Inanna, Lady of Heaven and Earth

History of a Sumerian Goddess

Colophon

ISBN: 978 90 8954 621 0

First printing 2014

© 2014 Henriette Broekema

Original title:

Inanna, heerseres van hemel en aarde. Geschiedenis van een Sumerische godin, 2013

Edited by Uitgeverij Elikser, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands; www.elikser.nl

Copyright English translation © 2014 by Henriette Broekema;

www.henriettebroekema.nl

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Copy editor: Selese Roche

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Cover:

Goddess Inanna, provided with weapons and with one foot on the back of a lion.

Cylinder seal..Provenance unknown. (Courtesy: Oriental Institute Museum of the University of Chicago)

Cupper head, supposedly of king Sargon or Naram-Sîn, found in the Ištar-temple of Niniveh, ca. 2400 v.C. (Courtesy: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Orient-Abteilung, Berlin).

Restaurated disc of limestone of the high priestess Enheduanna of the city of Ur. Diameter: 26 cm. (Courtesy: © Penn Museum, Pennsylvania, United States)

Terracotta relief from the city of Larsa (Barrelet 1968, fig 527, Louvre AO 16681)

Terracotta relief, provenance unknown, (Barrelet 1968, fig. 744, Louvre AO 8662

The author has done her best to trace rightful claimants to illustrations in this book. In case this has met with no or incomplete success, or of an inaccurate attribution, please contact the publisher.

This book may not be reproduced by print, photoprint, microfilm or any other means, without written permission from the author and the publisher.

Inanna, Lady of Heaven and Earth

History of a Sumerian Goddess

Henriette Broekema

My lady, on your acquiring the stature of heaven,

Maiden Inanna on your becoming as magnificent as the earth,

on your coming forth like Utu the king and stretching your arms wide,

on your walking in heaven and wearing fearsome terror,

on your wearing daylight and brilliance on earth,

on your walking in the mountain ranges and bringing forth beaming rays,

on your bathing the girinna plants of the mountains (in light),

on your giving birth to the bright mountain,

the mountain, the holy place,

on your […] on your being strong with the mace like a joyful lord,

like an enthusiastic lord, on your exulting in such battle like a destructive weapon,

the black headed people ring out in song and all the lands join in with their quiet ilulama.

(Inanna and the mount Ebih)

Plan of Mesopotamia. (After Sasson 1996, p. 839)

Preface

Written language was first used five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia by a people who occupied the territory between the Euphrates and Tigris, in an area in present day Iraq. In the earliest written records Inanna enjoys already a prominent position. She was both Morning star Inanna and Evening star Inanna, names used to indicate the planet Venus which appears as the morning star in the east and the evening star in the west. For more than three thousand years Inanna was a top ranking goddess in the pantheon of the Ancient Near East, and later goddesses such as the Greek Aphrodite and the Roman Venus are distant heiresses of this powerful goddess of the Bronze Age.

Inanna played a prominent part in the myths the Sumerians recorded in writing about their gods during the third millennium BC, moreover she is one of the very few deities we can recognize with certainty in the pictures drawn on cylinder seals and reliefs. Inanna represented various principles in the cosmos and while initially she was a powerful love goddess, responsible for the fecundity of the cattle and the crops on the fields, in the third millennium she emerged as a war goddess whose help was sought by kings on the battlefield.

The time in which Inanna wielded power is called the Bronze Age, a period that in the Middle East started about 4000 BC when the first large cities began to develop. About 1200 BC, when the states of the Hittites and Egypt and the Phoenician city states on the west coast of the Mediterranean were overrun by hostile peoples, this ancient world was lost to us forever. We can reconstruct tiny pieces of information thanks to the written sources that have survived, but they give only a fragmentary picture, their interpretation a difficult task, fraught with uncertainties and leaving many issues unresolved.

Scholars usually specialize in a restricted branch of this research, but in an attempt to make this world better known, I have tried to give an overview of all those little pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that this world has brought to light.

The Sumerian city states were theocratic societies, headed by a king who played a central role in the private lives of the citizens and behaved as if he was the son of the city god, to whom he dedicated temples in the hope of ingratiating himself. Traditionally, and from the earliest times, people in rural areas venerated their own gods, whose dwelling places they constructed from reeds and foliage and in these modest huts left their unobtrusive gifts, hoping the gods would not forget them. In contrast to this, in the huge monumental temples that the kings built, the gods lived as genuine feudal lords. However, whether in the public sphere of the temple and the palace or the private sphere of the people, the goddess Inanna had a specific place and in this book we shall become acquainted with these two separated worlds.

Relatively speaking, we are in possession of a lot of information about temple life, temples being the foundation stone of the economy of the city states. We know for instance the name and work of a high priestess of the moon god who lived in Ur about 2400 BC. Her name was Enheduanna and she had a special relationship with the goddess Inanna, to whom she dedicated three hymns which are an important part of this story. Two chapters are dedicated to an account of the amazing discoveries in the cemetery of the Royal Graves in Ur in use from about 2,600 BC, and one chapter is devoted to the so called temple prostitution in Mesopotamia, currently a controversial topic. A number of hymns which have survived about the relationship between Inanna and her loved one, which perhaps bear traces in the Song of Songs of the Old Testament, while the ritual of the Sacred Marriage, will be paramount in the discussion. Inanna was also the focus of a widely diffused ritual called Great Weeping. Her grief for the untimely death of her lover Dumuzi seems to be reflected in the inconsolable mourning for the Greek god Adonis and of Mary for her son Jesus. Even the Passion of Jesus reminds one in certain respects of the way Inanna’s beloved died and rose again from the dead.

The Mesopotamians carved their written texts with a cane, which was pressed into a soft clay tablet. The result was a sign that looked like a wedge, and so archaeologists gave it the name of cuneiform writing. The first language scholars have been able to decipher is the language of the Sumerians, who lived in the south of Mesopotamia. In the north of Sumer lived the Akkadians who spoke a Semitic language, but borrowed the cuneiform script from the Sumerians. Halfway through the third millennium the first texts in the Akkadian language appeared and from 2000 B.C. onwards Sumerian became a dead language, living on only in scribal schools that continued the much esteemed literary tradition, while Akkadian became predominantly the spoken language.

The major part of the texts in this book and their translations are available via the website of The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL: http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk), an initiative beyond praise of the scholars of the university of Oxford.

The time of Inanna lies far behind us and it is difficult to give a global idea of this ancient world. Our information of the past is very restricted and we meet all sorts of customs and usages which in our eyes are quite uncommon. I have tried to follow Inanna from the very first moment in which we find her name written on the cuneiform tablets until the time she advances into the full light of history. I have discussed political topics only in so far as they are relevant to our story and are an aid to our understanding of Inanna and the world in which she lived. The book contains 26 chapters that are more or less independent and there is a lexicon with the most important names and concepts and an index with dates of the main rulers in Mesopotamia.

For Sumerologists, Inanna is quite a celebrity about whom immense amounts has been written, but outside this specialised circle people hardly know who she was. So I hope more people will become acquainted with this mighty goddess and the story of how she was worshipped in the antique world. Possibly, with the help of this book, the reader will look at the sky with new eyes, seeing what our ancestors saw when Venus appeared on the horizon as Inanna, with the moon and the sun as her partners.