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.

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.

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 Sumerian Inanna version is fuller, and there the substitute is named: her own consort, the shepherd-god Dumuzi, the Akkadian Tammuz, condemned to the underworld in her stead and mourned in seasonal rites. Whether the myth encodes the agricultural year, the movements of Venus, or something else is debated; the text itself states no moral and offers no key.

The historical record is unusually deep. Ishtar held major temples at Uruk, Nineveh, and elsewhere; kings styled themselves her beloved and credited her with their victories; she figures in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the hero spurns her advances and lists the lovers she has destroyed, drawing her lethal rage. Modern scholarship has reconstructed her cult from cuneiform hymns, ritual texts, and royal inscriptions, and reads the conflation of Inanna and Ishtar as a long process rather than a single event.

Later readers reached for her across the gap of millennia. Comparative writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set Ishtar beside the dying-and- rising gods of the wider Near East and the Greek world, and the name has often been pressed into theories of a single underlying goddess. The resemblances to Aphrodite, to Astarte, to the mourned consorts of other cults are real and were noticed in antiquity itself. They are not evidence of one original figure; each cult meant its own goddess, in its own city, and meant her exactly.

→ Related: Mesopotamia · Vesta