Inanna is the Sumerian goddess of love, sexuality, war and political power, worshipped above all at Uruk and known to Akkadian speakers as Ishtar. In the sky she was the planet Venus, the morning and evening star, and her best-known myth, the Descent of Inanna to the Underworld, tells how she passed through seven gates, died before her sister Ereshkigal and returned only by handing over her husband Dumuzi in her place.
She matters because she is one of the best-documented deities of the ancient world: her worship runs from the temple precinct at Uruk in the late fourth millennium BCE to the glazed bricks of Babylon in the sixth century BCE, and the earliest author known by name wrote hymns to her. She also sits under modern debates, from the Burney Relief to Easter. For the wider family of gods around her, see Sumerian gods and goddesses explained.
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Who was Inanna, and is she the same as Ishtar?
Yes, in practice Inanna and Ishtar are the same goddess under two names: Inanna in Sumerian, Ishtar in Akkadian, merged so completely that scholars usually write "Inana/Ištar". The Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses project at the University of Pennsylvania (Oracc) describes her as the goddess of sexual love who is "equally prominent as the goddess of warfare", and notes that kings called themselves her spouse, making her a source of royal legitimacy.
She had temples in every important city, but her home was Uruk, where the Eanna ("House of Heaven") precinct was her temple complex. The Uruk (Warka) Vase, found in the Eanna district by German excavators in 1933–34 and usually dated to about 3200–3000 BCE, shows a procession of men bringing produce to a female figure standing before two reed-bundle posts, generally read as Inanna or her priestess. The vase is in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad; it was looted in 2003, returned in pieces and restored.
Her three main symbols are the reed-bundle gatepost, her earliest emblem and the sign used to write her name; the eight-pointed star, for her astral side as Venus; and the lion, for her warrior side.
Why is Inanna linked to the planet Venus?
Inanna is Venus because Mesopotamians identified the brightest planet with her: Oracc puts it plainly, "in her astral aspect, Inana/Ištar is the planet Venus, the morning and the evening star." Venus never strays far from the Sun, so it appears either after sunset or before dawn.
Venus's synodic period, the time it takes to return to the same position relative to the Sun as seen from Earth, is about 584 days. Around inferior conjunction, when Venus passes between Earth and the Sun, it vanishes from view for about eight days. Many modern writers read the Descent myth as an astronomical story: the goddess goes down, disappears and rises again, as the evening star sets into the Sun and returns as the morning star. That reading is a modern interpretation; the Sumerian poem itself never mentions the planet.
The Babylonians did keep careful Venus records. The Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa, which is tablet 63 of the omen series Enuma Anu Enlil, lists the first and last appearances of Venus over 21 years during the reign of Ammisaduqa, the fourth king after Hammurabi. The best-known copy, British Museum K.160, is a seventh-century BCE tablet from Nineveh, first published in 1870 by Henry Rawlinson and George Smith. For how texts like these were made and read, see the Sumerian tablets explained.
Who was Enheduanna, and what did she write about Inanna?
Enheduanna was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad and high priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur around 2300 BCE, and she is often described as the earliest author in history known by name. Her name appears inside her poems, though some scholars still debate how much of the surviving text is hers.
Three of her major hymns are addressed to Inanna, including the Nin-me-šara, known in English as "The Exaltation of Inanna". In it Inanna is the lady of all the divine powers (the me), and Enheduanna asks her for help after being driven from her office. The hymns were copied in scribal schools for centuries, which is why they survive.
What happens in the Descent of Inanna to the Underworld?
In the Sumerian Descent, Inanna leaves heaven and earth for the underworld, is stripped of her powers at seven gates, is killed by the judges of the dead and is revived through a plan of the god Enki, but must leave someone in her place. The poem opens, in the Oxford Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) translation: "From the great heaven she set her mind on the great below." The surviving copies, mostly from Nippur, date to around 1700 BCE; Samuel Noah Kramer's work in the 1940s finally pieced the poem together.
The seven gates. Inanna takes up the seven me, divine powers worn as regalia: headdress, beads, breastplate, a gold ring, a lapis-lazuli measuring rod and line, and her royal robe. She tells the gatekeeper Neti that she has come for the funeral of Gugalana, husband of her elder sister Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld. On Ereshkigal's orders, one item is taken at each of the seven gates, so she arrives naked and powerless.
Death on a hook. The Anuna, the seven judges, fix on her "the look of death", and "the corpse was hung on a hook." After three days and three nights her minister Ninshubur goes for help. Enlil and Nanna refuse; Enki agrees. From the dirt under his fingernails he makes two small beings, the kurgarra and the galatur (kur-jara and gala-tura in the ETCSL spelling), and gives them the life-giving plant and the life-giving water. They win Ereshkigal over by echoing her groans of pain, ask for the corpse and bring Inanna back to life. For Enki's character, see Enki and Enlil, the two brothers of Sumerian myth.
The substitute. No one leaves the underworld for free: galla demons follow Inanna to claim a replacement. She refuses to give up Ninshubur or her sons, who are in mourning. Then she finds her husband Dumuzi at Kulaba "clothed in a magnificent garment and seated magnificently on a throne", not grieving at all. She turns on him the same look of death and says, "Take him away."
The half-year. Dumuzi tries to escape, but in the end his sister Geshtinanna shares his fate. The closing lines say: "You for half the year and your sister for half the year." This is usually read as a seasonal myth, with Dumuzi, a shepherd tied to fertility, absent in the dry season and returning with the growing season. For a longer retelling, the 4biddenknowledge archive has Inanna's descent into the underworld: a Sumerian tale of injustice.
The Akkadian version. The Descent of Ishtar is a much shorter retelling, about 138 lines, known from first-millennium BCE tablets from Nineveh and Ashur. The gates remain, but the tone is harsher. At the gate Ishtar threatens to smash the door and "make the dead rise" to devour the living. Inside, Ereshkigal's minister Namtar strikes her with sixty diseases. The rescuer is Asushunamir, a figure created by Ea (the Akkadian Enki), and the Dumuzi story, here as Tammuz, shrinks to a brief closing passage about mourning rites.
Where does Ishtar appear in the Epic of Gilgamesh?
Ishtar appears in tablet VI of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. She proposes to Gilgamesh; he refuses and lists the lovers she has ruined, starting with Dumuzi. Furious, she asks her father Anu for the Bull of Heaven, threatening once again to break open the underworld and raise the dead to eat the living. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the bull, and Enkidu throws its thigh at her, an insult that leads in the next tablet to the gods condemning Enkidu to death. The full story is in the Epic of Gilgamesh explained.
The Ishtar Gate of Babylon, built under Nebuchadnezzar II around 575 BCE, was faced with blue glazed bricks showing lions, the animal of Ishtar, alongside aurochs and the dragon of Marduk. A reconstruction of the gate stands in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.
Is the Burney Relief Inanna?
Nobody knows for certain whether the Burney Relief shows Inanna; it has been identified as Lilith, as Inanna/Ishtar and as Ereshkigal. The fired-clay plaque, 49.5 by 37 centimetres, dates to the Isin-Larsa or early Old Babylonian period, about 1800–1750 BCE. It shows a naked winged woman with bird's talons, a horned crown and a rod-and-ring symbol in each hand, standing on two lions between two owls. The British Museum bought it in 2003 for £1.5 million, for its 250th anniversary, and calls it the "Queen of the Night". Its findspot is unknown.
In 1936 the archaeologist Henri Frankfort proposed Lilith, a reading now widely doubted. Thorkild Jacobsen argued for Inanna/Ishtar, pointing to the lions and the crown of a major goddess. The British Museum's curatorial notes point to the downward-pointing wings as a sign of the underworld, which is why Ereshkigal, Inanna's sister in the Descent, is the museum's preferred candidate.
Does Easter come from Ishtar?
Easter does not come from Ishtar according to the standard etymology, even though the two words look alike. The earliest explanation of the English name is from the monk Bede, who in De temporum ratione (The Reckoning of Time, written in 725 CE) says that the Anglo-Saxon month Eosturmonath, roughly April, was named after a goddess called Eostre, whose feasts were held then. Linguists trace "Easter" to a Germanic root meaning "dawn", from an older root meaning "to shine". Most other languages call the feast by forms of Pascha, from the Hebrew Pesach (Passover).
Bede is the only early source for Eostre, and some historians doubt she existed, but nothing links the English word to Mesopotamia. The popular link to Ishtar goes back to Alexander Hislop's nineteenth-century tract The Two Babylons, which claimed that Easter was Astarte and that the name was "Ishtar" on Assyrian monuments. The resemblance is a coincidence of sound across unrelated languages. Whether spring festivals echo older seasonal myths such as Dumuzi's return is a separate question that comparative religion still discusses.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson approaches Inanna as part of his wider reading of the Anunnaki. In that reading, the gods of the Sumerian texts were real beings who came to Earth and were later remembered, and worshipped, as deities, and Inanna belongs to that family. He lays out the general argument, that these beings allowed humans to treat them as gods, in did the Anunnaki masquerade as gods on Earth?. Mainstream Assyriology reads the same texts as religious literature about divine figures, not as history.
On Ishtar specifically, Carson put a question to his audience in a live stream titled "Could Easter be the Celebration of the Fertility God Ishtar?" It is presented here as a question he raises, not a settled claim. Beside it, Bede's account of Eostre and the Germanic "dawn" root give the conventional answer on the word itself, while the theme of a deity who dies and returns with the seasons is one the Sumerian Descent really does contain.
Watch, read and go deeper
The 4BK TV series Anunnaki: Ancient Secrets Revealed covers the Sumerian gods and Carson's case that they were real beings. For related articles on Sumer and the pantheon, start at the Anunnaki topic hub. The ETCSL translation of the Descent is free to read online, and the Wolkstein and Kramer edition below is the classic popular version.
Frequently asked questions
Are Inanna and Ishtar the same goddess?
Yes. Inanna is her Sumerian name and Ishtar her Akkadian name, and by the second millennium BCE the two were treated as one goddess of love, sexuality, war and kingship. Uruk remained her principal city under both names.
Why did Inanna go to the underworld?
The poem gives her stated reason as the funeral of Gugalana, husband of her sister Ereshkigal. Samuel Noah Kramer, who reconstructed the text, argued that her real motive was to extend her power into the one realm she did not rule.
Who replaced Inanna in the underworld?
Her husband Dumuzi was taken in her place after she found him on his throne instead of mourning her. In the end he spends half the year below and his sister Geshtinanna spends the other half, an arrangement often read as a myth of the seasons.
What does the eight-pointed star of Inanna mean?
It is the symbol of her astral form as the planet Venus. On Babylonian boundary stones it often appears with the crescent of the moon god Sin and the sun disc of Shamash, forming a heavenly trio.
Is the Burney Relief a picture of Inanna?
Possibly, but it is contested. Scholars have identified the winged figure as Lilith, as Inanna/Ishtar and as Ereshkigal, and the British Museum, which calls it the "Queen of the Night", leans toward an underworld goddess because of the downward-pointing wings.
Sources and further reading
- "Inana's descent to the nether world", Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), University of Oxford
- Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer (1983)
- Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (Oxford World's Classics)
- Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin Classics, 1999)
- "Inana/Ištar (goddess)", Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, Oracc, University of Pennsylvania
- Erica Reiner and David Pingree, Enūma Anu Enlil Tablet 63: The Venus Tablet of Ammiṣaduqa (1975)
- Dominique Collon, The Queen of the Night (British Museum Objects in Focus, 2005)
- Bede, The Reckoning of Time, translated by Faith Wallis (Liverpool University Press, 1999)
