Inanna
Inanna is the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of war, love, and fertility. She is also associated with political power, divine law, sensuality, and procreation. Originally worshipped in Sumer, she was known by the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians as Ishtar. Her primary title is "the Queen of Heaven".
She was the patron goddess of the Eanna temple at the city of Uruk, her early main religious center. In archaic Uruk, she was worshipped in three forms: morning Inanna, evening Inanna, and princely Inanna, the former two reflecting the phases of her associated planet Venus. Her most prominent symbols include the lion and the eight-pointed star. Her husband is the god Dumuzid, and her is the goddess Ninshubur, later conflated with the male deities Ilabrat and Papsukkal.
Inanna was worshipped in Sumer as early as the Uruk period, and her worship was relatively localized before the conquest of Sargon of Akkad. During the post-Sargonic era, she became one of the most widely venerated deities in the Sumerian pantheon, with temples across Mesopotamia. Adoration of Inanna/Ishtar was continued by the East Semitic-speaking peoples who succeeded and absorbed the Sumerians in the region.
The Assyrians elevated her to become the highest deity in their pantheon, ranking above their own national god Ashur. Inanna/Ishtar is alluded to in the Hebrew Bible and she greatly influenced the Ugaritic goddess Ashtart and later the Phoenician goddess Astarte, who in turn possibly influenced the development of the Greek goddess Aphrodite. Her worship continued to flourish until its gradual decline between the first and sixth centuries CE in the wake of Christianity.
Inanna appears in more myths than any other Sumerian deity. She also has a uniquely high number of epithets and alternate names, comparable only to Nergal.
Many of her myths involve her taking over the domains of other deities. She is believed to have been given the, which represent all positive and negative aspects of civilization, by Enki, the god of wisdom. She is also believed to have taken over the Eanna temple from An, the god of the sky. Alongside her twin brother Utu, Inanna is the enforcer of divine justice; she destroyed Mount Ebih for having challenged her authority, unleashed her fury upon the gardener Shukaletuda after he raped her in her sleep, and tracked down the bandit woman Bilulu and killed her in divine retribution for having murdered Dumuzid. In the standard Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Ishtar asks Gilgamesh to become her consort. When he disdainfully refuses, she unleashes the Bull of Heaven, resulting in the death of Enkidu and Gilgamesh's subsequent grapple with his own mortality.
Inanna's most famous myth is the story of her descent into and return from the ancient Mesopotamian underworld, ruled by her older sister Ereshkigal. After she reaches Ereshkigal's throne room, the seven judges of the underworld deem her guilty and strike her dead. Three days later, Ninshubur pleads with all the gods to bring Inanna back. All of them refuse her, except Enki, who sends two sexless beings to rescue Inanna.
They escort Inanna out of the underworld but the, the guardians of the underworld, drag her husband Dumuzid down to the underworld as her replacement. Dumuzid is eventually permitted to return to heaven for half the year, while his sister Geshtinanna remains in the underworld for the other half, resulting in the cycle of the seasons.
Etymology
Scholars believe that Inanna and Ishtar were originally separate, unrelated deities, but were conflated with one another during the reign of Sargon of Akkad and came to be regarded as effectively the same goddess under two different names. Inanna's name may derive from the Sumerian phrase, meaning "Lady of Heaven", but the cuneiform sign for Inanna is not a ligature of the signs lady and sky. These difficulties led some early Assyriologists to suggest that Inanna may have originally been a Proto-Euphratean goddess, who was only later accepted into the Sumerian pantheon. This idea was supported by Inanna's youthfulness, as well as the fact that, unlike the other Sumerian divinities, she seems to have initially lacked a distinct sphere of responsibilities. The view that there was a Proto-Euphratean substrate language in Southern Iraq before Sumerian is not widely accepted by modern Assyriologists.The name Ishtar occurs as an element in personal names from both the pre-Sargonic and post-Sargonic eras in Akkad, Assyria, and Babylonia. It is of Semitic derivation and is probably etymologically related to the name of the West Semitic god Attar, who is mentioned in later inscriptions from Ugarit and southern Arabia. The morning star may have been conceived as a male deity who presided over the arts of war and the evening star may have been conceived as a female deity who presided over the arts of love. Among the Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, the name of the male god eventually supplanted the name of his female counterpart, but, due to extensive syncretism with Inanna, the deity remained as female, although her name was in the masculine form.
Origins and development
Inanna has posed a problem for many scholars of ancient Sumer due to the fact that her sphere of power contained more distinct and contradictory aspects than that of any other deity. Two major theories regarding her origins have been proposed. The first explanation holds that Inanna is the result of a syncretism between several previously unrelated Sumerian deities with totally different domains. The second explanation holds that Inanna was originally a Semitic deity who entered the Sumerian pantheon after it was already fully structured, and who took on all the roles that had not yet been assigned to other deities.As early as the Uruk period, Inanna was already associated with the city of Uruk. During this period, the symbol of a ring-headed doorpost was closely associated with Inanna. The famous Uruk Vase depicts a row of naked men carrying various objects, including bowls, vessels, and baskets of farm products, and bringing sheep and goats to a female figure facing the ruler. The female stands in front of Inanna's symbol of the two twisted reeds of the doorpost, while the male figure holds a box and stack of bowls, the later cuneiform sign signifying the, or high priest of the temple.
Seal impressions from the Jemdet Nasr period show a fixed sequence of symbols representing various cities, including those of Ur, Larsa, Zabalam, Urum, Arina, and probably Kesh. This list probably reflects the report of contributions to Inanna at Uruk from cities supporting her cult. A large number of similar seals have been discovered from phase I of the Early Dynastic period at Ur, in a slightly different order, combined with the rosette symbol of Inanna. These seals were used to lock storerooms to preserve materials set aside for her cult.
Various inscriptions in the name of Inanna are known, such as a bead in the name of King Aga of Kish, or a tablet by King Lugal-kisalsi :
During the Akkadian period, following the conquests of Sargon of Akkad, Inanna and originally independent Ishtar became so extensively syncretized that they became regarded as effectively the same. The Akkadian poet Enheduanna, the daughter of Sargon, wrote numerous hymns to Inanna, identifying her with Ishtar. As a result of this, the popularity of Inanna/Ishtar's cult skyrocketed. Alfonso Archi, who was involved in early excavations of Ebla, assumes Ishtar was originally a goddess venerated in the Euphrates valley, pointing out that an association between her and the desert poplar is attested in the most ancient texts from both Ebla and Mari. He considers her, a moon god and a sun deity of varying gender to be the only deities shared between various early Semitic peoples of Mesopotamia and ancient Syria, who otherwise had different not necessarily overlapping pantheons.
Worship
Gwendolyn Leick assumes that during the Pre-Sargonic era, the cult of Inanna was rather limited, though other experts argue that she was already the most prominent deity in Uruk and a number of other political centers in the Uruk period. She had temples in Nippur, Lagash, Shuruppak, Zabalam, and Ur, but her main cult center was the Eanna temple in Uruk, whose name means "House of Heaven". Some research assumes that the original patron deity of this fourth-millennium BCE city was An. After its dedication to Inanna, the temple seems to have housed priestesses of the goddess. Next to Uruk, Zabalam was the most important early site of Inanna worship, as the name of the city was commonly written with the signs MUŠ and UNUG, meaning respectively "Inanna" and "sanctuary". It is possible that the city goddess of Zabalam was originally a distinct deity, though one whose cult was absorbed by that of the Urukean goddess very early on. Joan Goodnick Westenholz proposed that a goddess identified by the name Nin-UM, associated with Ishtaran in a zame hymn, was the original identity of Inanna of Zabalam.In the Old Akkadian period, Inanna merged with the Akkadian goddess Ishtar, associated with the city of Agade. A hymn from that period addresses the Akkadian Ishtar as "Inanna of the Ulmaš" alongside Inanna of Uruk and of Zabalam. The worship of Ishtar and syncretism between her and Inanna was encouraged by Sargon and his successors, and as a result she quickly became one of the most widely venerated deities in the Mesopotamian pantheon. In inscriptions of Sargon, Naram-Sin, and Shar-Kali-Sharri, Ishtar is the most frequently invoked deity.
In the Old Babylonian period, her main cult centers were Uruk, Zabalam, Agade, and Ilip. Her cult was also introduced from Uruk to Kish.
During later times, while her cult in Uruk continued to flourish, Ishtar also became particularly worshipped in the Upper Mesopotamian kingdom of Assyria, especially in the cities of Nineveh, Aššur, and Arbela. During the reign of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal, Ishtar rose to become the most important and widely venerated deity in the Assyrian pantheon, surpassing even the Assyrian national god Ashur. Votive objects found in her primary Assyrian temple indicate that she was a popular deity among women.
Individuals who practiced gender nonconformity were heavily involved in the cult of Inanna. During Sumerian times, a set of priests known as worked in Inanna's temples, where they performed elegies and lamentations. Men who became sometimes adopted female names, and their songs were composed in the Sumerian dialect, which, in literary texts, is normally reserved for the speech of female characters. Some Sumerian proverbs seem to suggest that had a reputation for engaging in anal sex with men. During the Akkadian Period, and were servants of Ishtar who dressed in female clothing and performed war dances in Ishtar's temples. Several Akkadian proverbs seem to suggest that they may have also had homosexual proclivities. Gwendolyn Leick, an anthropologist known for her writings on Mesopotamia, has compared these individuals to the contemporary Indian hijra. In one Akkadian hymn, Ishtar is described as transforming men into women.
Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, it was widely believed that the cult of Inanna involved a "sacred marriage" ritual, in which a king would establish his legitimacy by taking on the role of Dumuzid and engaging in ritual sexual intercourse with the high priestess of Inanna, who took on the role of the goddess. This view has been challenged, however, and scholars continue to debate whether the sacred marriage described in literary texts involved any kind of physical ritual enactment at all and, if so, whether this ritual enactment involved actual intercourse or merely the symbolic representation of intercourse. The scholar of the ancient Near East Louise M. Pryke states that most scholars now maintain, if the sacred marriage was a ritual that was actually acted out, then it involved only symbolic intercourse.
The cult of Ishtar was long thought to have involved sacred prostitution, but this is now rejected among many scholars. Hierodules known as are reported to have worked in Ishtar's temples, but it is unclear if such priestesses actually performed any sex acts, and several modern scholars have argued that they did not. Women across the ancient Near East worshipped Ishtar by dedicating to her cakes baked in ashes. A dedication of this type is described in an Akkadian hymn. Several clay cake molds discovered at Mari are shaped like naked women with large hips who are clutching their breasts. Some scholars have suggested that the cakes made from these molds were intended as representations of Ishtar herself. In the Biblical book of Jeremiah, the prophet condemns Judean female refugees for worshipping the Queen of Heaven by baking cakes with the goddess's image upon them and pouring libations to her. The women and their husbands defy him, and state that they will follow the practices of their ancestors, who performed these acts "in the towns of Judea and the streets of Jerusalem". In Ezekiel 8:14, the prophet has a vision of the women of Jerusalem weeping for Tammuz.