Ishtar: The Goddess Who Still Asks for the Body
Before she was Ishtar, she was Inanna of Uruk. The Sumerians sang to her. The Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians carried her name across the river plain and into the courts of kings. Her planet was Venus, the morning star and the evening star, and that double appearing already told the truth about her. She was desire and destruction in one person. Love and war. The bed and the battlefield. Hymns said battle was a feast to her. The same tablets called her the patron of the prostitute. She was not a quiet mother-goddess of hearth and harvest. She was the power men invoked when they wanted pleasure without bond, and victory without mercy. Her great temple was Eanna in Uruk, and she had houses in nearly every important city from Ur to Nineveh. Daily offerings of food, incense, and flowers went up to keep her favorable. At the New Year the city rehearsed her descent into the underworld and her return, a dying-and-rising drama meant to restart life in the land. The center of that re...