Irkalla's clearest narrative treatment comes from the myth of Inanna's Descent, in which the goddess of love and war travels to the underworld, by most readings to confront or challenge her sister Ereshkigal, and must pass through seven gates to reach her. At each gate the gatekeeper Neti, acting on Ereshkigal's instruction, strips Inanna of one item of her royal regalia and clothing, her crown, her lapis beads, her breastplate, her gold ring, her measuring rod and line, her royal robe, until she arrives before Ereshkigal entirely naked and powerless, "bowed low." Ereshkigal fixes the eye of death upon her and Inanna is struck dead and hung on a hook, a fate from which she is rescued only through Enki's intervention and, at Ereshkigal's insistence, a substitute sent down in her place, ultimately her husband Dumuzi.
The seven gate structure is read by Assyriologists as expressing a broader Mesopotamian principle: the underworld strips away worldly status and possession entirely, so that even a great goddess enters it as bare and powerless as the humblest of the human dead. The same descent structure recurs, with variation, in the later Akkadian version of the myth, the Descent of Ishtar, and echoes of it appear in Gilgamesh's own underworld journey, making Irkalla one of the most narratively developed single locations in the whole of Mesopotamian mythology despite the sparseness of its own physical description.