Thread by @PaulMMCooper

A thread on Ishtar's Descent Into the Underworld, one of the most famous and beautiful Mesopotamian legends. #folklorethursday

Ishtar was the Mesopotamian god of love, beauty, sex, fertility, war & political power from ~3500 BCE. She was associated with planet Venus.

One of the most famous Ishtar tales is of her descent into the underworld. Here's the text as it appeared in the Library of Ashurbanipal

In the Akkadian Gilgamesh Epic, Ishtar appears as a deadly femme fatale, who is enraged when Gilgamesh refuses to become her lover.

After this rejection, it seems Ishtar is compelled to visit the land of the dead, where her lost husband Tammuz is dwelling.

The Mesopotamian vision of the underworld is one of the most haunting I've ever seen, and appears elsewhere in other texts too.

Ishtar isn't playing around. She threatens to smash the gate of the underworld & unleash a zombie plague if the gatekeeper doesn't open it.

The underworld in Sumerian mythology was ruled by Ereshkigal, the sister of Ishtar in some traditions. She agrees to let Ishtar enter

What follows is the most famous passage: Ishtar is led through the seven gates of hell, and must take off an item of clothing at each one

Ereshkigal is furious at Ishtar entering her domain, and curses her with 60 illnesses afflicting all parts of her body and weakening her.

Ishtar is now trapped in the underworld. Since she is the god of fertility, all sex on Earth comes to a stop during this time.

The sun god Shamash is pretty worried about this, and begs the great god Ea to intervene. Ea sends his messenger to talk sense to Ereshkigal

Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld, is even more maddened by this, giving one of the fantastic curses that pepper Mesopotamian literature.

But she eventually relents and lets Ishtar go, giving her the water of life & sending her back through the 7 gates, returning her clothing.

The poem ends with a lament about irretrievable loss. If even Ishtar failed to retrieve her lost love, what hope is there for us mortals?

(The meaning of this lament is disputed, but this is always how I have read the poem, as an elegy to loss and how we seek to redress it)

Like the Gilgamesh Epic, the story of Ishtar’s Descent is about a strong character seeking something we know to be impossible, and failing.

The poem is still very much alive in people's hearts. I saw it read in Babylon, Iraq, & people in the audience called out lines they knew.

Its message of hope in the face of loss, and its beautiful evoking of the stages of grief as a physical descent still resonate today

You can read the whole translated text of the Akkadian version here: sacred-texts.com/ane/ishtar.htm

The older Sumerian version is about 3x longer and contains more detail. You can read it here: etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr141…

Thanks for listening! As a bonus, here's a detail of a lion, one of Ishtar's main symbols, from the tiled Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum