Ishtar

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Ishtar is the great goddess of ancient Mesopotamia — the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian deity of sexual love and of war, identified with the planet Venus and worshipped across the region for the better part of three thousand years. She is the Semitic counterpart of the older Sumerian Inanna, and the two figures were already merged in deep antiquity, sharing the same myths and the same temples; where one tradition wrote Inanna, the other wrote Ishtar, and the goddess behind both names is treated as a single power. Her oldest and greatest seat was Uruk, where the Eanna — the House of Heaven — was hers, and from that city, the first city of Sumer, her cult spread along the rivers and outward to the limits of the cuneiform world.

What set her apart, even among great gods, was the joining of opposites in one figure. She presided over desire, fertility, and the marriage bed, and at the same time over battle and the carnage of the field — patron of the harlot and of the warrior alike. The hymns address her as both alluring and terrifying, and do not try to reconcile the two; the contradiction was the point. Texts call her the morning and the evening star, and her cult drew the planet Venus into the same orbit of meanings, brilliant and ungoverned. The same body that rose ahead of the sun in the east and the body that followed it down in the west were her two faces, and the scribes who tracked the planet’s risings tracked the movements of the goddess herself.

The goddess who is both at once

The defining mark of Ishtar is that she does not resolve. Where most deities hold a province — sky, storm, grain, the deep — she holds two that ought to cancel: the bed and the battlefield, generation and slaughter, the force that draws bodies together and the force that breaks them. Sumerian hymns to Inanna glory in exactly this excess. She is praised as the one who can turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man, who unmakes the order of things and is honored for unmaking it; her cult drew personnel who stood athwart the ordinary categories — the gala lamentation-singers, the kurgarrû and assinnu, performers whose ambiguous standing belonged to a goddess for whom no boundary was fixed. To worship her was to acknowledge a power that the settled world both needed and could not contain.

The two halves are not arbitrary. In the love aspect she is belet of desire, the goddess of the courting-songs in which Inanna and her shepherd-bridegroom sing to each other, the patron of the rite scholars call the sacred marriage, in which the king took her favor and with it the fertility of the land. In the war aspect she is belet tahazi, lady of battle, who rides at the head of armies, whom Assyrian kings credit with their victories and call their beloved; her weapon-bristling image and her lions belong to this register. The hymns move between the two without seam. Desire and violence are, in her, names for one appetite — the appetite of a power that takes what it wants and is not accountable to the order it disturbs.

The descent

Her most enduring story is the descent. In the surviving Akkadian poem the goddess goes down into the land of no return, passing through seven gates and surrendering at each a garment or ornament until she stands stripped and powerless before the queen of the dead, who kills her; her absence freezes desire and generation in the world above, and she is recovered only when a substitute is found to take her place below. The poem is spare and frightening. At the first gate the gatekeeper takes the great crown from her head; at the next her earrings, then the beads at her throat, the ornaments of her breast, the girdle of birthstones at her waist, the rings of her hands and feet, and last the robe of her body — so that the goddess of all adornment arrives in the house of dust with nothing, and the queen of that house, Ereshkigal, fixes on her the eye of death.

The world above answers at once. With Ishtar held below, no bull mounts the cow, no man approaches a woman; the act of generation stops in field and bed alike, and the gods, alarmed, contrive her release. The Sumerian Inanna version is fuller, and there the substitute is named: her own consort, the shepherd-god Dumuzi, the Akkadian Tammuz. The detail that the Sumerian poem keeps and the Akkadian abbreviates is the goddess’s own hand in his fate. Returning from the dead under demon-escort, she finds Dumuzi enthroned in fine garments, untroubled, unmourning — and fixes on him the same look of death that had been fixed on her, and hands him to the demons in her place. He is dragged below; his sister Geshtinanna offers herself for half the year, and the two alternate, the shepherd descending and rising with the seasons while his sister takes his place in the dark. The seasonal lament for Tammuz, the wailing for the vanished young god, was kept across the region for millennia and is named, far to the west and late in time, in the Hebrew Bible, where the prophet sees women weeping for Tammuz at the gate of the Temple.

Whether the myth encodes the agricultural year, the disappearance of Venus beneath the horizon in its synodic cycle, or something else is debated; the text itself states no moral and offers no key. What it does not contain is a triumph. The goddess returns, but at a price exacted from another; the consort goes down in her stead and is mourned, not raised in glory. The descent is not a story of death conquered. It is a story of how the living and the dead are bound by substitution — that no one comes up from the great below unless someone goes down — and of a goddess powerful enough to come back and ruthless enough to choose who pays. (The wider death-world she descends into, the dust-realm of Irkalla shared by the whole Mesopotamian imagination, belongs to Mesopotamian religion.)

Gilgamesh and the lovers she destroyed

The other face of that ruthlessness is on display in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Flush with the killing of the forest-guardian, the hero washes and dresses, and Ishtar herself, taken with his beauty, proposes marriage and offers him a catalog of wealth and power. Gilgamesh refuses — and refuses by reciting the fates of the lovers who came before him. The bird whose wing she broke; the lion for whom she dug pits; the horse she condemned to the whip and spur; the herdsman she turned into a wolf to be chased by his own dogs; the gardener she struck into a frog or a mole. Loving her, the speech says, is not something her lovers survive. Enraged, the goddess goes up to her father Anu (the sky-god Anu) and her mother and demands the Bull of Heaven to destroy the city, threatening, if refused, to break the gates of the underworld and let the dead come up to outnumber the living — the one threat that moves the high gods. The Bull is loosed on Uruk; Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill it, and Enkidu flings its haunch in the goddess’s face. The insult is repaid. It is for the killing of the Bull and the guardian that the gods condemn Enkidu to death, and his dying turns the epic toward its real subject, the mortality the hero cannot outrun.

The episode is the literary distillation of everything the cult knew about her. She is irresistible and she is fatal; her favor is a danger; she answers refusal with annihilation and is too great to be safely refused. The poem does not moralize her any more than the descent does. It renders her exactly as the hymns do — a power one does not control and survives only by luck or by the help of the other gods.

The deep record: temples, kings, and recovery

The historical record is unusually deep. Ishtar held major temples across the land and the centuries — the Eanna at Uruk, her ancient house; the temple of Ishtar at Nineveh, and another at Arbela, the two great Assyrian seats from which the war-goddess answered the kings; and her place at Agade, the capital of the dynasty of Sargon of Akkad, who made her cult an instrument of the first Mesopotamian empire. Her standing in the official world is plain from the royal inscriptions, where kings style themselves her beloved and credit her with their victories, and from the temple economy, in which her households held land, herds, and dependents and stood at the center of urban life.

The single most consequential figure in her literary history is Enheduanna, the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, installed by her father as high priestess of the moon-god at Ur in the twenty-third century BCE. Hers is the earliest name in world literature attached to a body of work, and that work is largely hers: the great Sumerian hymns to Inanna — the composition known as the Exaltation of Inanna and its companions — in which the goddess is praised as a cosmic power above the other gods, terrible and radiant, the holder of the divine offices. Enheduanna’s poems, copied in the scribal schools for centuries after her death, did as much as any cult act to weld the Sumerian Inanna and the Semitic Ishtar into the single towering figure the later tradition received. (Her sphere overlaps but is distinct from the political theology of Marduk, the city-god whom Babylon raised over the pantheon; Ishtar’s authority was older and ran through cult and song rather than through a charter-myth of kingship.)

What survives of all this was recovered from clay. The hymns, the ritual texts, the royal inscriptions, the two descent-poems, and the Gilgamesh episode came back into the light only with the decipherment of cuneiform in the nineteenth century and the excavation of the great tablet-collections — above all the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, the seventh-century BCE collection from which the Akkadian Descent of Ishtar and the standard Gilgamesh were drawn. Modern scholarship reads the conflation of Inanna and Ishtar not as a single event but as a long process of two cults flowing together, and it has learned to read the descent without the assumptions that once governed it — the nineteenth-century certainty that Tammuz was a dying-and-rising vegetation god of the kind found everywhere, a certainty the texts themselves, once fully read, did not support. The Sumerian poem ends with Dumuzi handed over, not raised; the Akkadian poem ends without any clear resurrection of Tammuz at all.

Reception: the star that went west

Ishtar’s power did not stay within the cuneiform world. Her star — the planet the Babylonian scribes watched rise before the sun and called the star of Ishtar — carried her westward along the trade and language routes of the ancient Near East. The West Semitic Astarte, worshipped from the Levantine coast to the Punic colonies, belongs to the same divine type, a goddess in whom love and war are held together; the Greeks, who knew Astarte through the Phoenicians, identified her with their own Aphrodite, and the brightest of the wandering lights passed under the goddess of love from one people to the next until Rome named the planet Venus for the same power. The mourning for Tammuz, the seasonal lament for the vanished consort, has its cousins in the rites for Adonis in the Greek world and for the mourned young gods of other cults. Among the last to keep the old astral religion alive were the star-worshippers of Harran, whose Sabian tradition preserved a planetary cult into the Islamic centuries and named the planets with the old divine names. The technical reading of the heavens that the Babylonians built around Ishtar’s star — the long science of the omen and the planet — fed the astrology that the Hellenistic world systematized and passed on.

Yet the Babylonian who lifted his eyes to the evening star did not see Astarte, nor Aphrodite, nor Venus. He saw Ishtar — the lady of Uruk and of Nineveh, the bride of the courting-songs and the lion of the battle-line, the one who went down through the seven gates and came back, and who, coming back, fixed the eye of death on the consort who had not mourned her and handed him to the demons in her place. That is the figure the cult held. Her hymns end not on a riddle solved but on the goddess enthroned again, adorned again at the seventh gate regained, terrible and radiant over her city; the courting-songs resume, the king takes her favor, the year turns, and Tammuz goes down so that she may stand above. In her, desire and slaughter are not two powers reconciled but one appetite worshipped whole — and at Uruk, before her own star, that was never a contradiction to be explained away. It was the shape of the power they prayed to: the goddess who is both at once, and is great because she is.

Scholarship and primary texts

The standard reference handbook for the Mesopotamian pantheon, with a concise and reliable entry on Inanna-Ishtar, is Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary (British Museum Press, 1992) — https://www.britishmuseum.org/. The fullest English-language anthology of the Akkadian literature, including the Descent of Ishtar and the Gilgamesh material, is Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, 3rd ed. (CDL Press, 2005) — https://www.eisenbrauns.org/books/titles/978-1-883053-76-5.html. The critical edition of the epic in which she confronts Gilgamesh is A. R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 2003) — https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-babylonian-gilgamesh-epic-9780198149224.

For the underworld imagery the descent presupposes, the standard study is Dina Katz, The Image of the Netherworld in the Sumerian Sources (CDL Press, 2003) — https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/51242910; and on the contested question of whether Tammuz dies and rises at all, Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East (Coniectanea Biblica, Almqvist & Wiksell, 2001) — https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/46785829.

The primary texts are accessible in several forms. The Sumerian Inana’s descent to the nether world is edited with English translation in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (Oxford, text c.1.4.1) — https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr141.htm. Among the public-domain Assyriological editions, Morris Jastrow Jr.’s The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (Ginn, 1898) gives the first major English exposition of the Akkadian descent — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20758; and Stephen Langdon’s Tammuz and Ishtar (Clarendon Press, 1914) is the classic, if now superseded, monograph on the mourning cult and the goddess — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Herbert_Langdon. A literary tablet of the Akkadian Descent of Ishtar from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh is cataloged in the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative as artifact P345482 — https://cdli.earth/artifacts/345482.

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