Inanna: The Sumerian Queen of Heaven Who Walked Through Seven Gates

The earliest author in history known by name was a priestess of the moon god at Ur, around 2300 BCE. She served the moon, and she wrote her greatest hymns to his daughter.

That daughter was Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, the morning and evening star, the goddess of desire and of war. She also owns the oldest surviving story of a journey to the land of the dead: a goddess who sets her mind on the great below, walks through seven gates, and gives up one piece of her power at each. Later descents, from Persephone‘s abduction to Orpheus’s failed rescue, are stories of someone taken or someone fetched. Inanna’s is the one where a woman decides to go.

Overview of Inanna

Inanna was the great goddess of Uruk, often called the world’s first city, and her worship is as old as writing itself. The earliest clay tablets from her temple precinct there, the Eanna, date to around 3100 BCE, and they already carry her sign: a bundle of reeds bent into a loop at the top, with a streamer hanging from it. Her cult spread across Sumer, and as Ishtar she stayed among Mesopotamia’s greatest deities for another two and a half thousand years.

The best-known object from her city is the Warka Vase, an alabaster vessel about a meter tall carved around 3200 to 3000 BCE. Its bands show water, grain, flocks, and a line of naked men carrying offerings up to a woman standing before two of Inanna’s reed bundles. Whether that woman is the goddess or her priestess, the vase shows a whole society’s harvest arriving at her door.

Mesopotamian scribes gave her more than one father. Most often she is the daughter of the moon god Nanna and his wife Ningal, and the twin sister of the sun god Utu. Some traditions from Uruk make her a daughter of the sky god An, and in one famous myth the water god Enki calls her “my daughter” as he drinks with her. Her elder sister is Ereshkigal, queen of the dead.

Her domains look contradictory on paper. She governs sexual desire and the fury of battle, the planet Venus and the power of kings, and motherhood sits at the margins of her myths. Her closest companion is Ninshubur, her sukkal, the divine minister who carries her messages and defends her interests. The priestess from the opening of this post, Enheduanna, a daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, summed her up in the first line of her great hymn: “Lady of all the divine powers.” Some scholars question how much of the poetry under Enheduanna’s name she composed herself, while her existence as a historical priestess is secure.

Titles

• Queen of Heaven, the traditional reading of her name, from nin-an-ak, “Lady of Heaven”
• Lady of all the me (Nin-me-šara), the divine powers, in Enheduanna’s hymn
• Ninsianna, her name as the planet Venus
• Lady of the Eanna, her temple precinct at Uruk
• Lady of battle, in hymns that picture her dancing in combat
• Ishtar, her Akkadian name, under which she was worshiped into the first millennium BCE

Characteristics

How the texts and the temples describe her:

• Restless and ambitious, always reaching for more power
• Fierce in battle and terrifying in anger
• Frank about desire, the voice of some of the most explicit love poetry to survive from the ancient world
• Loyal to those who stay loyal to her, and ruthless to those who do not
• A crosser of boundaries, including the boundary between male and female

Symbols

• The reed bundle — a looped gatepost with a streamer, her sign in the earliest writing
• The eight-pointed star — the planet Venus, carved on later boundary stones and seals
• The lion — her mount and her emblem as a war goddess
• The rosette — a flower motif found throughout her temples
• The lapis measuring rod and line — one of the seven powers she carried into the underworld

Legends associated with Inanna

Inanna’s myths survive in Sumerian poems copied by student scribes in the Old Babylonian period, around 1800 BCE, and later reworked in Akkadian. The stories below draw on those texts, most of them available in English through Oxford’s Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.

The huluppu tree

The earliest story in her cycle opens a Sumerian poem about Gilgamesh. A tree grows on the bank of the Euphrates, and Inanna carries it to her garden in Uruk, hoping to make a chair and a bed from its wood. Three squatters move in: a snake “immune to incantations” at the roots, the lion-headed Anzud bird in the branches, and in the trunk a creature the Sumerian calls ki-sikil-lil-la, “the phantom maid who laughs with a joyful heart.” Inanna weeps, her brother Utu refuses to help, and the hero Gilgamesh kills the snake, drives off the others, and gives her the wood for her chair and bed. From the leftovers he makes a ball and mallet for himself, which fall into the underworld and set off the rest of his poem.

The phantom maid has a famous second life. In 1938 the Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer read her as the earliest Lilith, and many popular retellings follow him. Other translators render her more cautiously as a young female wind spirit, and the Lilith identification remains one reading among several.

Inanna and Enki: the gift of the me

In the Sumerian worldview the me were the divine decrees that made civilization work: kingship, the scribal art, woodworking, lamentation, lovemaking, truth, deceit, and dozens more. Enki kept them in his temple in the city of Eridu. Inanna sails there, and Enki welcomes her with beer. Drinking toast after toast, he hands her the me one by one, “to holy Inana, my daughter.”

She loads them onto her Boat of Heaven and leaves. When Enki sobers up and finds them gone, he sends his minister Isimud and a series of monsters after the boat six times, and six times Ninshubur drives them off. Inanna arrives in Uruk to celebration, and Enki, his text damaged at the end, appears to accept the outcome.

The shepherd and the farmer

Two suitors court her in a debate poem, the shepherd Dumuzi and the farmer Enkimdu. Utu urges the shepherd on her, and Inanna refuses at first, declaring she will marry the man who grows flax and grain. The poem ends with the two men as friends. Inanna marries Dumuzi.

A large body of love songs follows the couple through courtship and marriage, and a hymn to King Iddin-Dagan of Isin describes a New Year rite in which the king “goes to the thighs of Inana” on a prepared bed. This is the Sacred Marriage, the union of the goddess with the ruler that was believed to secure the land’s prosperity.

The descent through the seven gates

“From the great heaven she set her mind on the great below.” That single line is the whole of her motive in the poem. Before she leaves, Inanna dresses in seven me: a turban, lapis beads at her throat, a pair of egg-shaped beads on her breast, a pectoral called “Come, man, come,” a golden ring, a lapis measuring rod and line, and her pala robe. She tells Ninshubur what to do if she has not returned in three days.

At the outer gate she tells the gatekeeper Neti she has come for the funeral of Gugalanna, the husband of her sister Ereshkigal. Ereshkigal orders the seven gates bolted and opened one at a time, and at each gate something is taken: the turban, the small beads, the egg-shaped beads, the pectoral, the ring, the rod and line, and finally the robe. Each time Inanna asks why, and each time the answer is the same: the ways of the underworld are perfect, and she must not question them. She arrives before her sister naked. The judges of the dead fix on her “the look of death,” and her corpse is hung on a hook.

Three days pass. Ninshubur beats the drum in mourning and goes to Enlil, who refuses to help, then to Nanna, Inanna’s father, who also refuses. Enki agrees. From the dirt under his fingernail he makes two small beings, the kurgarra and the galatur, and gives one the plant of life and the other the water of life. They slip into the underworld and find Ereshkigal groaning like a woman in labor. They echo her cries back to her, and she is so moved by their sympathy that she offers them gifts. They ask for the corpse on the hook. They sprinkle it with food and water, “and thus Inana arose.”

Dumuzi, Geshtinanna, and the half year

Anyone who leaves the underworld owes it a substitute, and a band of demons follows Inanna up to collect one. They reach for Ninshubur, and Inanna refuses: this woman mourned for her. They reach for her son Shara, and then for Lulal, and she refuses again, because both were in mourning clothes. At Kulaba they find Dumuzi seated on a throne in splendid robes. Inanna looks at him with the same look of death, and says, “Take him away.”

A companion poem, Dumuzi’s Dream, follows him as he flees and is hidden by his sister, Geshtinanna, who refuses to give him up under torture. At the end of the Descent the arrangement is fixed: “You for half the year and your sister for half the year.” Dumuzi and Geshtinanna take turns below. The seasonal reading, with Dumuzi’s months below as winter, came later, from modern readers comparing the story to Persephone’s.

Ishtar at the gate: the Akkadian retelling

A much shorter Akkadian version, the Descent of Ishtar, survives on tablets from Assyria. The frame is the same, and the tone is harder. Ishtar arrives at the gate threatening to break it down and “raise up the dead to eat the living.” Her regalia now include a great crown, earrings, and a girdle of birthstones. While she lies below, animals and people stop mating on earth. To rescue her, the god Ea creates a beautiful being called Asushunamir, often described as a eunuch or as neither man nor woman, who charms Ereshkigal into releasing the water of life. The poem ends with mourning for Tammuz, the Akkadian Dumuzi.

In Tablet VI of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, Ishtar proposes marriage and Gilgamesh refuses, listing her ruined lovers, starting with Tammuz, for whom she “ordained weeping year after year.” In revenge she sends the Bull of Heaven against Uruk.

Is the descent the first resurrection story?

The idea that most modern readers bring to Inanna’s descent arrives through one book: James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, first published in 1890. Frazer grouped Tammuz with Adonis, Attis, and Osiris as “dying and rising gods,” vegetation spirits who died each year and returned with the crops, and he read the Mesopotamian goddess as the mourner who went down to bring the dead god back.

Frazer worked before the Sumerian poem had been pieced together. When Kramer finally assembled its ending in the early 1950s, it showed Inanna sending Dumuzi down in her place, the reverse of the rescue scholars had expected. Jonathan Z. Smith, in an influential 1987 encyclopedia article, argued that “dying and rising gods” is a modern category built by Frazer, that most of the gods in it die without rising, and that it should be retired. Tryggve Mettinger answered in The Riddle of Resurrection (2001), arguing that a real, limited pattern of death and return does exist in the ancient Near East before Christianity, and that Dumuzi’s half-year return is one of its clearest cases.

Inanna herself sits oddly in this debate, because she is the one the text describes as dying and rising: a corpse on a hook for three days, then revived with the plant and water of life. Some readers see in that the template of every later resurrection. Others read it as a myth about power and its limits, in which even the Queen of Heaven cannot cross into death without surrendering everything and cannot leave without paying.

Modern goddess spirituality has added its own reading. In The Great Cosmic Mother (1987), Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor place Inanna’s descent at the root of the whole dying-and-rising tradition: the Goddess strips away her powers to enter death and bring life back, and the dying male gods come later. They also trace Salome’s dance of the seven veils to the seven gates. Assyriologists question that last link. The Gospel accounts of Salome’s dance mention no veils, the “dance of the seven veils” first appears in Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé in 1891 and Richard Strauss’s opera of 1905, and the Sumerian goddess gives up a turban, beads, a pectoral, a ring, a measuring rod, and a robe.

The texts support several of these readings at once. They say Inanna died and rose, that Dumuzi and his sister alternate, and that the gods’ ways below are perfect. What the scribes who copied the poem took from that pattern, the tablets leave open.

Inanna, Ishtar, and the goddesses who came after

Inanna’s line runs west. The Akkadian Ishtar, the Canaanite Astarte, and the Greek Aphrodite share her star, her doves, and her tangle of love and war, and scholars generally trace a real historical thread between them. The kurgarra and other cult personnel who paraded before her in men’s clothing on the right side and women’s on the left, along with the gala who sang her laments, have close cousins in the castrated priests of Cybele. Descents to the land of the dead appear across the world, from Japan, where Izanagi goes down after Izanami, to the Norse land of the dead ruled by Hel, where a messenger rides nine nights to ask for Baldr. Egypt’s Nephthys keeps watch over the dead in a tradition nearly as old as Inanna’s.

One popular idea about her deserves retiring. Inanna is often called the patron of temple prostitutes, and the claim that her temples housed “sacred prostitution” is still widespread. It traces mostly to the Greek historian Herodotus, writing about Babylon in the fifth century BCE. Julia Assante and Stephanie Budin have taken that evidence apart: the words usually translated “prostitute” mean something closer to an unmarried woman living outside a father’s or husband’s household, and no text describes sex for pay in a temple as worship. The Sacred Marriage remains a separate question, and scholars such as Jerrold Cooper still debate whether it was a performed rite or a literary and royal image.

Final thoughts

Enheduanna knew what she was praising. Her Inanna is the Lady of all the powers, radiant and dangerous, the goddess who takes the gifts of civilization from a drunk god and sails home with them. Then the same goddess walks downhill through seven gates and hands them back one at a time, until there is nothing left to take.

The descent tells you that power can be set down, that grief can be answered by someone who echoes your cries, and that the way back up has a cost somebody pays. Inanna pays it with the man who sat on his throne in fine robes while she hung on the hook.

Samhain is the season for this story, when the doors between the living and the dead are said to stand open. Picture yourself walking down through seven gates tonight: which of your powers would you hold on to until the last gate?

Bibliography

• “Inana’s descent to the nether world.” The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), c.1.4.1. University of Oxford. The seven me, the seven gates, Gugalanna’s funeral, Ninshubur, the kurgarra and galatur, the substitute, and the half-year alternation.
• “Inana and Enki.” ETCSL c.1.3.1. The drinking scene in Eridu, Enki’s “my daughter,” and the Boat of Heaven.
• “Gilgameš, Enkidu and the nether world.” ETCSL c.1.8.1.4. The huluppu tree, its three occupants, and the chair and bed.
• “The exaltation of Inana (Inana B).” ETCSL c.4.07.2. Enheduanna’s Nin-me-šara, her self-naming, her exile, and Nanna and Ningal as Inanna’s parents.
• “Dumuzid and Enkimdu.” ETCSL c.4.08.33. The shepherd and the farmer.
• “Inana and Iddin-Dagan (Iddin-Dagan A).” ETCSL c.2.5.3.1. The New Year Sacred Marriage and the cult personnel dressed as men and women.
• “Dumuzid’s dream.” ETCSL c.1.4.3. Geshtinanna hiding her brother.
• Dalley, Stephanie. Myths from Mesopotamia. Oxford University Press, 1989. Translations of the Akkadian Descent of Ishtar and the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet VI.
• Wolkstein, Diane, and Samuel Noah Kramer. Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth. Harper & Row, 1983. The popular retelling of the cycle, read here as a literary version.
• Kramer, Samuel Noah. Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree. Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, 1938. The original identification of the ki-sikil-lil-la with Lilith.
• Helle, Sophus. Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author. Yale University Press, 2023. Enheduanna’s life, her hymns to Inanna, and the authorship debate.
• Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion. Yale University Press, 1976. Inanna’s many aspects, Dumuzi, and the Sacred Marriage.
• Black, Jeremy, and Anthony Green. Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia. British Museum Press, 1992. Her parentage, the reed bundle, the star, the lion, and the rosette.
• Cooper, Jerrold S. “Sacred Marriage and Popular Cult in Early Mesopotamia.” In Official Cult and Popular Religion in the Ancient Near East, ed. E. Matsushima. Heidelberg, 1993. The debate over whether the Sacred Marriage was enacted.
• Assante, Julia. “The kar.kid/ḫarimtu, Prostitute or Single Woman? A Reconsideration of the Evidence.” Ugarit-Forschungen 30 (1998). The rereading of the Mesopotamian vocabulary.
• Budin, Stephanie Lynn. The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity. Cambridge University Press, 2008. The case against temple prostitution across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.
• Smith, Jonathan Z. “Dying and Rising Gods.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade. Macmillan, 1987. The argument that the category is a modern construction.
• Mettinger, Tryggve N. D. The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East. Almqvist & Wiksell, 2001. The case that a pre-Christian pattern of death and return exists, with Dumuzi as a central example.
• Sjöö, Monica, and Barbara Mor. The Great Cosmic Mother. HarperOne, 1987. The descent as the Goddess’s template for death and rebirth, and the seven-veils derivation; one modern perspective among many.
• “Inanna”. Wikipedia. Survey of the attestations, the cult, and the scholarship.
• Mark, Joshua J. “Inanna”. World History Encyclopedia.