Inanna

The Descent of Inanna is the best preserved long myth in Sumerian and one of the oldest narratives of any kind. Inanna, mistress of heaven, decides to go down to the great below, where her sister Ereshkigal rules the dead. She instructs her servant Ninshubur to raise the alarm if she does not return in three days. She arrives at the outer gate dressed in the full regalia of her office.

There are seven gates. At each one the gatekeeper removes a piece of what she is wearing, on Ereshkigal's order, and at each removal Inanna asks what this is and is told: the ways of the underworld are perfect, they may not be questioned. Crown, rod and line, necklace, breast stones, gold ring, breastplate, garment. She arrives naked and bowed low. The seven judges fix her with the eye of death; she is turned into a corpse and hung on a hook.

Ninshubur does as instructed. Enlil and Nanna both refuse to help, on the grounds that whoever demands the great below gets it. Enki does not refuse. He scrapes dirt from under his fingernails and makes two creatures who are neither male nor female and so can pass the gates unchallenged, and sends them down with the food and water of life. They find Ereshkigal groaning as though in labour, and instead of asking for anything they echo her cries back to her, sympathising, until in gratitude she offers them a gift and they ask for the corpse.

Inanna rises, but the underworld releases no one without a substitute. Demons follow her up to collect one. She spares Ninshubur and her sons, who are all in mourning for her, and finds her husband Dumuzi seated on his throne in clean clothes, not mourning at all. She fixes him with the eye of death. He flees, is caught, and in the end his sister Geshtinanna takes half his term, so that he is below for half the year and she for the other half.

Most modern pairings of gods with planets were assigned by later writers. Inanna and Venus is different: the identification is made in the Mesopotamian sources themselves, in their own language, from an early period, and it is one of the very few god-to-planet links in this whole subject that can be shown to be ancient rather than modern.

Venus behaves unlike the other planets visible to the naked eye. It appears as a brilliant morning star for a stretch of months, disappears, and returns as an evening star, and the alternation is regular and easy to notice without instruments. Mesopotamian observers matched it to Inanna, and the doubleness was read as an aspect of her rather than as a puzzle: the goddess who is mistress of love in the evening and of battle in the morning. Hymns address her as the star, and one of the oldest surviving astronomical documents, the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa, records twenty-one years of the planet's risings and settings as omens, compiled under a king of the First Dynasty of Babylon in the seventeenth century BC.

The line from there to later astrology is real and traceable. Akkadian-speaking Babylonians called her Ishtar and kept the planetary association; Levantine peoples had Astarte, also linked to the evening star; the Greeks identified Astarte with Aphrodite, as Herodotus already does in the fifth century BC; and the Romans rendered Aphrodite as Venus, which is the name the planet still bears. The English word for the planet descends by a chain of translations from a Sumerian goddess.

That chain is worth stating precisely, because it is the exception that shows what the rule usually looks like. Each step of it is documented. Most claimed correspondences between pantheons have no such chain behind them and are simply matches made by modern writers on grounds of resemblance.

Ishtar's most famous myth is her descent through the seven gates of the underworld to challenge her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the dead. At each gate a gatekeeper strips her of one article of clothing or power, so that she arrives naked and defenceless before her sister, who kills her and hangs her corpse on a hook. Only the intervention of the god Ea, who fashions creatures to revive her, allows Ishtar to return, and even then only on condition that someone take her place below; her lover Dumuzi is seized to fill it, though later tradition allows his sister Geshtinanna to share his sentence, spending half the year below in his place. The myth's descent-and-return pattern has long been read as tied to the agricultural cycle Dumuzi also represents.

Ishtar's mixture of desire and violence appears just as sharply in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where she proposes marriage to the hero and, spurned with a catalogue of the ruin she brought on her earlier lovers, persuades her father Anu to loose the Bull of Heaven on Uruk in revenge, an act whose consequences cost Gilgamesh's companion Enkidu his life. Centuries later, Nebuchadnezzar II's Ishtar Gate at Babylon, its blue glazed brickwork patterned with rows of dragons and aurochs, stood as the ceremonial entrance to the processional way used at her festival and is now reconstructed in Berlin's Pergamon Museum. Her cult travelled west as well, into the Phoenician Astarte and, through Cyprus, into the Greek Aphrodite, so that a single line of descent runs from Uruk's temple of Inanna to the goddess later worshipped across the classical Mediterranean.