Inanna | The Sumerian Goddess Who Went Down to the Dead and Came Back

“From the great heaven she set her mind on the great below.”

The poem begins with a goddess looking down. She is Inanna, the Lady of Heaven, the brightest star of the Sumerian sky, goddess of love and war, patron of Uruk, the greatest city in the world. She has everything the gods can give. And she turns her eyes to the one place she does not rule, the land of the dead, where her elder sister sits on the throne.

She goes down. She passes through seven gates, and at each one something is taken from her, until she stands naked before her sister. She is killed and her body is hung on a hook. Three days later she is brought back to life, and when she climbs back into the light she brings the dead with her, looking for someone to take her place.

The Descent of Inanna was written in Sumerian, on clay tablets copied around 1750 BCE, and it has been called the oldest story of a deity who dies and returns. It has been read as a myth of the seasons, a map of the soul and the hidden source of later stories of resurrection, from Persephone to the rites of the mystery schools. The tablets survive, and so does the goddess they describe.

Who Was Inanna?

Inanna was the most important goddess of ancient Mesopotamia, worshipped for more than three thousand years in what is now Iraq. She was the goddess of love, sexual desire and war, and of the political power that went with them, and she was identified with the planet Venus, the morning and evening star. Her chief temple was the Eanna, the “House of Heaven,” at Uruk. The Akkadians and later the Babylonians and Assyrians knew her as Ishtar. Her best-known myth is the Descent of Inanna, in which she travels to the underworld ruled by her sister Ereshkigal, dies and is brought back to life.

The Lady of Heaven

Her name is usually explained as nin-an-ak, “Lady of Heaven,” though the way it is written in cuneiform does not settle the question. She was there at the very beginning of writing. In the archaic tablets of Uruk, from the late fourth millennium BCE, her name is marked by her symbol, a bundle of reeds knotted into a loop at the top, the gatepost of a reed house or storehouse. In those same tablets she is worshipped in three forms, as the morning Inanna, the evening Inanna and the princely Inanna, which ties her to Venus from the first records.

The Warka Vase, a tall alabaster vessel carved around 3000 BCE and found at Uruk, shows a procession of naked men carrying baskets of produce to a female figure standing before two of those reed bundles, either the goddess or her priestess. It is one of the oldest narrative carvings in the world. It was looted from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad in April 2003 and returned, broken, a few months later.

Inanna was not a mother goddess, and not a goddess of marriage. She was young, restless, ambitious and dangerous, the force of desire and of battle, and battle itself was called the playground of Inanna. Her animal was the lion, and by the second millennium BCE her emblem was the eight-pointed star of Venus. When the Akkadian kings united Mesopotamia in the twenty-fourth century BCE, she merged with the Semitic goddess Ishtar, and under that name her worship spread from Babylon to Nineveh and Syria. The great blue-glazed gate that Nebuchadnezzar II built into the walls of Babylon around 575 BCE, now reconstructed in Berlin, is the Ishtar Gate. Her worship faded only in the first centuries CE.

Enheduanna’s Goddess

The first poet in history whose name survives wrote for Inanna. Enheduanna was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, the king who founded the first empire in Mesopotamia, and around 2300 BCE he made her high priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur. An alabaster disk found by Leonard Woolley at Ur in 1927, now in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, shows her at an offering, with her name and title on the back.

Hymns credited to her survive in later copies, among them The Exaltation of Inanna, which praises the goddess as the lady of all the divine powers and describes her terrifying in battle, raining fire on the land. Its speaker has been driven out of her temple by a rebel and calls on Inanna to restore her. Scholars still argue whether Enheduanna composed these works herself, since the surviving copies were written centuries after her lifetime. Either way, the Inanna of these hymns is already the goddess of the later myths, magnificent, merciless and impossible to contain.

The Stories of Inanna

The Sumerians told many stories about her, and almost all of them are about power. In Inanna and Enki, she visits the god of wisdom in his city of Eridu, and when he has drunk too much beer he gives her the me, the divine powers that make civilisation, more than a hundred of them, from kingship and the scribal art to music, lovemaking and the descent to the underworld. When he sobers up he sends monsters to stop her, but she escapes to Uruk in the Boat of Heaven with her servant Ninshubur, and the city keeps the powers.

In other stories she destroys a mountain, Ebih, for refusing to bow to her, hunts down a gardener who assaulted her in her sleep, and asks the hero Gilgamesh to rid her sacred tree of the creatures nesting in it. In the courtship poems she chooses the shepherd Dumuzi over a farmer for her husband. And in the later Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh, as Ishtar, she offers herself to the hero, who rejects her and recites the fates of her past lovers. In revenge she sends the Bull of Heaven against Uruk, and its death sets in motion the death of Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu.

The Descent of Inanna

The Descent survives on tablets found at Nippur, the religious capital of Sumer, and copied in the Old Babylonian period, around 1900 to 1600 BCE. The American Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer spent decades piecing it together from fragments scattered between museums in Philadelphia and Istanbul, and published it in full in the early 1950s. The complete text runs to about four hundred lines.

Inanna gives a reason for her journey. Gugalanna, the husband of her elder sister Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld, has died, and she says she is going to his funeral rites. Before she leaves, she dresses in her powers. She puts on her turban, her wig, her lapis lazuli necklace and twin egg-shaped beads, her robe, her eye paint, a pectoral called “Come, man, come,” a golden ring, and takes up a lapis lazuli measuring rod and line. She gives instructions to her servant Ninshubur. If she does not return, Ninshubur is to raise a lament for her, and go to the gods Enlil, Nanna and Enki and ask them to save her.

At the gate of the underworld she is stopped by the gatekeeper Neti, who reports to Ereshkigal. Ereshkigal orders the seven gates bolted and opened one at a time, and at each gate something is taken from her.

Death on the Hook

At the bottom, naked and bowed low, Inanna makes her sister rise from the throne and sits on it herself. Then the Anunna, the seven judges of the underworld, pronounce judgement against her. Ereshkigal fixes on her the look of death, speaks the word of anger and the cry of guilt, and Inanna becomes a corpse. The corpse is hung on a hook.

After three days and three nights, Ninshubur does as she was told. She laments, beats the drum, and goes from god to god. Enlil refuses to help. Inanna, he says, wanted the great below, and whoever goes there does not come back. Nanna, the moon god, refuses too. Only Enki, the god of wisdom, is troubled. He takes dirt from under his fingernail and makes two small beings, the kurgarra and the galatura. He gives one the plant of life and the other the water of life, and tells them how to slip into the underworld like flies.

They find Ereshkigal lying in pain, uncovered and unkempt, groaning like a mother in labour. Whenever she cries out, they cry out with her, sharing her suffering. Moved, she offers them a gift, the river at its full or the fields of grain. They ask only for the corpse on the hook. They sprinkle it with the plant and the water of life, and Inanna rises.

The two figures have attracted much interpretation. The text says nothing about their sex. Their names, though, echo the kurgarra and the gala, members of Inanna’s cult, performers and lamentation priests who in Mesopotamian sources were associated with crossing the boundaries of gender.

Dumuzi Under the Apple Tree

No one leaves the underworld without a substitute. Inanna climbs back with demons at her side, small creatures who “eat no food, drink no water,” and who will seize whoever she gives them. They try to take Ninshubur, who greets her in mourning clothes, and Inanna refuses. They try to take her sons Shara and Lulal, both in mourning, and she refuses again.

At Kulaba, beside Uruk, she finds her husband Dumuzi under the great apple tree, dressed in a magnificent garment and seated on a throne. He is not mourning. Inanna looks at him, and it is the look of death. The demons seize him. He prays to Inanna’s brother, the sun god Utu, who changes his hands and feet so that he can escape, but in the end he is taken. The poem’s final lines set out a bargain. Dumuzi will spend half the year in the underworld, and his sister will take his place for the other half. In a related poem she is named as Geshtinanna, a goddess of the vine.

For a long time scholars read the story as a myth of the seasons, with Dumuzi as the green growth that dies in the scorching summer, and the Mesopotamian calendar did have a month of Dumuzi, Tammuz, in high summer, when he was mourned. Others have seen in Inanna’s three days among the dead the planet Venus vanishing from the sky as it passes the Sun and reappearing on the other side. Others still read the poem as a story about the limits of power, in which even the Queen of Heaven must obey the laws of a world she does not rule.

Ishtar at the Gate

A shorter version of the story, The Descent of Ishtar, was written in Akkadian and found in the 1860s on tablets from the libraries of Nineveh and Assur, copied in the first millennium BCE. Its Ishtar is fiercer. At the gate of the underworld she threatens to smash the door and bring up the dead to devour the living until the dead outnumber them. In this version the god Ea, the Akkadian Enki, sends a single envoy, Asushunamir, a figure of the gender-crossing assinnu, to win her release, and Tammuz, her young husband, is washed, anointed and dressed in red for his time below, mourned by his sister.

The mourning for Tammuz lasted a very long time. The Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, in the sixth century BCE, describes seeing women at the north gate of the Temple in Jerusalem, “weeping for Tammuz.”

The Queen of the Night

One image is often taken for her. The Burney Relief, a fired clay plaque about half a metre high, made around 1800 to 1750 BCE and now in the British Museum, shows a naked winged woman with the talons of a bird, standing on two lions between two owls, holding a rod and ring in each hand. It was first identified as Ishtar. Others have argued for Lilitu, a night demon, or for Ereshkigal herself, the identification the British Museum now prefers. A few scholars have even doubted that it is ancient, though the museum regards it as authentic. Its identity is still open, and its nickname, the Queen of the Night, is a modern one.

Persephone, Osiris and the Dying God

The Descent is about a thousand years older than the Greek Homeric Hymn to Demeter, composed around the seventh century BCE, which tells how Persephone was carried down to Hades and returned for part of every year. The parallels are striking, a goddess in the underworld, a bargain that divides the year, the return of life to the earth. Whether the Greek story descends from the Mesopotamian one, through Syria and Phoenicia where Ishtar became Astarte, or whether the two arose separately, has been argued for a century without proof either way.

The wider idea, of a “dying and rising god” behind all these myths, comes from James Frazer’s The Golden Bough at the turn of the twentieth century, where Tammuz was one of the founding examples. In 1987 the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith argued that the category was a modern invention that fitted the evidence badly, and for a generation it fell out of favour. In 2001 the Swedish scholar Tryggve Mettinger answered him in The Riddle of Resurrection, arguing that a few Near Eastern gods, Dumuzi among them, do die and return. On one point the tablets are clear. Inanna herself dies and is brought back to life. The Egyptian god Osiris, killed and restored to a new life as ruler of the dead, is the nearest parallel, discussed in our file on the strange gods of ancient Egypt.

The modern readings came later. In 1949 Joseph Campbell used the Descent as a model of the hero’s ordeal, the stripping away of everything the ego relies on. The Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton Perera’s Descent to the Goddess in 1981 read it as a path of initiation for women, and the storyteller Diane Wolkstein’s version with Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, in 1983, made the poem widely known. Modern occult writers have connected the seven gates with the descending spheres of the Kabbalah and the shadow tree of the Qliphoth. Those connections belong to the twentieth century. Nothing in the record traces a line from the Sumerian poem to the Kabbalah.

Inanna Among the Anunnaki

In the Descent, the Anunna, often written Anunnaki, are the judges of the underworld who condemn Inanna. In the books of Zecharia Sitchin from 1976 on, the Anunnaki became astronauts from a hidden planet, and Inanna a pilot among them, a reading examined in our file on the Sumerian tablets and the Anunnaki creation myth. The Sumerian texts know her as something older and stranger, a star that rose at dawn and dusk, a goddess of desire and war who went down to the dead and came back with the dead behind her.

The tablets that tell her story are in Philadelphia, Istanbul and New Haven. The chants for Tammuz were still being sung when Ezekiel heard them in Jerusalem. And Venus still disappears into the glare of the Sun and comes back, as morning star and as evening star, as it did over Uruk.

Quick Answers About Inanna

Who is Inanna? The chief goddess of ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia, the Lady of Heaven, goddess of love, sexuality, war and political power, identified with the planet Venus and worshipped at Uruk.

What was Inanna the goddess of? Love and sexual desire, war, justice and the power of kings. She was not a mother goddess or a goddess of marriage.

Is Inanna the same as Ishtar? They began as separate goddesses, one Sumerian and one Semitic, and were merged in the Akkadian period, from about 2300 BCE. Later Mesopotamians used the names for the same goddess.

What happens in the Descent of Inanna? Inanna goes down to the underworld of her sister Ereshkigal, gives up her regalia at seven gates, is killed and hung on a hook, and is revived by two beings made by the god Enki. She must send a substitute in her place and chooses her husband Dumuzi, who then shares his time below with his sister.

Who is Ereshkigal? The queen of the underworld and Inanna’s elder sister. Her husband Gugalanna, whose name has been read as the great bull of heaven, has died when the Descent begins.

Who was Geshtinanna? The sister of Dumuzi, a goddess linked with the vine, who takes his place in the underworld for half of every year.

The Verdict | Disputed

The Descent of Inanna exists, it is old and it says what it is often said to say. Inanna does go down through seven gates, die and return, in a Sumerian poem copied around 1750 BCE and composed earlier. Several details in the popular retelling do not come from the text, among them the “sixty times” sprinkling and the claim that Enki’s two envoys were explicitly neither male nor female. The larger claim, that this poem is the source of the Persephone myth, the resurrection stories of later religions and the initiatory traditions of the West, rests on striking parallels but no traced line of transmission, and scholars still argue over the dying-god pattern itself. As the original of the resurrection story, the Descent of Inanna is disputed.

The Sumerian background of these stories, from kings who reigned for tens of thousands of years to the theft of the Tablet of Destinies, runs through our file on the Sumerian King List.

The wider story of Sumer, its gods and the tablets behind them is gathered in our Sumer and Mesopotamia case files. 

For how this verdict sits beside the rest of the archive, see the Verdict Index.