version from the early second millennium BCE. The Sumerian version is nearly three times the length of the Akkadian and contains far greater detail. Already in the first cuneiform texts of the late fourth millennium Uruk period, the divine name Inanna-kur, meaning "Inanna of the netherworld", is attested, making the descent myth possibly the oldest reliably attested myth of mankind.

  Before leaving for the underworld, Inanna dresses elaborately. She wears a turban, wig, lapis lazuli necklace, beads, the pala dress, mascara, a pectoral, and a golden ring, and holds a lapis lazuli measuring rod. Each garment represents a powerful me she possesses. She instructs her minister Ninshubur to plead with the deities Enlil, Nanna, An, and Enki to rescue her if she does not return after three days.

  At each of the seven gates of the underworld, Inanna surrenders one piece of clothing or jewelry. When she finally arrives naked before her sister Ereshkigal and the seven judges, they render their verdict against her: "They looked at her - it was the look of death. They spoke to her - it was the speech of anger. The afflicted woman was turned into a corpse. And the corpse was hung on a hook."

  Ninshubur pleads with Enlil, Nanna, and An in turn; all three refuse to help, saying Inanna's fate is her own fault. Only Enki agrees to act. He creates two sexless beings, the gala-tura and the kur-jara, from the dirt under his fingernails. They travel to the underworld, find Ereshkigal in agony, and refuse all her offers of rivers and fields of grain. They ask only for Inanna's corpse, then sprinkle it with the food and water of life.

  The galla demons follow Inanna out of the underworld, demanding a substitute. They attempt to take Ninshubur, then Shara, then Lulal, but Inanna stops them each time, noting that each had properly mourned for her. When they reach Dumuzid, however, he is lavishly clothed and resting beneath a tree, entertained by slave-girls, showing no sign of grief. Inanna decrees that the galla shall take him instead.

  Through a chain of events involving Dumuzi's Dream and the poem The Return of Dumuzid, Dumuzid's sister Geshtinanna ultimately agrees to share his fate. Inanna decrees that Dumuzid will spend half of each year in the underworld and the other half in heaven, while Geshtinanna takes his place for the remaining half. Scholars connect this rotation with the cycle of the seasons.

  The Akkadian version, found in two manuscripts from the Library of Ashurbanipal and a third from Asshur, adds a detail absent from the Sumerian text: after Ishtar descends, all sexual activity ceases on earth. The first cuneiform edition of this version was published in 1873 by Francois Lenormant. Dina Katz, an authority on Sumerian afterlife beliefs, argues that references to nature becoming infertile while Ishtar is dead were only added in the Akkadian translations to bring the myth closer to cultic traditions linked to Tammuz.

• 7. After Mesopotamia

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  Inanna's influence extended far beyond Mesopotamia's borders. She greatly influenced the Ugaritic goddess Ashtart and later the Phoenician goddess Astarte, who in turn possibly influenced the development of Aphrodite in Greek religion. In the ancient Near East, she was syncretised with a large number of deities to varying degrees; tablet IV of the monumental god list An-Anum is known as the "Ishtar tablet" because most of its contents are the names of Ishtar's equivalents, her titles, and her various attendants.

  The cult of Inanna/Ishtar may have been introduced to the Kingdom of Judah during the reign of King Manasseh. In the Biblical book of Jeremiah, the prophet condemns Judean female refugees for worshipping the Queen of Heaven, baking cakes with the goddess's image upon them, and pouring libations to her, as recorded in chapters 7 and 44. The women and their husbands defy him and state that they will follow the practices of their ancestors who performed these acts "in the towns of Judea and the streets of Jerusalem". In Ezekiel 8:14, the prophet has a vision of the women of Jerusalem weeping for Tammuz.

  The Song of Songs bears strong similarities to the Sumerian love poems involving Inanna and Dumuzid, particularly in its use of natural symbolism to represent the lovers. A late hymn to Nanaya alludes to a male aspect of Ishtar from Babylon, evidence that the goddess's ambiguous character persisted even into later theological reflection.

  Worship of Inanna/Ishtar flourished for millennia and declined only gradually between the first and sixth centuries CE, in the wake of Christianity's spread. The eight-pointed star that once branded the arms of her temple slaves is still recognizable on the face of the planet Venus, which carries the name of her Roman equivalent to this day.