#like ishtar and ereshkigal's situation in babylonia

[hydrachea]

Actually I love that the new event just randomly switches your gender here and there for yet to be explained reasons. It took me off-guard the first time but now that I'm more used to it I love seeing the male avatar, yes thank you I look great. They should make this a mechanic more often considering how easy switching between the two options is in the in-game settings.

[dijeh]

For whoever’s still interested (anyone..hello? echo?), I got bored last night and decided the best thing to do at 2 am is translating things about goddesses of beauty and love and trying to decipher the Japanese understanding of the term “Orient”. The first one was much easier. Without further ado,

Thirteenth Topic: Inanna and Myths of the Orient

Previous topic: Napaea and Fairy Tales. More translations here.  (ko-fi)

The world’s oldest myths written in cuneiform

stories about the great flood in the world’s oldest culture, Sumerian, were also touched upon in Topic 11;

the Epic of Gilgamesh remains as a collections of writings translated into the language of the Akkadian Empire, successor of the Sumerian civilisation, these translations leading to some name changes, like Inanna -> Ishtar;

Ishtar also has rather important roles in SMT II (Astaroth as a fusion between Ashtar and Ishtar) and SMT IV (turning Astaroth back into Ishtar quest), these events being based on the demonisation of certain pagan gods in the Old Testament (Ishtar -> Astaroth);*

why the use of the term ‘Orient’?*

Orient オリエント can mean either Touyou 東洋* or Touhou 東方 (Eastern Direction);

currently ‘Orient’ means Chuutou 中東 (Middle East) or Chuukintou 中近東 (Near and Middle East), all from the POV of Europe (meaning: ‘East of Europe’);

in ancient times it meant ‘East of Rome’, since the term was of Latin origin;

‘Orient’ can thus include anything from Eastern Europe to Persia, India, China or Ancient Egypt;

in that case, applying the term to myths of Sumerian origin might miss the point but the historical custom is useful and easier to use in order to put together myths of Sumerian, Akkadian or Babylonian origin;

the general term for the ancient civilisation in that region = Mesopotamian culture or mythology;

the ancient Sumerian, Akkadian or Babylonian civilisations of the Middle East are equivalent to one of the four great ancient civilisations, the Mesopotamian civilisation;*

the first to rise was the Sumerian civilisation which was overturned by the Akkadians coming from the north, which later split into Assyria and Babylonia;

both Sumerians and Akkadians had their own languages, so Inanna became Ishtar;

both Sumerian and Akkadian had their writings inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets;

the Epic of Gilgamesh was also written on this type of tablets, but since they are quite fragile, we only have about half of it left although some missing parts have been discovered in the past few years;

Inanna and Ishtar in Myths of the Orient

in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Ishtar falls in love at first sight with the hero and wants to marry him, but is rejected; she resents that and asks her father, the sky god Anu, to exact revenge on him, leading to Enkidu’s death;

this episode, written on the 6th and 7th tablets, can be read almost identically in the older Sumerian poems (Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven episode), where Ishtar was Inanna;

her negative role in the narrative both brings out one of her human like facets, but can also be considered one of the factors of her being later identified with the demon Astaroth;

Inanna was worshipped in the southern city of Uruk and was popular after the Akkadian period as well, so she appears in other stories besides the Epic of Gilgamesh;

a particularly well-known one is about her descent into the Underworld in which she visits her older sister, Ereshkigal, the goddess of the Underworld, to attend the funeral of Ereshkigal’s husband;

however, in order to enter the realm, she is ordered by the gatekeeper to strip off her clothes and jewellery, but she still breaches the rules of the Underworld by being alive, so in a fit of anger, Ereshkigal kills her;

Inanna’s servant and the water god Enki revive her, but in order to be able to return from the Underworld, she has to leave someone in exchange (her husband, the god of agriculture Dumuzid, in Akkadian, Tammuz);*

the story of gods descending into the Underworld and then coming back symbolises the setting and rising of the sun, its disappearance and reappearance during eclipses, but also the cycle of grains turning from seeds to crops, being harvested and then becoming seeds once more, a common motif encountered in mythologies all over the world, of gods of harvest, symbolising death and rebirth;

in Japanese mythology, there is not only the story of Izanagi descending to the Underground because he wishes to see his dead wife Izanami, but also the sun goddess Izanami hiding inside the cave 岩戸 (iwa to rock door) symbolising the death of the sun and her subsequent return (Amanoiwato 天岩戸 heavenly rock door);

there’s also Ookuninushi who got killed and dismembered, later revived with his mother’s help, then went on and conducted kunitsukuri;*

Inanna’s story also resembles the story of the Greek goddess Aphrodite and the young man she loved, Adonis, also loved by the queen of the Underground, Persephone, who spends the year travelling between the Underworld and the world above, but also that of Persephone herself who was kidnapped by the ruler of the Underground, Hades, and who ended up travelling between the two realms after eating a pomegranate from the Underworld;

moreover, Inanna is identified with Aphrodite, and it is considered that her legend was transmitted to Greece;

Inanna was also worshipped as a goddess of war and there are opinions that her descent into the Underworld was actually done with the intent to conquer it;

her worship as a goddess who offered her power to warrior kings can also be related to her falling in love with and proposing to the brave Gilgamesh;

statues and bas-reliefs of Inanna portray her with angel-like wings and just like Aphrodite, she is associated with the morning/evening star (Venus) leading to a demon rather than angel association and recalling Lucifer;

myths inscribed on clay tablets were found in the ancient city state of Ugarit, depicting the fight between the chief god, the harvest god Baal and the death god Mot;

the former is slain, but is later revived by his younger sister Anat;

Baal appears in the Old Testament as a pagan god and is later considered to have become the demons Bael and Beelzebub;

Anat is identified with Ishtar and considered to be an alias for Asherah, once more revealing the deep connection between Oriental myths and Judeo-Christian tradition;

in SMT Devil Summoner there was a fictional kingdom in ancient Japan ruled by Princess Inaruna who refused to obey the Yamato court and was subjugated (based on Inanna);

Inaruna was someone who refused to submit*, thus she was subjugated and subsequently erased from history.

*more like Astarte, the Phoenician equivalent of Ishtar, the Babylonian equivalent of the Summerian Inanna, to be fair;

*as you may have noticed, the title simply has the katakana form of Orient オリエント ;

*wiki has these neat maps with the broad sense of Touyou, the current meaning of East, as well as what Touyou meant in relation to Japan (’Oriental history’ introduced as a school subject in the later half of the 19th c., mostly concerned with East Asia; same thing happened in the Korean Peninsula), to China (Touyou = Japan, both as location and as name) and Vietnam (Đông Dương = Touyou = Indochina; in a strict sense it means the former countries of French Indochina, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; in a broader sense, those three plus Thailand, Malaysia and Myanmar);

*guess he's only talking about the Old World here;

*the Internet tells me it was 'Du'zu' in Akkadian and 'Tammuz' in Hebrew;

*topic 8 actually dealt with this;

*the term used for ‘submit’ (まつろわぬ matsurowanu) is interesting because in Japan’s case it can be used for the Ezo people, touched upon in topic 10; the whole situation is similar to Inaruna’s story.