Star of Ishtar
The eight-pointed star was the emblem of the goddess Inanna, or Ishtar, as the planet Venus, the morning and evening star. On Babylonian boundary stones it stands beside the crescent of the moon god and the sun disc of Shamash.
Meaning
In her astral aspect Inana/Ištar is the planet Venus, and she is symbolised by the eight-pointed star, as Yağmur Heffron writes in the Oracc guide to the Mesopotamian gods. The star belongs to a set. On the boundary stones the Babylonians called kudurrus, the great gods appear as emblems or as their animals, and the three gods of the sky appear together: Ishtar’s star, the sun disc of Shamash and the crescent of Sin, the moon. The Louvre’s catalogue of a kudurru of King Melishipak II describes exactly this trio beside the king leading his daughter to a goddess. It is an ancient emblem; the star on today’s Assyrian flag, often taken for it, is by its designer’s account the sun of Shamash.
Origin and history
The star is a sign of the goddess in the sky, and so it appears where gods are shown as emblems rather than figures. Two kudurrus of Melishipak II, a king of Babylonia, are now in the Louvre. On the larger, the king holds his hand before his mouth in prayer as he presents his daughter to the goddess Nannaya, and above them, the Louvre’s description reads, are the symbols of the astral gods: the star of Ishtar, the sun of Shamash and the crescent of Sin for the moon. The second lists the pantheon in symbols and animals: the star (Ishtar), the moon (Sin), the solar disc (Shamash), a lance for Marduk, a dog for Gula, an antelope, fish and ram for Ea. Both stones were carried off from Babylonia to Susa in Iran as war booty in the twelfth century BC, and French excavators found them there in 1897–1899.
Often confused with the sun of Shamash
The commonest confusion is with the sun. From the Akkadian to the Neo-Babylonian period the sun god Šamaš (Utu) was shown by a solar disc that usually took the form of a four-pointed star with curved lines coming out between the points, Ruth Horry writes for Oracc; on Neo-Assyrian monuments he could instead be a winged disc. Ishtar’s emblem is the eight-pointed star. The difference matters for a modern symbol too. The star at the centre of the Assyrian flag, the “Assyrian Star”, was chosen by its designer, George Bet Atanous, as the disc of Shamash. In an interview from about 1980 he explained that it “does not represent a star, but the god Shamash, the sun disc”, which in ancient Assyrian designs has either four points or eight, with sets of rays between them.
The morning and the evening star
Venus appears at dawn and at dusk, and Heffron notes that the stories told about the goddess have been read in the same terms. Her journey from Uruk to Enki’s city of Eridu and back, in the poem Inana and Enki, recalls the cycle of Venus, and her search for the gardener Šu-kale-tuda in another myth has been suggested to follow the planet’s course. Presumably, Heffron adds, the same journey was carried out on earth in festivals.
Read next
- Next in Mesopotamian symbols and godsEnki (Ea)Enki, called Ea in Akkadian, was the Mesopotamian god of the fresh waters beneath the earth, of wisdom and of magic. On cylinder seals he is a bearded god in a horned cap with a stream of water full of fish flowing around him.
- The same shape in Adinkra symbolsNsoromma (star)Nsoromma, “child of the heavens”, is the adinkra star. It stands for guardianship.
See also
Inanna (Ishtar), Anunnaki (Anunna), Assyrian winged disc, Rub el Hizb, Cuneiform, Marduk.
Sources
- Inana/Ištar (goddess) (Yağmur Heffron, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses), Yağmur Heffron, “Inana/Ištar (goddess)”, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, Oracc and the UK Higher Education Academy, 2019, Oracc (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus), University of Pennsylvania, page text
- Kudurru du roi Melishipak II, Sb 23 (Louvre), Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités orientales, Sb 23, collections database entry, Musée du Louvre, page text
- Kudurru de Meli-Shipak, Sb 22 (Louvre), Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités orientales, Sb 22, collections database entry, Musée du Louvre, page text
- Utu/Šamaš (god) (Ruth Horry, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses), Ruth Horry, “Utu/Šamaš (god)”, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, Oracc and the UK Higher Education Academy, 2019, Oracc (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus), University of Pennsylvania, page text
- The Assyrian flag and its designer (AINA), Assyrian International News Agency, “The Assyrian Flag and Its Designer”, translated excerpt from George Bet Atanous’s book The Assyrian Flag (interview by Homer Abramian, c. 1980), Assyrian International News Agency, page text
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or stars.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research
Added .