The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— Inanna and Ishtar in the Babylonian world —
and she causes disease. On the 28th, the day of the byre, you dedicate to Ishtar
a vulva of lapis lazuli with a little gold star. You pronounce the name of the sick
person.
(Farber 1977: 140–141 AII a 3–10)
Among the incantations to be recited are those addressed to Ishtar to plead on
behalf of the sufferer to Dumuzi, and among the rituals to be performed is the
symbolic offering of a stylised vulva, which illustrates the connection between sexuality
and Ishtar, and a star which highlights the astral aspect of Ishtar.
THE GODDESS
We have traced the development of the conception of Sumerian Inanna and her
Akkadian counterpart Ishtar from their first appearance in the cuneiform records and
have examined the diverse elements of the personality of the goddess. We have seen
that her most archaic and basic aspect of astral dimorphism is the source of the ambiguities
and contradictions in her character including her apparent androgyny. In like
manner, she held dominion over all polarity of behaviours from capricious to caring,
and represented both order and disorder, structure and antistructure. Her bi-polarity
was founded on a natural phenomenon: the planet Venus appears twice in its course,
once in the east, once in the west, as morning and as evening star. Her very mutability
may have intrigued the ancient Mesopotamians and led to the conception of
Inanna/Ishtar as the one and only divine entity able to embody such opposing aspects.
NOTES
1 The etymology of both Inanna’s and Ishtar’s names is uncertain. The name Inanna was explained
by ancient as well as modern scholars as deriving from nin-an-na ‘lady of Heaven’ [(n)in ‘lady’
+ an ‘heaven’ + a(k) genitive] (Hallo 1995:768) while Ishtar (originally ‘Ashtar, a form with
no gender marking) has been derived from the root ’t.r, ‘to be rich’ (Krebernik 1983: 31, no.
805). Note the litany of her names in the Ishtar (Queen of Nippur) hymn beginning with
Ninanna ‘Queen of Heaven’ (Lambert 1982: 198f., iii 52ff. and see comment to line 211). For
a discussion on the original form of her name in Sumerian as Innin, see Beaulieu 2003: 116,
122f. Note, however, the suggestion by Selz (2000: 29, 33f.), basing himself on the third
millennium material that In(n)in(a) is of Semitic origin, most probably a deity of war.
2 For this and other Sumerian litarary compositions, see Black, J. A., Cunningham, G., Ebeling,
J., Flückiger-Hawker, E., Robson, E., Taylor, J. and Zólyomi, G. The Electronic Text Corpus of
Sumerian Literature (http:/etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk, Oxford 1998–2006 (abbreviated ETCSL).
3 Even in her male role, she never becomes fully male, but seems to be a female with male
gender characteristics. For a possible visual image of a bearded Inanna/Ishtar in the third
millennium and the written descriptions of a bearded Ishtar in first millennium astrological
sources, see Reiner 1995: 5, fig. 2 and 6 with notes 14–16. See further Beaulieu 2003: 136f.
and note his references to possible two-faced male-female images.
4 It should be also noted that the mountains at the end of the earth and the netherworld were
a continuum in Mesopotamian thought. The realms of the dead were probably at the foothills
of the mountain lands rather than under the ground.
5 Verb e 11 describes vertical movement.
6 Another conundrum comes from the cuneiform writing system. The fact is that the names of
the Akkadian goddess, Ashtar, is written syllabically consistently asˇ-dar in personal names and
just as consistently as a logogram INANNA in all other contexts. Only from the second
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