Inanna (Ishtar)

Stories told about her

Sumerian poets told how she went down to the underworld and came back. “Inana abandoned heaven, abandoned earth, and descended to the underworld,” begins the poem known as Inana’s Descent. There she took her sister Ereškigala’s throne, and “the Anuna, the seven judges, rendered their decision against her”: she was turned into a corpse hung on a hook. Her minister Ninšubura went for help to Enlil and to Nanna, who refused, and then to Enki, who gave it. Inana came back to life, but the Anuna would not let anyone leave the underworld unscathed, and in the end Inana gave up her husband Dumuzid to the demons who had followed her. The poem ends with Dumuzid and his sister each spending half the year below.

In another poem, Inana and Enki, she visits Enki in his house in the abzu, and the two drink beer together until he hands her, one after another, the divine powers of civilisation, from the scribe’s craft to the art of judging. She loads them into the Boat of Heaven, and when Enki sends his minister after her she refuses to give them back: “How could my father have changed what he said to me?” Her route between Uruk and Enki’s city of Eridu, Heffron notes, recalls the cycle of the planet Venus, and the same suggestion has been made of her search for the gardener Šu-kale-tuda in another myth. In the Akkadian Epic of Gilgameš the hero turns down her offer of love and lists the lovers she has destroyed.

Love, war and the sacred marriage

The Oracc entry describes a goddess of contradictions. Sumerian poems sometimes show her as a young girl under her family’s authority, whose marriage to Dumuzi is arranged without her knowledge, and sometimes as an ambitious goddess reaching for power; Gilgameš shows her as a femme fatale. People prayed to her about potency and unrequited love, and she was the patron goddess of prostitutes. Her warrior side was praised alongside royal power. Scholars have long described a “sacred marriage” rite, in which a ruler played Dumuzi and her high priestess played the goddess at the New Year festival; Heffron cites Philip Jones’s doubt that it was ever more than “an intellectual construct, rather than an event in real life”. Many rulers of the third millennium BC called themselves her husband.

Her emblems

Besides the reed bundle, three emblems recur. In her astral aspect she is the eight-pointed star. Her animal as goddess of war is the lion, on whose back she often stands with one foot or both, and a Sumerian hymn compares her to a roaring lion. The rosette appears on the bracelets of Assyrian divine figures, and the Metropolitan Museum describes it as a symbol of divinity “and perhaps particularly with the goddess Ishtar”. In her warrior form she wears a flounced robe with weapons rising from her shoulders, sometimes with a beard; a horned cap marks her as divine. The countless nude female figurines of the ancient Near East, the Oracc entry warns, probably do not all show her.

Who are the Anunna in her story?

In Sumerian texts the Anunna (Akkadian Anunnaki) are the highest gods of the pantheon, or the gods of one particular city, Nicole Brisch writes for Oracc; their name most likely means something like “those of princely seed”, and one of their main tasks was to decide fates. Inana’s Descent already places them in the underworld, as the seven judges who condemn her, and after the Old Babylonian period the name was used for the gods of the underworld as opposed to the Igigi of heaven. No pictures of the Anunna as a group are known, only of individual gods.