Inanna and Ishtar: the queen of heaven of Uruk and the descent below

In Mesopotamia the goddess of love was also the goddess of war, and her star was the planet Venus. The Sumerians called her Inanna, a name often interpreted as lady of heaven; Akkadian-speaking peoples worshipped her as Ishtar. For more than three thousand years, from the first Sumerian cities to the Neo-Babylonian empire, she was one of the most powerful and most invoked deities of the ancient Near East.

Uruk and the priestess Enheduanna

The heart of her cult was Uruk, in the south of present-day Iraq, where the great temple complex of the Eanna, the house of heaven, was among the places in which the first forms of writing developed at the end of the fourth millennium BC. Her oldest symbol is a bundle of reeds bent into a ring; later the eight-pointed star, image of the planet Venus, prevailed.

Some of the earliest literary texts linked to an author's name are dedicated to the goddess. Enheduanna, daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, who lived around the twenty-third century BC and was priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur, is regarded by tradition as the author of hymns to Inanna, including the one known as Nin-me-šara, Lady of all powers. Some scholars question the attribution, but her name remains tied to those compositions.

The descent to the underworld

The most famous myth is Inanna's Descent to the Underworld, a Sumerian poem preserved on tablets from the early second millennium BC. The goddess decides to go down to the realm of her sister Ereshkigal. At each of the seven gates she must give up an ornament or a garment, until she arrives naked before the queen of the dead, who kills her and hangs her body on a hook.

Her faithful minister Ninshubur asks the gods for help, and only Enki, lord of wisdom, intervenes, creating two small beings who bring the goddess back to life. Inanna, however, cannot return without a substitute. Back on earth, she finds her husband, the shepherd Dumuzi, seated on the throne showing no sign of mourning, and hands him over to the demons. In the ending, Dumuzi and his sister Geshtinanna take turns spending half of each year in the netherworld.

Love, war and Gilgamesh

The Sumerian songs devoted to the union of Inanna and Dumuzi are among the most explicit love songs of antiquity. Some rulers, such as Shulgi of Ur and Iddin-Dagan of Isin, present themselves in the texts as the goddess's bridegrooms, in a rite scholars call the sacred marriage. How much of this rite was actually performed and how much belonged to poetic language is still debated.

Ishtar is also a fearsome goddess. In the sixth tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, in the standard Babylonian version, the goddess proposes marriage to the hero; Gilgamesh refuses, reminding her of the unhappy fate of her earlier lovers. Offended, Ishtar obtains from her father Anu the Bull of Heaven to lay waste to Uruk, but Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill it. The same goddess led the armies of the Assyrian kings, who invoked her as lady of battle.

The best-known monument linked to her name is the Ishtar Gate, built at Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar II around 575 BC and reconstructed in Berlin in the Pergamonmuseum, with its blue glazed bricks decorated with lions, bulls and dragons. Through Astarte and contacts with the Greek world, the features of Inanna and Ishtar also left an echo in the figure of Aphrodite.