Venus, Descent, and a Long Afterlife

Inanna-Ishtar is among the best-attested deities of the ancient Near East, central to the Sumerian hymns of Enheduanna, the earliest named author in world literature, and to the myth of the Descent to the Underworld, in which the goddess passes through seven gates, surrendering an ornament at each until she stands naked before her sister Ereshkigal. Her Venus-star travelled: eight- and six-pointed stars in later Near Eastern and Mediterranean iconography draw, directly or at a distance, on this Mesopotamian astral vocabulary, and the same eight-pointed motif recurs on Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian seals centuries after the Kassite kudurru that first fixed the triad convention.

The symbol is best read in its own terms, a specific astral theology of the third and second millennia BCE, rather than assimilated to the later Star of David or to modern star emblems, with which it shares only geometry; the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, though it bears the goddess's name, carries a wholly different visual programme of glazed-brick bulls and dragons rather than the star sign, and the two are often wrongly conflated in popular accounts. Museums and modern jewellers now circulate the star as a generic emblem of Mesopotamian religion, a convention of display rather than a continuation of Kassite or Neo-Assyrian devotional use.