#Neo-Babylonian period

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Iraqi museum discovers missing lines from the 'Epic of Gilgamesh'

It's not unusual for fantasy epics to endure for years. (Right, Game of Thrones fans?)

But even George R.R. Martin would be shocked to learn about century-and-a-half wait for a new chapter of the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world's oldest written stories. 

The Sulaymaniyah Museum in Iraq has discovered 20 new lines to the ancient Babylonian poem, writes Ted Mills for Open Culture. 

The Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates back to 18th Century BC, was pieced together from fragments that tell the story of a Sumerian king who travels with a wild companion named Enkidu.

As Mills explains, scholars were well aware that new fragments of the poem could possibly turn up — modern readers are most familiar with a version discovered in Nineveh in 1853 and during the war in Iraq, as looters pillaged ancient sites.

The Sulaymaniah Museum acquired the tablet in 2011, as part of a collection purchased from a smuggler, according to Osama S.M. Amin at Ancient History Et Cetera.

"The collection was composed of 80-90 tablets of different shapes, contents and sizes.

All of the tablets were, to some degree, still covered with mud. Some were completely intact, while others were fragmented.

The precise location of their excavation is unknown, but it is likely that they were illegally unearthed from what is known today as the southern part of the Babel (Babylon) or Governorate, Iraq (Mesopotamia)."

The tablet is three fragments joined together, dating back nearly 3,000 years to the Neo-Babylonian period.

An analysis by the University of London's Farouk Al-Rawi reveals more details from the poem's fifth chapter, according to Amin.

The new lines include descriptions of a journey into the "Cedar Forest," where Gilgamesh and Enkidu encounter monkeys, birds and insects, then kill a forest demigod named Humbaba.

In a paper for the American Schools of Oriental Research, Al-Rawi describes the significance of these details:

The previously available text made it clear that [Gilgamesh] and Enkidu knew, even before they killed Humbaba, that what they were doing would anger the cosmic forces that governed the world, chiefly the god Enlil.

Their reaction after the event is now tinged with a hint of guilty conscience, when Enkidu remarks ruefully that … "we have reduced the forest [to] a wasteland."

The museum's discovery casts new light on Humbaba, in particular, who had been depicted as a "barbarian ogre" in other tablets. 

As Mills writes:

"Just like a good director’s cut, these extra scenes clear up some muddy character motivation and add an environmental moral to the tale."

[ina-shumelim]

I must say within Assyriology, the people doing Neo-Babylonian really do have some of the coolest ressources. I was at first intimated by Parker and Dubberstein’s Babylonian Chronology (1946), but now I can’t stop converting dates from the Neo-Babylonian calendar into the Gregorian one.

I mean to be fair just having some types of documents that are consistently dated is insanely cool and helpful, but it becomes even more fun when it’s not the 4th Addaru in the 33rd year of Nebuchadnezzar II, but 1 March 571 BC. Like, suddenly, it’s so relatable and I’m like, I know a 1 March!

Also, you can convert dates up until 45/46 AD which by Assyriological standards is so late. The last dateable cuneiform text is from 79/80 AD, concurrent with the eruption of Vesuvius (cf. Hunger & de Jong 2014, “Almanac W22340a from Uruk”)!

And then you also get family names in the Neo-Babylonian period, at least for the upper classes, and boy is that helpful when every guy’s called something like Bēl-iddin or Nabû-šum-uṣur. And you have these amazing prosopographies like Kümmel’s Familie, Beruf und Amt im spätbabylonischen Uruk (1979) and Bongenaar’s The Neo-Babylonian Ebabbar Temple at Sippar (1997) to just look up what a specific person has been up to.

Also, the family trees. I love the family trees!

And then there’s also Jursa’s Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Documents (2005) which just contains so much helpful information! All of these books just make me so happy and for all their citing unpublished texts that I as a poor student simply can’t lay my eyes on, these Neo-Babylonian people really got their reference works figured out.

[a-modernmajorgeneral]

Cylinder seals are cylindrical objects carved in reverse (intaglio) in order to leave raised impressions when rolled into clay. Seals were generally used to mark ownership, and they could act as official identifiers, like a signature, for individuals and institutions. A seal’s owner rolled impressions in wet clay to secure property such as baskets, letters, jars, and even rooms and buildings. This clay sealing prevented tampering because it had to be broken in order to access a safeguarded item. Cylinder seals were often made of durable material, usually stone, and most were drilled lengthwise so they could be strung and worn. A seal’s material and the images inscribed on the seal itself could be protective. The artistry and design might be appreciated and considered decorative as well. Cylinder seals were produced in the Near East beginning in the fourth millennium BCE and date to every period through the end of the first millennium BCE.

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Mesopotamia, 3000-2700 B.C.

Tools and Equipment; seals

Black marble

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This seal illustrates a scene with the goddess Ishtar welcoming a devotee. A cuneiform inscription is incorporated into the scene.

Cylinder seals of the ancient Near East

Invented in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) about 3500 BC, cylinder seals were used as magical amulets, administrative tools, and jewellery. These small cylinders had a design carved in intaglio, and a hole through them, enabling them to be worn on string.

When these seals were rolled onto clay, a continuous impression was left of the design. Shown here are three such examples of these impressions, with the cylinder seal itself alongside the second example. The first example dates to 800-600 BC (Neo-Elamite), the second is the oldest at 3000-2700 BC, and the third, ca. 700 BC (Achaemenid).

The Walters provides the following description for the first example:

In the 8th and 7th centuries BC, Elam, to the east of Mesopotamia in Iran, experienced a brief period of prosperity during which it allied itself with Babylonia against Assyria. The seals produced in Elam during this period reflect themes derived from Mesopotamia, such as the lion hunt seen here; however, the strong modeling, the almost decorative patterning of the details, and the exaggerated posture of the lion characterize the local Elamite style.

Cylinder Seal with a Lion Hunt, courtesy of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore: 42.797.

Cylinder Seal, courtesy of the LACMA: M.71.73.11c.

Cylinder Seal with Ishtar Welcoming a Devotee, courtesy of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore: 42.782.

[yamayuandadu]

Nonconformity, ambiguity, fluidity and misinterpretation: on the gender of Inanna (and a few others)

This article wasn’t really planned far in advance. It started as a response to a question I got a few weeks ago:

However, as I kept working on it, it became clear a simple ask response won’t do - the topic is just too extensive to cover this way. It became clear it has to be turned into an article comprehensively discussing all major aspects of the perception of Inanna’s gender, both in antiquity and in modern scholarship. In the process I’ve also incorporated what was originally meant as a pride month special back in 2023 (but never got off the ground) into it, as well as some quick notes on a 2024 pride month special that never came to be in its intended form, as I realized I would just be repeating what I already wrote on wikipedia.

To which degree can we speak of genuine fluidity or ambiguity of Inanna’s gender, and to which of gender non-conforming behavior? Which aspects of Inanna’s character these phenomena may or may not be related to? What is overestimated and what underestimated? What did Neo-Assyrian kings have in common with medieval European purveyors of Malleus Maleficarum?  Is a beard always a type of facial hair? Why should you be wary of any source which calls gala “priests of Inanna”? 

Answers to all of these questions - and much, much more (the whole piece is over 19k words long) - await under the cut.

Zeus is basically Tyr: on names and cognates

The meaning of a theonym - the proper name of a deity - can provide quite a lot of information about its bearer. Therefore, I felt obliged to start this article with inquiries pertaining to Inanna’s name - or rather names. I will not repeat how the two names - Inanna and Ishtar - came to be used interchangeably; this was covered on this blog enough times, most recently here. Through the article, I will consistently refer to the main discussed deity as Inanna for the ease of reading, but I’d appreciate it if you read the linked explanation for the name situation before moving forward with this one.

Sumerian had no grammatical gender, and nouns were divided broadly into two categories, “humans, deities and adjacent abstract terms” and “everything else” (Ilona Zsolnay, Analyzing Constructs: A Selection of Perils, Pitfalls, and Progressions in Interrogating Ancient Near Eastern Gender, p. 462; Piotr Michalowski, On Language, Gender, Sex, and Style in the Sumerian Language, p. 211). This doesn’t mean deities (let alone humans) were perceived as genderless, though. Furthermore, the lack of grammatical masculine or feminine gender did not mean that specific words could not be coded as masculine or feminine (Analyzing Constructs…, p. 471; one of my favorite examples are the two etymologically unrelated words for female and male friends, respectively malag and guli).

While occasionally doubts are expressed regarding the meaning of Inanna’s name, most authors today accept that it can be interpreted as derived from the genitive construct nin-an-ak - “lady of heaven” (Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The Pantheon of Uruk During the Neo-Babylonian Period, p. 104). The title nin is effectively gender neutral (Julia M. Asher-Greve, Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Goddesses in Context: On Divine Powers, Roles, Relationships and Gender in Mesopotamian Textual and Visual Sources, p. 6) - it occurs in names of male deities (Ningirsu, Ninurta, Ninazu, Ninagal, Nindara, Ningublaga...), female ones (Ninisina, Ninkarrak, Ninlil, Nineigara, Ninmug…), deities whose gender shifted or varied from place to place or from period to period (Ninsikila, Ninshubur, Ninsianna…) and deities whose gender cannot be established due to scarcity of evidence (mostly Early Dynastic oddities whose names cannot even be properly transcribed). However, we can be sure that Inanna’s name was regarded as feminine based on its Emesal form, Gašananna (Timothy D. Leonard, Ištar in Ḫatti: The Disambiguation of Šavoška and Associated Deities in Hittite Scribal Practice, p. 36).

The matter is a bit more complex when it comes to the Akkadian name Ishtar. In contrast with Sumerian, Akkadian, which belongs to the eastern branch of the family of Semitic languages, had two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, though the gender of nouns wasn’t necessarily reflected in verbal forms, suffixes and so on (Analyzing Constructs…, p. 472-473). In contrast with the name Inanna, the etymology of the Akkadian moniker is less clear. The root has been identified, ˤṯtr, but its meaning is a subject of a heated debate (Aren M. Wilson-Wright, Athtart. The Transmission and Transformation of a Goddess in the Late Bronze Age, p. 22-23; the book is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, which can be read here). Based on evidence from the languages from the Ethiopian branch of the Semitic family, which offer (distant) cognates, Wilson-Wright suggests it might have originally been an ordinary feminine (but not marked with an expected suffix) noun meaning “star” which then developed into a theonym in multiple languages (Athtart…, p. 21) She tentatively suggests that it might have referred to a specific celestial body (perhaps Venus) due to the existence of a more generic term for “star” in most Semitic languages, which must have developed very early (p. 24). Thus the emergence of Ishtar would essentially parallel the emergence of Shamash, whose name is in origin the ordinary noun for the sun (p. 25). This seems like an elegant solution, but as pointed out by other researchers some of the arguments employed might be shaky, so it’s best to remain cautious about quoting Wilson-Wright’s conclusions as fact, even if they are more sound than some of the older, largely forgotten, proposals (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 40-41).

In addition to uncertainties pertaining to the meaning of the root ˤṯtr, it’s also unclear why the name Ishtar starts with an i in Akkadian, considering cognate names of deities from other cultures fairly consistently start with an a. The early Akkadian form Eštar isn’t a mystery - it reflects a broader pattern of phonetic shifts in this language, and as such requires no separate inquiry, but the subsequent shift from e to i is almost unparalleled. Wilson-Wright suggests that it might have been the result of contamination with Inanna, which seems quite compelling to me given that by the second millennium BCE the names had already been interchangeable for centuries (Athtart…, p. 18).

As for grammatical gender, in Akkadian (as well as in the only other language from the East Semitic branch, Eblaite), the theonym Ishtar lacks a feminine suffix but consistently functions as grammatically feminine nonetheless. I got a somewhat confusing ask recently, which I assume was the result of misinterpretation of this information as applying to the gender of the bearer of the name as opposed to just grammatical gender of the name itself:

Occasional confusion might stem from the fact that in the languages from the West Semitic family (like ex. Ugaritic or Phoenician) there’s no universal pattern - in some of them the situation looks like in Akkadian, in some cognates without the feminine suffix refer to a male deity, furthermore goddesses with names which are cognate but have a feminine suffix (-t; ex. Ugaritic Ashtart) added are attested (Athtart…, p. 16). 

In Akkadian a form with a -t suffix (ištart) doesn’t appear as a theonym, only as the generic word, “goddess” - and it seems to have a distinct etymology, with the -t as a leftover from plural ištarātu (Athtart…, p. 18). The oldest instances of a derivative of the theonym Ishtar being used as an ordinary noun, dated to the Old Babylonian period (c. 1800 BCE), spell it as ištarum, without such a suffix (Goddess in Context…, p. 80). As a side note, it’s worth pointing out that both obsolete vintage translations and dubious sources, chiefly online, are essentially unaware of the existence of any version of this noun, which leads to propagation of incorrect claims about equation of deities (Goddesses in Context…, p. 82).

It has been argued that a further form with the -t suffix, “Ishtarat”, might appear in Early Dynastic texts from Mari, but this might actually be a misreading. This has been originally suggested by Manfred Krebernik all the way back in 1984. He concluded the name seems to actually be ba-sùr-ra-at (Baśśurat; something like “announcer of good news”; Zur Lesung einiger frühdynastischer Inschriften aus Mari, p. 165). Other researchers recently resurrected this proposal (Gianni Marchesi and Nicolo Marchetti, Royal Statuary of Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, p. 228; accepted by Dominique Charpin in a review of their work as well). I feel it’s important to point out that nothing really suggested that the alleged “Ishtarat” had much to do with Ishtar (or Ashtart, for that matter) in the first place. The closest thing to any theological information in the two brief inscriptions she appears in is that she is listed alongside the personified river ordeal, Id, in one of them. Marchesi and Marchetti suggest they form a couple (Royal Statuary…, p. 228); in absence of other evidence I feel caution is necessary. I’m generally wary of asserting deities who appear together once in an oath, greeting or dedicatory formula are necessarily a couple when there is no supplementary evidence. Steve A. Wiggins illustrated this issue well when he rhetorically asked if we should treat Christian saints the same way, which would lead to quite thrilling conclusions in cases like the numerous churches named jointly after St. Andrew and St. George and so on (A Reassessment of Asherah With Further Considerations of the Goddess, p. 101).

Even without Ishtarat, the Mariote evidence remains quite significant for the current topic, though. There’s a handful of third millennium attestations of a deity sometimes referred to as “male Ishtar” (logographically INANNA.NITA; there’s no ambiguity thanks to the second logogram) in modern publications - mostly from Mari. The problem is that this is most likely a forerunner of Ugaritic Attar, as opposed to a male form of the deity of Uruk/Zabalam/Akkad/you get the idea (Mark S. Smith, The God Athtar in the Ancient Near East and His Place in KTU 1.6 I, esp. p. 629; note that the deity with the epithet Sarbat is, as far as I know, generally identified as female though). 

Ultimately there is no strong evidence for Attar being associated with Inanna (his Mesopotamian counterpart in the trilingual list from Ugarit is Lugal-Marada) or even with Ashtart (Smith tentatively proposes the two were associated - The God Athtar.., p. 631 - but more recently in ‛Athtart in Late Bronze Age Syrian Texts he ruled it out, p. 36-37) so he’s not relevant at all to this topic. Cognate name =/= related deity, least you want to argue Zeus is actually Tyr; the similarly firmly male South Arabian ˤAṯtar is even less relevant (Athtart. The Transmission and Transformation…, p. 13). Smith goes as far as speculating the male cognates might have been a secondary development, which would render them even more irrelevant to this discussion (‛Athtart in Late…, p. 35).

There are also three Old Akkadian names which might refer to a masculine deity based on the form of the other element (Eštar-damqa, “E. is good”, Eštar-muti “E. is my husband”, and Eštar-pāliq, “E. is a harp”), but they’re an outlier and according to Wilson-Wright might be irrelevant for the discussion of the gender of Ishtar and instead refer to a deity with a cognate name from outside Mesopotamia (Athtart. The Transmission and Transformation…, p. 22). 

There’s also a possible isolated piece of evidence for a masculine deity with a cognate name in Ebla. Eblaite texts fairly consistently indicate that Inanna’s local counterpart Ašdar was a female deity. In addition to the equivalence between them attested in a lexical list, her main epithet, Labutu (“lioness”) indicates she was a feminine figure. However, Alfonso Archi argues that in a single case the name seems to indicate a god, as they are followed by an otherwise unattested “spouse” (DAM-sù), Datinu (Išḫara and Aštar at Ebla: Some Definitions, p. 16). The logic behind this is unclear to me and no subsequent publications offer any explanations so far. It might be worth noting that the Eblaite pantheon seemingly was able to accommodate two sun deities, one male and one female, so perhaps this is a similar situation.

It should also be noted that the femininity of Ishtar despite the lack of a feminine suffix in her name is not entirely unparalleled - in addition to Ebla, in areas like the Middle Euphrates deities with cognate names without the -t suffix might not necessarily be masculine, even when they start with a- and not i- like in Akkadian. In some cases the matter cannot be solved at all - there is no evidence regarding the gender of Aštar of the Stars (aš-tar MUL) from Emar, for instance. Meanwhile Aštar of Ḫaši and Aštar-ṣarbat (“poplar Aštar”) from the same site are evidently feminine (Athtart. The Transmission and Transformation…, p. 106). At least in the last case that’s because the name actually goes back to the Akkadian form, though (p. 85).

To sum up: despite some minor uncertainties pertaining to the Akkadian name, there’s no strong reason to suspect that any greater degree of ambiguity is built into either Inanna or Ishtar - at least as far as the names alone go. The latter was even seen as sufficiently feminine coded to serve as the basis for a generic designation of goddesses. 

Obviously, there is more to a deity than just the sum of the meanings of their names. For this reason, to properly evaluate what was up with Inanna’s gender it will be necessary to look into her three main roles: these of a war deity, personification of Venus and love deity.

Masculinity, heroism and maledictory genderbening: the warlike Inanna

An Old Babylonian plaque depicting armed Inanna (wikimedia commons)

Martial first, marital second?

War and other related affairs will be the first sphere of Inanna’s activity I’ll look into, since it feels like it’s the one least acknowledged online and in various questionable publications. Ilona Zsolnay points out that this even extends to serious scholarship to a degree, and that as a result her military side is arguably understudied (Ištar, Goddess of War, Pacifier of Kings: An Analysis of Ištar’s Martial Role in the Maledictory Sections of the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions, p. 389). The oldest direct evidence for the warlike role of Inanna are Early Dynastic theophoric names such as Inanna-ursag, “Inanna is a warrior”. Further examples are provided by a variety of both Sumerian and Akkadian sources from across the second half of the third millennium BCE. This means it’s actually slightly older than the first evidence for an association with love and eroticism, which can only be dated with certainty to the Old Akkadian period when it is directly mentioned for the first time, specifically in love incantations (Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Inanna and Ishtar in the Babylonian World, p. 336).

Deities associated with combat were anything but uncommon in Mesopotamia. There was no singular war god - Ninurta, Nergal, Zababa, Ilaba, Tishpak and an entire host of other figures, some recognized all across the region, some limited to one specific area or even just a single city, shared a warlike disposition. Naturally, the details could vary - Ninurta was essentially an avenger restoring order disturbed by supernatural threats, Nergal was a war god because he was associated with just about anything pertaining to inflicting death, and so on. 

All the examples I’ve listed are male, but similar roles are also attested for multiple goddesses, not just Inanna. Those include closely related deities like Annunitum or Belet-ekallim, most of her foreign counterparts, the astral deity Ninisanna (more on this figure later), but also firmly independent examples like Ninisina and the Middle Euphrates slash Ugaritic Anat (Ilona Zsolnay, Do Divine Structures of Gender Mirror Mortal Structures of Gender?, p. 114).

The god list An = Anum preserves a whole series of epithets affirming Inanna’s warlike character - Ninugnim, “lady of the army”; Ninšenšena, “lady of battle”; Ninmea, “lady of combat”; Ninintena, “lady of warriorhood” (tablet IV, lines 20-23; Wilfred G. Lambert and Ryan D. Winters, An = Anum and Related Lists, p.162). It is also well represented in literary texts. She is a “destroyer of lands” (kurgulgul) in Ninmesharra, for instance (Markham J. Geller, The Free Library Inanna Prism Reconsidered, p. 93).

At least some of the terms employed to describe Inanna in other literary compositions were strongly masculine-coded, if not outright masculine. The poem Agušaya characterizes her as possessing “manliness” (zikrūtu) and “heroism” (eṭlūtu; this word can also refer to youthful masculinity, see Analyzing Constructs…, p. 471) and calls her a “hero” (qurādu). Another example, a hymn dated to the reign of Third Dynasty of Ur or First Dynasty of Isin opens with an incredibly memorable line - “O returning manly hero, Inanna the lady (...)” (or, to follow Thorkild Jacobsen’s older translation, which involves some gap filling - “O you Amazon, queen—from days of yore, paladin, hero, soldier”; The Free Library… p. 93). 

A little bit of context is necessary here: while “heroism” might seem neutral to at least some modern readers, in ancient Mesopotamia it was seen as a masculine trait (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 392-393). It’s worth noting that eṭlūtum, which you’ve seen translated as “heroism” above can be translated in other context as  “youthful masculinity” (Analyzing Constructs…, p. 471). On the other hand, while zikrūtu is derived from zikāru, “male”, it might refer both straightforwardly to masculinity and more abstractly to heroism (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 397).

However, the same hymn which calls Inanna a “manly hero” refers to her with a variety of feminine titles like nugig. There’s even an Emesal gašan (“lady”) in there, you really can’t get much more feminine than that (The Free Library… p.  89). On top of that, about a half of the composition is a fairly standard Dumuzi romance routine (The Free Library… p. 90-91; more on what that entails later, for now it will suffice to say that not gender nonconformity). 

This is a recurring pattern, arguably - Agušaya, where masculine traits are attributed to Inanna over and over again, still firmly refers to her as a feminine figure (“daughter”, “goddess”, “queen”, “princess”, “mistress”, “lioness” and so on; Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: an Anthology of Akkadian Literature, p. 160 and passim). In other words, the assignment of a clearly masculine sphere of activity and titles related to it doesn’t really mean Inanna is not presented as feminine in the same compositions.

How to explain this phenomenon? In Mesopotamian thought both femininity and masculinity were understood as me, ie. divinely ordained principles regulating the functioning of the cosmos. In modern terms, these labels as they were used in literary texts arguably had more to do with gender and gender roles than strictly speaking with biological sex (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 391-392). Ilona Zsolnay on this basis concludes that Inanna, while demonstrably regarded as a feminine figure, took on a masculine role in military context (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 401). This is hardly an uncommon view in scholarship (The Free Library…, p. 93; On Language…, p. 243). 

In other words, it can be argued that when the lyrical voice in Agušaya declares that “there is a certain hero, she is unique” (i-ba-aš-ši iš-ta-ta qú-ra-du; Before the Muses…, p. 98) the unique quality is, essentially, that Inanna fulfills a strongly masculine coded role - that of a “hero”, understood as a youthful, aggressive masculine figure - despite being female.

It should be noted that the ideal image of a person characterized by youthful masculinity went beyond just warfare, or abstract heroic adventures, though. The Song of the Hoe indicates that willingness to perform manual work in the fields was yet another aspect of it (Ilona Zsolnay, Gender and Sexuality: Ancient Near East, p. 277). This, as far as I know, was never attributed to Inanna.

Furthermore, the sort of youthful, aggressive masculinity we’re talking about here was regarded as something fleeting and temporary for the most part (at least when it came to humans; deities are obviously a very different story), and a very different image of male gender roles emerges from texts such as Instruction of Shuruppak, which extol a peaceful, reserved demeanor and the ability to provide for one’s family as masculine virtues instead (Gender and Sexuality…, p. 277-278). It might be worth pointing out that Sumerian outright uses two different terms to designate “youthful” (namguruš) and “senior” (namabba) masculinity (Gender and Sexuality…, p. 275); the general term for masculinity, namnitah, is incredibly rare in comparison  (Gender and Sexuality…, p. 276-277).

It needs to be pointed out that a further Sumerian term sometimes translated as “manliness” -  šul, which occurs for example in the hymn mentioned above - might actually be gender neutral; in addition to being used to describe mortal young men and Inanna, it was also applied as an epithet to the goddess Bau, who demonstrably was not regarded as a masculine figure; she didn’t even share Inanna’s warlike character (Analyzing Constructs…, p. 471). Perhaps the original nuance simply escapes us - could it be that šul was not strictly speaking masculinity, but some more abstract quality which was simply more commonly associated with men?

In any case, it’s hard to argue that Inanna really encompasses the entire concept of masculinity as the Mesopotamians understood it. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that she was portrayed as responsible for - and enthusiastically engaged in - spheres of activity which were seen as firmly masculine, and could accordingly be described with terms associated with them. Therefore, it would be more than suitable to describe her as gender nonconforming - at least when she was specifically portrayed as warlike. 

Perhaps Dennis Pardee was onto something when he completely sincerely described Anat, who despite being firmly a female figure similarly engaged in masculine pursuits (not only war, but also hunting) as a “tomboy goddess” (Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, p. 274). 

These observations only remain firmly correct as long as we assume that gender roles are a concept fully applicable to deities, of course - I’ll explore in more detail later whether this was necessarily true.

Royal curses and legal loopholes

A different side of Inanna as a war deity which nonetheless still has a lot to do with the topic of this article comes to the fore in curse formulas from royal inscriptions. Their contents are not quite as straightforward as imploring her to personally intervene on the battlefield. Rather, she was supposed to make the enemy unable to partake in warfare properly (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 390). Investigating how this process was imagined will shed additional light on how the Mesopotamians viewed masculinity, and especially the intersection between masculinity and military affairs.

The formulas under discussion start to appear in the second half of the second millennium BCE, with the earliest example identified in an inscription of the Middle Assyrian king Tukultī-Ninurta I (Gina Konstantopoulos, My Men Have Become Women, and My Women Men: Gender, Identity, and Cursing in Mesopotamia, p. 363).  He implored the goddess to punish his enemies by turning them into women (zikrūssu sinnisāniš) - or rather, by turning their masculinity into femininity, or at the very least some sort of non-masculine quality. The first option was the conventional translation for a while, but sinništu would be used instead of the much more uncommon sinnišānu if it was that straightforward. Interpreting it as “femininity” would parallel the use of zikrūti, “masculinity”, in place of zikaru, “man”. 

There are two further possible alternatives, which I find less plausible myself, but which nonetheless need to be discussed. One is that sinnišānu designated a specific class of women. Furthermore, there is also some evidence - lexical list entry from ḪAR.GUD, to be specific -  that sinnisānu might have been a synonym of assinnu, a type of undeniably AMAB, but possibly gender nonconforming, cultic performer (in older literature erroneously translated as “eunuch” despite lack of evidence; the second most beloved vintage baseless translation for any cultic terms after “sacred prostitute”, an invention of Herodotus), in which case the curse would involve something like “changing his masculinity in the manner of a sinnisānu” (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 394-396). However, Zsolnay herself subsequently published a detailed study of the assinnu, The Misconstrued Role of the assinnu in Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy, which casts her earlier proposal into doubt, as the perception of the assinnu as a figure lacking conventional masculinity might be erroneous. I’ll return to this point later. For now, it will suffice to say that on grammatical grounds and due to parallels in other similar maledictions, “masculinity into femininity” seems to be the most straightforward to me in this case.

The “genderbending” tends to be mentioned alongside the destruction of one’s weapons (My Men Have…, p. 363). This is not accidental - martial prowess, “heroism” and even the ability to bear weapons were quintessential masculine qualities; a man deprived of his masculinity would inevitably be unable to possess them. The masculine coding of weaponry was so strong that an erection could be metaphorically compared to drawing a bow (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 395).

Zsolnay points out the reversal of gender in curses is also coupled with other reversals: Inanna is also supposed to “establish” (liškun) the defeat (abikti) of the target of the curses - a future king who fails to uphold his duties - which constitutes a reversal of an idiom common in royal inscriptions celebrating victory (abikti iškun). The potential monarch will also be unable to face the enemy as a result of her intervention - yet again a reversal of a mainstay of royal declarations. The majesty and heroism of a king were supposed to scare enemies, who would inevitably prostrate themselves when faced by him on the battlefield (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 396-397). 

It is safe to say the goal of invoking Inanna in the discussed formulas was to render the target powerless. (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 396; My Men Have…, p. 366). Furthermore, they evoke a fear widespread in cuneiform sources, that of the loss of potency, which sometimes took forms akin to Koro syndrome or the infamous penis theft passages from Malleus Maleficarum (My Men Have…, p. 367). It is worth noting that male impotence could specifically be described as being “like a woman” (kīma sinništi/GIM SAL; Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 395).

Gina Konstantopoulos argues that references to Inanna “genderbening” others occur in a different context in a variety of literary texts, for example in the Epic of Erra, where they’re only meant to highlight the extent of her supernatural ability. She also suggests that more general references to swapping left and right sides around, for example in Enki and the World Order, are further examples, as they “echo(...) the language of birth incantations” which ritually assigned the gender role to a child (My Men Have…, p. 368). She also sees the passage from the Epic of Gilgamesh describing the fates of various individuals who crossed her path and ended up transformed into animals as a result as a more distant parallel of the curse formulas (My Men Have…, p. 369). However, it needs to be pointed out this sort of shapeshifting is almost unparalleled in Mesopotamian literature (Frans Wiggermann, Hybrid creatures A. Philological. In Mesopotamia, p. 237), and none of the few examples involve a change of gender. The fact that the "genderbending" passages generally reflect a fear of loss of agency (especially on the battlefield) or potency, and by extension of independence tied to masculine gender roles, explains why they virtually never describe the opposite scenario, a mortal woman being placed in a masculine role through supernatural means as punishment (My Men Have…, p. 370). It might be worth pointing out that a long sequence of seemingly contradictory duties involving reversals is also ascribed to Inanna in a particularly complex Old Babylonian hymn (Michael P. Streck, Nathan Wasserman, The Man is Like a Woman, the Maiden is a Young Man. A new edition of Ištar-Louvre (Tab. I-II), p. 2-3). It also contains a rare case of bestowing masculine qualities upon women: “the man is like a woman, the maiden is like a young man” (zikrum sinništeš ardatu eṭel; The Man is Like…, p. 5). However, the context is not identical to the “genderbening” curses. The text is agreed to describe a performance during a specific festival. Other passages explicitly refer to crossdressing and rituals themed around reversal (šubalkutma šipru, "behavior is turned upside down"; The Man is Like…, p. 6). Furthermore, grammatical forms of verbs do not indicate a full reversal of gender (The Man is Like…, p. 31). Overall, I agree with Timothy D. Leonard’s cautious remark that in this context only religiously motivated temporary reversal of gender roles occurs, and we cannot use the passage to make far reaching conclusions about the participants’ identity (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 298).

It’s important to bear in mind that a performance involving crossdressing won’t necessarily involve people who are otherwise gender nonconforming, and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the sexuality of the performer. While I typically avoid bringing up parallels from other cultures and time periods as evidence, I feel like this is illustrated quite well by the case of shirabyōshi, a type of female performer popular in Japan roughly from the second half of the Heian period to the late Kamakura period.

A 20th century depiction of a shirabyōshi (wikimedia commons)

They performed essentially in male formal wear, and with swords at their waists; their performance was outright called a “male dance” (Roberta Strippoli, Dancer, Nun, Ghost, Goddess. The Legend of Giō and Hotoke in Japanese Literature, Theater, Visual Arts, and Cultural Heritage, p. 28). Genpei jōsuiki nonetheless states that famous shirabyōshi were essentially the Japanese answer to the most famous historical Chinese beauties like Wang Zhaojun or Yang Guifei (Dancer, Nun…, p. 27-28). In other words, while the shirabyōshi crossdressed, they were simultaneously held to be paragons of femininity.

Putting crossdressing aside, it’s worth noting women taking masculine roles are additionally attested in legal context in ancient Mesopotamia, though only in an incredibly specific scenario. A man who lacked male heirs could essentially legally declare his daughter a son, so that she would be able to have the privileges as a man would with regards to inheritance. For example, in a text from Emar a certain mr. Aḫu-ṭāb formally made his daughter Alnašuwa his heir due to having no other descendants, and explained that as a result she will have to be “both male and female” (NITA ù MUNUS) - effectively both a son and a daughter - to keep the process legitimate. Once Alnašuwa got married, her newfound status as a son of her father was legally transferred to her husband, though. Evidently no supernatural powers were involved at any stage, only an uncommon, but fully legitimate, legal procedure (My Men Have…, p. 370-372). It should be noted that when male by proxy, Alnašuwa was explicitly not expected to perform any military roles - her father only placed such an exception on potential grandsons (My Men Have…, p. 370). Therefore, the temporary masculine role she was granted was arguably not the same as the sort of masculinity curses were supposed to take away, or the sort Inanna could claim for herself to a degree.

Luminous beards and genderfluid planets: the astral Inanna (and her peers)

A standard Mesopotamian depiction of the planet Venus (Dilbat) on a late Kassite boundary stone (wikimedia commons)

Male in the morning, female in the evening (or the other way round)?

While the inquiry into Inanna’s military aspect revealed a fair amount of evidence for gender nonconformity, it would be disingenuous on my part to end the article on just that. A slightly different phenomenon is documented with regards to her astral side - or perhaps with regards to the astral side of multiple deities, to be more precise.

To begin with, in Mesopotamian astrology Venus (Dilbat) was one of the two astral bodies which were described as possessing two genders, the other being Mercury (Erica Reiner, Astral Magic in Babylonia, p. 6; interestingly, it doesn’t seem any deity associated with Mercury acquired this characteristic unless you want to count a possible late case from outside Mesopotamia). The primary sources indicate that this reflected the fact Venus is both the morning star and the evening star, though there was no agreement between ancient astronomers which one of them was feminine and which masculine (Ulla Koch-Westenholz, Mesopotamian Astrology. An Introduction to Babylonian and Assyrian Celestial Divination, p. 40). We even have a case of a single astrologer, a certain Nabû-ahhe-eriba, alternating between both options in his personal letters (p. 126). It needs to be pointed out that while some interest in stars and planets might already be attested in Early Dynastic sources, its scope was evidently quite limited and astrology didn’t develop yet (Mesopotamian Astrology…, p. 32). No astrological texts predate the Old Babylonian period, and most of the early ones are preoccupied with the moon (p. 36-37), though the earliest evidence for astrological interest in Venus are roughly contemporary with them (p. 40). Astronomical observations of this planet were certainly already conducted for divinatory purposes during the reign of Ammisaduqa, and by the seventh century BCE experts were well familiar with its cycle and made predictions on this basis (p. 126).

Inanna’s association with Venus predates the dawn of astrology by well over a millennium. It likely goes back all the way up to the Uruk period - if not earlier, but that sort of speculation is moot because you can’t talk about Mesopotamian theology with no textual sources, and these are fundamentally not something available before the advent of writing. The earliest evidence are archaic administrative texts which separately record offerings for Inanna hud, “Inanna the morning” and Inanna sig, “Inanna the evening” (Inanna and Ishtar…, p. 334-335). However, it is impossible to tell if this was already reflected in any sort of ambiguity or fluidity of gender. It also needs to be noted the archaic text records two more epithets, Inanna NUN, possibly “princely Inanna” (p. 334; this is actually the single oldest one) and Inanna KUR, possibly a forerunner of later title ninkurkurra, “lady of the lands” (p. 335). Therefore, Inanna was arguably already more than just a deity associated with Venus.

It’s up for debate to which degree an astral body was seen as identical with the corresponding deity in later periods (Spencer J. Allen, The Splintered Divine. A Study of Ištar, Baal, and Yahweh Divine Names and Divine Multiplicity in the Ancient Near East, p. 41-42). There is evidence that Inanna and the planet Venus could be viewed as separate, similarly to how the moon observed in the sky could be treated as distinct from the moon god Sin (p. 40). The most commonly cited piece of evidence is that astrological texts fairly consistently employ the name Dilbat to refer to the planet instead of Inanna’s name or one of the logograms used to represent it, like the numeral 15 (p. 42).

Regardless of these concerns, one specific tidbit pertaining to astrological comments on Venus is held as particularly important for possible ambiguity or fluidity of Inanna’s gender, and even lead to arguments that masculine depictions might be out there: the planet can be described as bearded (Astral Magic…, p. 6). Omens attesting this are most notably listed in the compendium Iqqur īpuš (Erica Reiner, David Pingree, Babylonian Planetary Omens vol. 3, p. 10-11). it should be noted that the planet is referred to only as Dilbat in this context (see ex. Babylonian Planetary…, p. 105 for an example). I’m only aware of two texts where this feature is transferred to the corresponding deity: the syncretic hymn to Nanaya and Ashurbanipal’s hymn to Ishtar of Nineveh. Is the beard really a beard, though? Not necessarily, as it turns out.

The passage from the hymn of Ashurbanipal has been recently discussed by Takayoshi M. Oshima and Alison Acker Gruseke (She Walks in Beauty: an Iconographic Study of the Goddess in a Nimbus, p. 62-63). They point out that ultimately there are no certain iconographic representations of bearded Ishtar. There are a few proposed ones on cylinder seals but this is a minority position relying on doubtful exegesis of every strand of hair in sight; no example has anything resembling the “classic” Mesopotamian beard. I’ll return to this problem in a bit.

In any case, the authors of the aforementioned paper argue the key to interpreting the passage is the fact that the reference to the beard (or rather beards in the plural) occurs in an enumeration of strictly astral, luminous characteristics, like being “clothed in brilliance” (namrīrī ḫalāpu). Furthermore, they identify a parallel in the Great Hymn to Shamash: the rays of the sun are described as “beards” (ziqnāt), and occur in parallel with “splendor” (šalummatu) and “lights” (namrīrū). Therefore, they assume the “beard” might be a metaphorical term for a ray of light, rather than facial hair. This would match actually attested depictions - in the first millennium BCE, especially in Assyria, images of a goddess surrounded by rays of light or a large halo of sorts are very common.

A goddess surrounded by a halo on a Neo-Assyrian seal (wikimedia commons)

Perhaps most importantly, this interpretation is also confirmed by the astronomical texts which kickstarted the discussion. The phrase ziqna zaqānu, “to have a beard”, is explained multiple times as reflection of an unusual luminosity when applied to Venus. The authors additionally argue that it is possible the use of the term “beard” was originally tied to the triangular portions of the emblems of Inanna and her twin (which indeed represent the luminosity of Venus and the sun) to explain why a plurality of “beards” is relatively common in the discussed descriptions (p. 64).

As I said before, the second example is a hymn to Nanaya. It’s easily one of my favorite works of Mesopotamian literature, and a few years ago it kickstarted my interest in its “protagonist”, but tragically most of it is completely irrelevant to this article. The gist of it is fairly simple: the entire composition is written in first person, and in each strophe Nanaya claims the prerogatives of another deity before reasserting herself: “still I am Nanaya” (Goddesses in Context…, p. 116-117). The “borrowed” attributes vary from abstract cosmic powers to breast size. The deities they are linked with range from the most major members of the pantheon (Inanna, Gula, Ishara, Bau…) through spouses of major deities (Shala, Damkina…) to obscure oddities (Manzat, the personified rainbow); there’s even one who’s otherwise entirely unknown, Šuluḫḫītum (for a full table see Erica Reiner’s A Sumero-Akkadian Hymn of Nanâ, p. 232).

As expected, the strophe relevant to the current topic is the one focused on Inanna, in which Nanaya proudly exclaims “I have a beard (ziqna zaqānu) in Babylon”, in between claiming to have “heavy breasts in Daduni” (Reiner notes this is not actually an attested attribute of Inanna, and suggests the line might be a pun on the name of the city mentioned in it, Daduni, and the word dādu) and appropriating Inanna’s family tree for herself (A Sumero-Akkadian…, p. 233).

A possible late depiction of Nanaya (wikimedia commons)

It needs to be stressed that Nanaya’s gender shows no signs of ambiguity anywhere; quite the opposite, she was the “quintessence of womanhood“ (Olga Drewnowska-Rymarz, Mesopotamian Goddess Nanāja, p. 156). I would argue the most notable case of something along the lines of gender nonconformity in a source focused on her occurs in the sole known example of a love poem starring her and her sparsely attested Old Babylonian spouse Muati. 

Muati is asked to intercede with Nanaya on behalf of a petitioner (Before the Muses…, p. 160), which usually was the role performed of the wife of a major male deity (or by Ninshubur in Inanna’s case; Goddesses in Context…, p. 273). Sadly, despite recently surveying most publications mentioning Muati I haven’t found any substantial discussion of this unique passage, and I’m not aware of any parallels involving other couples where the wife was a more important deity than the husband (like Ninisina and Pabilsag).

A further issue for the beard passage is that Nanaya had no connection to Venus to speak of -  she could be described as luminous, but she was only compared to the sun, the moon, and unspecified stars (Mesopotamian Goddess Nanāja, p. 153-155).

Given that the hymn most likely dates to the early first millennium BCE (Goddesses in Context…, p. 116), yet another problem for the older interpretation is that the city of Babylon at this point in time is probably the single worst place for seeking any sort of gender ambiguity when it comes to Inanna.

After the end of the Kassite period, Babylon became the epicenter of Marduk-centric theological ventures which famously culminated in the composition of Enuma Elish. What is less well known is that as a part of the same process, attempts were made to essentially fuse Bēlet-Bābili (“lady of Babylon”) - the main (but not only) local form of Inanna, regarded as distinct from Inanna of Uruk (the “default” Inanna) - with Zarpanitu (The Pantheon…, p. 75-76). Zarpanitu was effectively the definition of an indistinct spouse of another deity - there’s not much to say about her character other than that she was Marduk’s wife (Goddesses in Context…, p. 92-93). Accordingly, it is hard to imagine that the contemporary “lady of Babylon” would be portrayed as bearded.

During the reign of Nabu-shuma-ishkun in the eighth century BCE an attempt to extend the new dogma to Inanna of Uruk was made, though this was evidently considered too much for contemporary audiences. Multiple sources display varying degrees of opposition to replacement of Inanna in the Eanna by a goddess who didn’t belong there, presumably either Zarpanitu or at the very least Bēlet-Bābili after “Zarpanituification” so severe she no longer bore a sufficient resemblance to her Urukuean colleague (The Pantheon…, p. 76-77). Inanna of Uruk was restored during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, who curiously affirmed that her temple was temporarily turned into the sanctuary of an “inappropriate goddess” (The Pantheon…, p. 131). However, the Marduk-centric ventures left a lasting negative impression in Uruk nonetheless, and in the long run lead to quite extreme reactions, culminating in the establishment of an active cult of Anu for the first time, but that’s another story (I might consider covering it in detail if there’s interest).

To go back to the hymn to Nanaya one last time, it’s interesting to note that a single copy seems to substitute ziqna zaqānu for zik-ra-[...], possibly a leftover of zikrāku, “manly”. Takayoshi M. Oshima and Alison Acker Gruseke presume this is only a scribal mistake, since this heavily damaged exemplar is rife with typos in general (She Walks…, p. 63), though I’m curious if perhaps a reference to the military character of Inanna herself or Annunitum was meant. This would line up with evidence from Babylon to a certain degree, since through the first millennium BCE Annunitum was worshiped there in her own temple (Goddesses in Context…, p. 105-106). However, in the light of what is known about this unique variant, it’s best to assume that it is indeed a typo and the hymn simply refers to luminosity. 

While no textual sources earlier (or later, for that matter) than the two hymns discussed above attribute a beard to Inanna (Zainab Bahrani, Women of Babylon. Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia, p. 182), the most commonly cited example of a seal with a supposedly bearded depiction is considerably earlier (Ur III, so roughly 2100 BCE, long before any references to “bearded Venus”). It comes from the Umma area judging from the name and title of its owner, a certain Lu-Igalima, a lumaḫ priest of Ninibgal (“lady of the [temple] Ibgal”, ie. Inanna’s temple in Umma). However, Julia M. Asher-Greve  points out that the beard is likely to be a strand of hair, since contemporary parallels supporting this interpretation are available, for example a seal of a priest of Inanna from Nippur, Lugalengardu. Furthermore, she notes that the seal cutter was seemingly inexperienced, since the detail is all around dodgy, for example Inanna’s foot seems to be merged with the head of the lion she stands on (Goddesses in Context…, p. 208). Looking at the two images side by side, I think this is a compelling argument, since the beard doesn’t really look like, well, a typical Mesopotamian beard, while the hairdo on the Nippur seal is indeed similar:

Both images are screencaps from Goddesses in Context, p. 403; reproduced here for educational purposes only.

While I think the beard-critical arguments are sound, this is not the only possible kind of depiction of Inanna argued to reflect the fluidity of gender attributed to the planet Venus.

Paul-Alain Beaulieu notes that an inscription of Nebuchadnezzar with a dedication to Inanna of Uruk she might be called both the lamassu, ie. “protective goddess”, of Uruk and šēdu, ie. “protective genius”, of Eanna; the latter is an invariably masculine term. However, it is not entirely clear if the lamassu and šēdu invoked here are both really a partially masculine Ishtar, since there’s a degree of ambiguity involved in the concept of protective deity or deities of a temple - while there’s evidence for outright identification with the main deity of a given house of worship, they could also be separate, though closely related, and Beaulieu ultimately remains uncertain which option is more plausible here (The Pantheon…, p. 137-138). He also points out that there’s some late evidence for apotropaic figures with two faces, male and female, which were supposed to represent a šēdu+lamassu pair, but rules out the possibility that these have anything to do with Ishtar, since two faces are virtually never her attribute (The Pantheon…, p. 137).  There is a single possible exception from this rule, but it’s an outlier so puzzling it’s hard to count it. A single Neo-Assyrian text from Nineveh (KAR 307) describes Ishtar of Nineveh (there is a reason why I abstain from using the name Inanna here, as you’ll see later) as four-eyed, which Beaulieu suggests might mean the deity had a male face and a female face. The same source also states that Ishtar of Nineveh is Tiamat and has “upper parts of Bel” and “lower parts of Ninlil”, though (The Pantheon…, p. 137), so it’s probably best not to think of it too much - Tiamat is demonstrably not a figure of much importance in general, let alone in the context of Inanna-centric considerations.

The same text has been interpreted differently by Wilfred G. Lambert. He concludes that it’s ultimately probably an esoteric Enuma Elish commentary and that it might have been cobbled together by a scribe from snippers of unrelated, contradictory sources (Babylonian Creation Myths, p. 245). If correct, this would disprove Beaulieu’s proposal, since the four eyes would simply reflect the description of Marduk (Bel) in EE (tablet I, line 55: “Four were his eyes, four his ears”). I lean towards Lambert’s interpretation myself; the reference to Tiamat is the strongest argument, outside EE and derived commentaries she was basically a non-entity. I’ll go back to the topic of Ishtar of Nineveh later, though - there is a slim possibility that two faces might really be meant, though this would take us further away from Inanna, all the way up to ancient Anatolia.

As a final curiosity it’s worth pointing out that while this is entirely unrelated to the discussed matter, KAR 307 is also the same text which (in)famously states Tiamat has the form of a dromedary. As odd as that sounds, it’s much easier to explain when you realize that the Akkadian term for this animal, when broken down to individual logograms, could be interpreted as “donkey of the sea” - and Tiamat’s name was derived from the ordinary Akkadian word “sea” (Babylonian Creation…, p. 246).

The Red Lady of Heaven, my king

While both the bearded and two faced Inannas are likely to be mirages, this doesn’t mean the dual gender of Venus was not reflected in the world of gods. The result was a bit more complex than the existence of a male Inanna, though.

In addition to being Inanna’s astral attribute, Venus simultaneously could be personified under the name Ninsianna. Ninsianna could be treated as a title of Inanna - this is attested for example in a hymn from the reign of Iddin-Dagan of Isin  - but unless explicitly stated, should be treated as a separate deity. This is evident especially in sources from Larsa, where the two were worshiped entirely separately from each other (Goddesses in Context…, p. 92).

Ninsianna’s name can be literally translated as “red lady of heaven” (Goddesses in Context…, p. 86), though as I already explained earlier, nin is actually gender neutral - “red lord of heaven” is theoretically equally valid. And, as a matter of fact, it is necessary to employ the latter translation in some cases - an inscription of Rim-Sin I refers to Ninsianna with the firmly masculine title lugal, “king” (Wolfgang Heimpel, Ninsiana, p. 488). 

It seems safe to say that in Ninsianna’s case we’re essentially dealing with a deity who truly was like Venus. Timothy D. Leonard stresses that while frequently employed in past scholarship, the labels “hermaphroditic” and “androgynous” do not describe the phenomenon accurately. What the sources actually present is a deity who switches between a male form and a female one (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 226). In other words, if we are to apply a contemporary label, it seems optimal to say Ninsianna was perceived as genderfluid.

Interestingly, though, it seems that Ninsianna’s gender varied by location as well (Goddesses in Context…, p. 92). The worship of feminine Ninsianna is attested for example in Nippur (Goddesses in Context…, p. 101) and Uruk (Goddesses in Context…, p. 126), masculine - in Sippar-Amnanum, Girsu and Ur (Ninsiana, p. 488-489). No study I went through speculated what the reasons behind this situation might have been. Was Ninsianna’s gender locally viewed as less flexible than the discussed theological texts indicate? Were specific sanctuaries dedicated only to a specific aspect of this deity - only the “morning” Ninsianna or “evening” Ninsianna? For the time being these questions must remain unanswered in most cases. 

There’s a single case where the preference for feminine Ninsianna was probably influenced by an unparalleled haphazard theological innovation, though - in Isin in the early second millennium BCE the local dynasty lost control over Uruk, and as a result access to royal legitimacy granted symbolically by Inanna. To remedy that, the tutelary goddess of their capital was furnished with similar qualifications through a leap of logic relying on one hand on the close association between Inanna and Ninsianna, and on the other on the phonetic (but not etymological) similarity between the names of Ninisina and Ninsianna (Goddesses in Context…, p. 86). As far as I know, this did not influence the perception of Ninisina’s gender in any shape or form, though.

An interesting extension of the phenomenon of Ninsianna’s gender is this deity’s association with an even more enigmatic figure, Kabta. Only two things can be established about Kabta with certainty: that they were an astral deity, and that they were associated in some way with Ninsianna; even their gender is uncertain (Wilfred G. Lambert, Kabta, p. 284).

It might be worth pointing out that as a result Kabta and Ninsianna seem to constitute the first case of a Mesopotamian deity of variable (Ninsianna) or uncertain (Kabta) gender being referred to with a neutral pronoun in an Assyriological publication - Ryan D. Winters’ commentary on their entries in a variety of god lists employs a singular they (An = Anum…, p. 34):

Wilfred G. Lambert argued that the two were spouses (Kabta, p. 284). More recently the same point has been made by Winters based on Kabta’s placement after Ninsianna in An = Anum, and directly before Dumuzi in an Old Babylonian forerunner of this list (An = Anum…, p. 22). However, I feel obliged to point out that An = Anum, which fairly consistently identifies spouses as such, does not actually specify the nature of the connection between the two. Once the enumeration of Ninsianna’s names finishes, the list simply switches to Kabta’s (An = Anum…, p. 170). 

In another god list, which is rather uncreatively referred to as “shorter An = Anum” due to sharing the first line with its more famous “relative” but lacking its sheer scope, names of Kabta are listed among designations for Inanna’s astral forms, which would have interesting implications for the nature of the supposed relationship between them and Ninsianna (An = Anum…, p. 34). Furthermore, as noted by Jeremiah Peterson, both of them, as well as Kabta’s alternate name Maḫdianna and a further astral deity, Timua, are also glossed as Ištar kakkabi - in this case according to him likely a generic moniker “goddess of the star” as opposed to “Ishtar of the star” - in a variety of lexical lists (God Lists from Old Babylonian Nippur, p. 58). 

In the light of the somewhat confusing evidence summarized above, further inquiries into both Kabta’s character and the nature of the connection between them and Ninsianna are definitely necessary. Assuming that they were spouses, how did theologians who adhered to this view deal with them also being treated as two manifestations of one being instead (I suppose you could easily put a romantic spin on that, to be fair)? Did Kabta’s gender change alongside Ninsianna’s, or perhaps following a different scheme, or was this a characteristic they lacked? Unless new sources emerge, this sadly must remain the domain of speculation.

Ninsianna’s fluid gender also has to be taken into account while discussing one further deity, Pinikir. The discovery of a fragmentary god list in Emar made it possible to establish the latter was regarded as the Hurrian equivalent of the former (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 224; note that there seems to be a typo here, the list is identified as An = Anum but it’s actually the Weidner god list). This deity similarly was understood as a personification of Venus (Piotr Taracha, Religions of Second Millennium Anatolia, p. 99) and was in a certain capacity associated with Inanna - however, as it will become evident pretty quickly these weren’t the only analogies with Ninsianna.

Despite appearing in Emar in Hurrian context, Pinikir actually originated to the east of Mesopotamia, in Elam (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 223). Her name cannot yet be fully explained due to imperfect understanding of Elamite, but it is clear that the suffix -kir is feminine and means “goddess” (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 237; cf. the not particularly creatively named Kiririsha, “great goddess”). Sources from Anatolia recognize Pinikir as an Elamite deity, though direct transfer from one end of the “cuneiform world” to the other is unlikely (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 236). Most likely, Hurrians received Pinikir through Mesopotamian intermediaries in the late third or early second millennium BCE, and later introduced this deity further west (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 237). We know Mesopotamians were aware of her thanks to the god list Anšar = Anum, where the name occurs among what may or may not be an enumeration of deities regarded as Inanna’s foreign counterparts (An = Anum…, p. 36). For the time being it is not possible to track this process directly, though - it’s all educated guesswork.

While as far as I am aware none of the few Elamite sources dealing with Pinikir provide much theological information about her, and none hint at her gender being anything but feminine, Hurro-Hittite texts from Anatolia indicate that at least in this context, like Ninsianna in Mesopotamia, she came to be seen as a genderfluid deity, sometimes counted among gods, sometimes among goddesses (Gary Beckman, The Goddess Pirinkir and her Ritual from Ḫattuša (CTH 644), p. 25). Firmly feminine Pinikir occurs in a ritual text (KUB 34.102) which refers to her in Hurrian as Allai-Pinikir, “lady Pinikir”; interestingly this is the only case where she is provided with an epithet in any Anatolian source (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 211). However, there are examples of ritual texts where Pinikir is listed among male deities (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 229). He is also depicted in the procession of gods in the famous Yazilikaya sanctuary in a rather striking attire:

I know, I know, the state of preservation leaves much to be desired (wikimedia commons) This isn’t just any masculine clothing - the outfit is only shared with two other figures depicted in this sanctuary, the sun god Shimige and the Hittite king (The Goddess Pirinkir…, p. 25-26):

Shimige (left; wikimedia commons) and the king (right; also wikimedia commons)

Piotr Taracha argues that it reflects the attire worn by the Hittite king when he fulfilled his religious duties (Religions of…, p. 89); Pinikir’s isn’t identical - it’s only knee length, like the more standard masculine garments - but the skullcap is pretty clearly the same. He is also winged, which is a trait only shared with the moon god and one more figure (more on them in a bit), and likely reflects celestial associations (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 211). All the same traits are also preserved on a small figurine of Pinikir from the collection of the MET:

A much better preserved masculine Pinikir (MET)

It’s therefore probably safe to say that the male form had a fairly consistent iconography, which furthermore was patterned on what probably was an archetypal image of masculinity to Hurro-Hittite audiences. The king, whose appearance is reflected in Pinikir’s iconography, was, after all, supposed to be not just any man, but rather the foremost example of idealized masculinity (Mary R. Bachvarova, Wisdom of Former Days: The Manly Hittite King and Foolish Kumarbi, Father of the Gods, p. 83-84).

Since we started this section with beards, we may as well end with them - I feel obliged to point out that no matter how clearly described as masculine, neither Ninsianna nor Pinikir were ever described (let alone depicted) as bearded. 

It is difficult for me to estimate to which degree the information about the genderfluidity of Ninsianna and Pinikir can be used to elucidate in which way the association with Venus influenced the perception of Inanna’s gender. However, it seems safe to say the focus on secondary physical characteristics made some authors miss the forest for the trees. I’ll leave it as an open question whether Inanna could be interpreted similarly to her even more Venusian peers, but I’m fairly sure that a metaphorical beard is unlikely to have anything to do with the answer.

Excursus: “the masculinity and femininity of Shaushka”, or when an Ishtar is not Ishtar

Bringing up the masculine Pinikir, and the matter of possible genderfluidity of deities in Mesopotamia and nearby areas, makes it necessary to also discuss Shaushka. The two of them appear mere two lines apart in Anšar = Anum  (An = Anum…, p. 36), though they were not closely associated with each other - rather, they were both deities associated with Inanna who happened to belong to the same cultural milieu.

Mx. Worldwide: the transmission of Shaushka across the cuneiform world

Shaushka was originally the tutelary deity of Nineveh, but the attestations span almost the entire “cuneiform world” - from Nineveh in the north to Lagash in the south, from Hattusa in the west, through Ugarit and various inland Syrian cities all the way up to Arrapha in the east. There are simply too many of them to cover everything here.

The oldest known reference to Shaushka (which doubles as the first reference to the city of Nineveh) occurs in a text from the Ur III period. It’s not very thrilling - it’s only an administrative text mentioning the offering of a sheep made on behalf of the king of the Ur III state (Gary Beckman, Ištar of Nineveh Reconsidered, p. 1). The earliest sources render the name as Shausha; the infix -k- which only starts to appear consistently later on is presumed to be an honorific, or less plausibly a diminutive (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 55-56). Either way, it is agreed it can be translated simply as “the great one” (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 56) - a pretty apt description of its bearer.

Ur III attestations of Shaushka are sparse otherwise: a textile offering in Umma (possibly a garment for a statue), a handful of theophoric names like Ur-Shausha and Geme-Shausha in Lagash, and that’s basically it (Tonia Sharlach, Foreign Influences on the Religion of the Ur III Court, p. 106). Still, it’s probably safe to say it’s one of the examples of a broader pattern of interest in Hurrian religion evident in the courtly documents from this period, and in the appointment of a number of Hurrian diviners to relatively prestigious positions. Whether such experts might have influenced the introduction of Shaushka and other Hurrian deities who entered lower Mesopotamia roughly at the same time (for example Allani from Zimudar or Shuwala from Mardaman) remains an open question (Foreign Influences…, p. 111-114).

A degree of equivalence between Shaushka and Inanna was already recognized in the early second millennium BCE, as evidenced by a tablet from the northern site of Shusharra dated to the reign of Shamshi-Adad which records an offering made to “Ishtar of Nineveh” (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 58). However, it might have happened as early as half a millennium earlier, during the Sargonic period - Gary Beckman suggests the identification between the two might have initially occurred simply due to the importance assigned to Inanna by rulers of the Akkadian Empire (Ištar of Nineveh…, p. 2). 

Furthermore, a number of later Mesopotamian lexical lists label Shaushka as “Ishtar of Subartu” - a common designation for the core Hurrian areas (Ištar of Nineveh…, p. 2). Meanwhile, Hurrians and cultures influenced by them used the name Ishtar as a logogram to represent Shaushka (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 46). Furthermore, they placed Shaushka in Uruk in an adaptation of the Epic of Gilgamesh (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 125). One is forced to wonder if perhaps from the Hurrian interpreter’s perspective Inanna was some sort of foreign Shaushka ersatz, not the other way around.

Despite Shaushka’s origin in the Hurrien milieu of northernmost part of Mesopotamia, the bulk of attestations actually come from Hittite Anatolia (Ištar of Nineveh…, p. 2). Kizzuwatna, a kingdom in southeastern Anatolia, was the middleman in this transmission (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 95). The earliest evidence for Hittite reception of Shaushka is an oracle text from either the late fifteenth or early fourteenth century BCE (Ištar in Ḫatti, p. 84). However, save for the capital, Hattusa, no major cities were ever identified as cult centers of this deity, and they were seemingly worshiped largely within the southern and eastern periphery of the Hittite empire (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 94). Most of the ritual texts Shaushka appears in accordingly appear to have Kizzuwatnean, or at least broadly Hurrian, background (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 87).

Is non-astral genderfluidity possible, or what’s up with Shaushka’s gender?

Probably the most fascinating aspect of Shaushka’s character is the apparent coexistence of a female and a male form of this deity. The best known example of this phenomenon are the Yazilikaya reliefs, where a masculine form, with unique attributes including a robe leaving one leg exposed and wings, marches with the gods (with the handmaidens Ninatta and Kulitta - more on them later - in tow) while a caption accompanying a damaged relief indicates a feminine one was originally depicted in the procession of identically depicted goddesses (The Splintered Divine…, p. 75).

Masculine Shaushka (right) accompanied by Ninatta and Kulitta (wikimedia commons)

A restoration of the procession of goddesses, including feminine Shaushka (wikimedia commons)

A number of epithets applied to Shaushka were similarly explicitly feminine, for instance Hurrian “lady of Nineveh” (allai Ninuwawa) and Hittite “woman of that which is repeatedly spoken” (taršikantaš MUNUS-aš), implicity something like “woman of incantations” (Ištar of Nineveh…, p. 5); magic was apparently understood as a particular competence of this deity (Ištar of Nineveh…, p. 6). There is even a singular case of an incantation being explicitly attributed to Shaushka (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 98). 

Literary texts, chiefly myths from the so-called Kumarbi cycle, generally portray Shaushka as feminine too, and more as a love deity (to be precise, as something along the lines of a heroic equivalent of a femme fatale) rather than as a warlike one (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 85). Mary R. Bachvarova tentatively suggests that a reference to possibly masculine Shaushka might be present in the first of its parts, Song of Going Forth (also known as Song of Kumarbi), which mentions a deity of uncertain gender designated by the logogram KA.ZAL, “powerful”, which she argues has the same meaning as Shaushka’s name (Wisdom of Former…; p. 95 for the text itself, p. 106 for commentary). However, I’m not aware of any subsequent studies adopting this view.

Regardless of the contents of the literary texts available to us presently, Shaushka is explicitly counted among male deities in CTH 712. The enumeration in this ritual text also includes the “femininity and masculinity” of this deity. The male form of Pinikir is there too, though without a separate entry dedicated to any of his attributes or characteristics (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 219). Another example might be less direct: two descriptions of depictions of Shaushka use the terms “helmeted” (kurutawant), which referred to headwear worn by gods, as opposed to “veiled” (ḫupitawant), which referred to the typical headwear of goddesses. This lines up with the relief of masculine Shaushka from Yazilikaya (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 300).

A detail I haven’t seen brought up in any discussion of Shaushka’s gender which I personally think might be relevant to this topic is that their name occurs as a theophoric element both in feminine and masculine Hurrian theophoric names, which is otherwise entirely unheard of. Hurrians evidently were more rigid than Mesopotamians when it comes to theophoric elements in given names, as goddesses occur only in names of women and gods in names of men (Gernot Wilhelm, Name, Namengebung D. Bei den Hurritern, p. 125). 

Interestingly, Hittite sources pertaining to Shaushka offer a parallel to the “genderbending” curse formulas as well (My Men Have…, p. 363-364; note they are actually slightly earlier than the Assyrian examples). In a few cases, including a prayer and military oaths, this deity is implored to deprive foreign adversaries of the Hittite empire of their masculinity and courage, to take away their weapons, and to make them dress like women (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 90).

How did this aspect of Shaushka’s character develop? I’d assume that in contrast with Ninsianna and Pinikir, the influence of astronomical ideas about Venus can probably be ruled out. Beckman stresses that at least in Anatolian context Shaushka was evidently not an astral deity (Ištar of Nineveh…, p. 7). Timothy D. Leonard argues that the wings, which only the male form possesses, likely reflect a celestial role, but he doesn’t explore the point further (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 211). However, he notes that only Pinikir is explicitly identified with Venus in Hurro-Hittite sources, and presumably fulfilled the role of personification of this astral body alone (p. 225). 

Leonard argues that it cannot be established with certainty whether Shaushka  was perceived as capable of taking both male and female forms, as existing simultaneously as a male and female deity (with two bodies, presumably), or if they should be regarded as androgynous. However, he notes that there is no evidence for the recognition of any sort of nonbinary identity in known Hittite sources - so at least implicitly, he assumes the gender of both of the forms would need to be binary (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 298). 

It needs to be noted that the validity of applying the label “androgynous” to Shaushka has already been questioned all the way back in 1980(!) - in the first detailed study of Shaushka’s character and cult ever published, Ilse Wegner argued that in both visual arts and literary texts they are presented either as feminine or masculine, but never is their gender ambiguous (Gestalt und Kult der Ištar-Šawuška in Kleinasien, p. 47). Frans Wiggermann argues that KAR 307, which I already discussed and which describes a single figure with both masculine and feminine traits, might be related to depictions of Shaushka (Mischwesen A…, p. 237; thus I suppose the text would deal with an Ishtar, not with Inanna slash Ishtar herself) but this would quit obviously at best constitute a late exception which could be attributed to very vague familiarity with the deity. 

In addition to the options discussed by Leonard, a further interpretation present in scholarship is possibility is that Shaushka might have been seen primarily as a goddess, but performed a male role in specific context, to be precise when portrayed as a warlike deity (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 301) - in other words, that we are dealing with a similar phenomenon as in the case of Inanna. For instance, Wegner assumed Shaushka was essentially female, and the masculine portrayals merely reflect adoption of masculine-coded character traits and attributes as opposed to actual transformation into a male figure (p. 47-48). Gary Beckman similarly suggests that Shaushka was a goddess, and that the male form, which he likewise considers to be a military aspect, was interpreted as crossdressing, as opposed to an actual shift in gender (Shawushka, p. 1). Leonard accepts the possibility that the male form might reflect the fact that warfare was seen as an exclusively masculine pursuit in Anatolia, though since there are multiple sources where goddesses whose gender never shifted in any way appear on the battlefield he stresses it’s not impossible such gender norms did not necessarily apply to deities (Ištar in Ḫatti, p. 299-300).

Out of all the possible interpretations I personally find the possibility that Shaushka was imagined to shift between a male and a female deity to be the most convincing - in other words, that they were viewed as genderfluid, similarly to Ninsianna, though almost definitely for different, presently impossible to determine, reasons. However, since the matter is far from settled, I opted to generally use neutral forms across this section of the article - I hope this doesn’t make it too confusing. Can any of the information pertaining to Shaushka be applied to Inanna as well? I don’t really think so. For starters, no source goes out of its way to depict a feminine and a masculine form of Inanna in the same location, so I would argue that it is significant this is something attested for her counterpart - a sign that the latter’s masculine identity was more pronounced. Note that this is only my personal impression, though, and it might not fully hold to academic scrutiny, not to mention that the emergence of new sources might invalidate it.

Beyond Inanna: Shaushka’s other connections

While I focused on the connection between Shaushka and Inanna, it’s necessary to point out that the former was more than just a “foreign counterpart”. As a deity worshiped for well over a millennium, they amassed their own complex network of deities - often completely distinct from Inanna. For instance, it’s hard to find a parallel to Shaushka’s position as the sibling (and, in myths, main ally) of the head of the Hurrian pantheon, Teshub (not least because he represented a somewhat different model of a head god than Mesopotamian Enlil and Anu). However, to do this matter justice I’d basically need a separate article. Due to the scope of this treatment of Shaushka, I will limit myself only to a small number of figures they were associated with - either because they have something to do with their gender, or because they are additionally in one way or another connected to Inanna.

In Hittite context, Shaushka came to be closely associated with an Anatolian deity, Anzili (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 112). Since the latter’s character is poorly known (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 113), the reasoning behind the equivalence between them is opaque (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 119). Timothy D. Leonard tentatively proposes that Anzili’s name might be grammatically masculine and that it originally designated a god who later came to be seen as a goddess (as reflected in available sources), or that similarly as in the case of Shaushka both a male and a female form could be attributed to them (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 117). 

Untangling this problem is complicated further by the fact that Anzili’s name is used simply as a Hittite translation of Shaushka in both ritual and literary texts in which the deity of Nineveh is undeniably meant, down to being explicitly referred to with titles pertaining to this city - where Anzili obviously wasn’t actually worshiped (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p.120-121). Through the association with Shaushka, Anzili’s name even got to be used to translate the name of their Mesopotamian counterpart a few times - the Hittite translation of King of Battle, the most famous epic about Sargon of Akkad, refers to his divine backer as… “Anzili of Akkad” (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 125). Ultimately the translation was not entirely consistent, though, and texts written in Hittite where Shaushka’s name is nonetheless rendered phonetically, leaving no possibility that it was translated as Anzili, are also known (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 126).

Next to Inanna and Anzili, the deities probably the most commonly associated with Shaushka were their handmaidens Ninatta and Kulitta (Ištar of Nineveh…, p. 6). They could be portrayed as divine musicians (Gestalt und Kult…, p. 78), but also as warlike deities (John MacGinnis, The Gods of Arbail, p. 109). Ilse Wegner went as far as suggesting the phrase “right weapon of Shaushka” was an apposition of the pair, though that’s obviously speculative (Gestalt und Kult…, p. 79). 

Further information about their role is provided in a hymn to Shaushka (CTH 717). They are grouped in it with two other handmaidens, Šintal-irti (“seven-tongues”) and Ḫamra-zunna. The four of them are supposed to look after households which Shaushka views favorably, so that their inhabitants can live in harmony. Meanwhile, four other handmaidens, Ali, Ḫalzari, Taruwi and Šinanda-dukarni, are entrusted with making people in households which Shaushka resents quarrel with each other (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 120-122). It has been argued that this reflects the two aspects of Shaushka’s character - as a love deity in the case of the first four handmaidens, and as a warlike one in the case of the second group (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 123) - but I am skeptical if this can be easily reconciled with the fact Ninatta and Kulitta appear with them no matter which side of them is in the spotlight. 

Ninatta and Kulitta also represent probably the strongest case of Shaushka leaving a mark on their Mesopotamian counterpart. In the Neo-Assyrian period, they appear as members of the entourage of the latter not only in Nineveh, but also in Arbela and Assur under “Akkadianized” forms of their names, Ninittu and Kulittu (The Gods of Arbail, p. 109)

While Inanna had an extensive court - something that for mysterious reasons is not acknowledged online or even in publications aimed at general audiences (to use a recent example - even an a-list example like Nanaya comes up less times in Louise Pryke’s Ishtar than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who, as far as I am aware, is not attested in any cuneiform texts) - I’m not aware of any instance of Ninatta and Kulitta being explicitly identified as counterparts of any of its members, though. Perhaps the fact that some of the cities in which they are attested were originally Hurrian has something to do with it - they weren’t introduced there as new additions, it was the Mesopotamian goddess who was superimposed over their original superior (The Gods of Arbail, p. 112).

Madonna-whore complex and beyond: (the modern reception of) Inanna as a love deity

After the brief detour focused on Shaushka, it is time to go back to Inanna - specifically to the most major aspect of her character I largely left out before, her association with love and all that entails.

As I already said, the oldest available texts affirming this was one of her prerogatives are younger than these linking her with war, let alone these hinting at her astral role. Regardless of when this aspect of her character first developed, it took until the Ur III period for it to take the center stage (Inanna and Ishtar…, p. 338). Simultaneously, it is by far the most well known today, to the point you often get the impression people barely know there’s more to her. Tonia M. Sharlach notes that even in scholarship there is discussion over whether this aspect of her character isn’t perhaps overestimated to a degree (An Ox of One’s Own. Royal Wives and Religion at the Court of the Third Dynasty of Ur, p. 268). 

At least when it comes to the spread of this misconception online, one is tempted to ask to which degree pretending this is the only thing about Inanna that matters amounts to the need to present her as some sort of demo version of Aphrodite, with limited, if any, concern for Mesopotamia.

None of these phenomena is why I kept it for last, though - even if I do agree that viewing Inanna simply as a “love goddess” is misguided at best. My decision simply reflects the fact that the relevant sources portray Inanna probably at her least gender nonconforming . As argued by Bendt Alster, in some cases in love poetry it would essentially be possible to substitute her and Dumuzi for an average young human couple without the need to make any adjustments (Sumerian Love Songs, p. 78).  Ultimately, these works reflect fairly normative ideas of courtship, romance and sex, though with a clear female focus (Frans Wiggermann, Sexuality A. In Mesopotamia, p. 412). The portrayal of love and eroticism in them has been described as “playful”, in contrast with the more blunt genres like potency incantations, or even with portrayal of sex in myths like Enki and Ninhursag (Jerrold S. Cooper, Gendered Sexuality in Sumerian Love Poetry, p. 92-94). Many of them are honestly an enjoyable read, as long as you are willing to engage with heavy use of assorted metaphors in descriptions of sex (date syrup, lettuce and agricultural activities are particularly abundant). Here is a fairly representative example:

The Song of the Lettuce (ETCSL)

There isn’t really much to say beyond that - they’re a fascinating topic in their own right, but they are largely irrelevant for the matter this article investigates.

Frans Wiggermann, an author whose work I generally value highly, made the peculiar argument that erotic poetry in which Inanna is the more active side and her goal is sexual gratification might reflect attribution of masculine traits to her and proceeded to argue every depiction of sex where the woman tops is ought to be related to this phenomenon (Sexuality A…, p. 417-418). He simultaneously raises an interesting point that these representations of Inanna might have been supposed to justify sex without the aim of reproduction. It is unclear to me how it would “allow minorities a place under the sun”, though (p. 418), as the sex scenes in relevant compositions are invariably straight.

While I am unsure about some aspects of Wiggermann’s argument, I should stress that I think it was made in good faith. Sadly this can’t be said about much of the other scholarship pertaining to Inanna and sexuality, and especially the intersection of the topic of sexuality and gender.  This matter has been investigated in depth by Zainab Bahrani in the early 2000s already. She argues that publications which overestimate the ambiguity of Inanna’s gender (which typically employ hardly applicable labels like “hermaphrodite”; she singles out Rivkah Harris’ Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and a Coincidence of Opposites and Brigitte Groenberg’s Die sumerisch-akkadische Inanna/Ištar: Hermaphroditos? as relatively recent examples), in particular while emphasizing her erotic character, are essentially a leftover a fear of nefarious seductresses common in popular culture of fin-de-siècle Europe, for example in symbolist paintings (Women of Babylon…, p. 146).

Jen Delville's The Idol of Perversity, a fairly standard example of the sort of symbolist painting Bahrani meant, a representation of the fear of "unquenched bestial desires of a woman" (wikimedia commons)

I think it’s also a valid point that traits like assertiveness or a quick temper could very well be assigned to a femme fatale, and are not necessarily an indication of any ambiguity of gender (Women of Babylon…, p. 144), though I don’t think every aspect of Inanna’s characters needs to be subsumed under the erotic, and recent publications focused on her military role and its intersection with gender are much more nuanced, as you could see for yourself earlier.

Bahrani also highlights that publications she criticizes - both historical and modern - treat transsexuality, crossdressing and various adjacent phenomena and (male) homosexuality as basically one and the same (Women of Babylon…, p. 145; I will come back to this). However, I feel she falls into this trap herself to a small degree when it comes to women, as she appears to link the dubious Inanna scholarship  overestimating the ambiguity of her gender and the phenomenon of various femme fatale figures being portrayed as bisexual for voyeuristic purposes, and to Orientalist art at the very least implying lesbian activities (Women of Babylon…, p. 146). I am not aware of any actual publication dealing with Inanna or relevant phenomena (of any quality) which would go into this direction, though.

I also disagree with treating Inanna as unique compared to other goddesses just because she is not primarily portrayed as a wife or mother (Women of Babylon…, p. 149) - the median Mesopotamian goddess was a personification of a profession or the interests of a city or both, arguably; major members of the pantheon like Nanshe, Nisaba, Ninmug, Nungal or numerous medicine goddesses were hardly defined by either of these two roles, even if they could be, indeed, portrayed as wives or mothers in a capacity Inanna was not.

Most importantly, I disagree with invoking Freud and his disciples (positively, for clarity) to bolster arguments (Women of Babylon…, p. 153-154).

Still, I do think the core concerns raised by Bahrani are more than sound. The next section will sadly make that painfully clear.

Sexualization of lamenting

The validity of some of Bahrani’s criticism is pretty evident just based on the survey of past literature on the matter of the assinnu (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 83-84), a type of religious specialist or performer who you already met earlier in the subsection of this article dedicated to military curses. It would appear that the authors most keen on far reaching speculations about their gender identity and sexuality are probably some of the least qualified to deal with this matter, and lo and lo and behold, typically blur together being gay, nonbinary and any form of gender nonconformity. 

Furthermore, even though texts from Mari explicitly link the assinnu with Annunitu (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 94) - the single most straightforwardly warlike Inanna-ish deity of them all, whose very name, “the skirmisher”, refers to combat - a peculiar obsession with rendering their role into something innately sexual (or rather lascivious) just because of their association with Inanna, appears to be a distinct trend. It  intersects with the former issue; after all, it is known that anything but being a cis straight person who is a paragon of gender conformity is innately inappropriately (or even “abnormally”, as one of the past evaluations cited by Zsolnay critically put it) sexual.

For what it’s worth, there is some evidence that the assinnu were men who - at least in certain situations - crossdressed and played lyres (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 86). In an Old Babylonian hymn I’ve already mentioned, this is said to take place during a festival which also involved female performers who for this occasion dressed up in a masculine way and carried weapons, who are not described with any specific technical term (The Man is Like…, p. 6). Given the context of this mention, I feel the jury's out on whether this was universal, or merely a specific local festival, especially in the light of other evidence for the activities of the assinnu, though. The participation in a celebration which involved crossdressing could explain why late lexical lists - first examples only come from the Neo-Assyrian period, some 1000 years after the Mariote and Old Babylonian attestations - sometimes offer UR.SAL as the logographic writing of assinnu. This combination of signs can be interpreted in different ways - some probably can be ruled out since they refer to female animals (canines and big cats), not to people; this led to the common interpretation as “feminine man” or “woman-man” based on other sign values. Zsolnay disagrees with it, and tentatively proposes something like “servant of women” (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 85)., though this might be an overabundance of skepticism.

However, Zsolnay’s position might not be entirely unwarranted. She correctly points out lexical lists are not necessarily reliable when it comes to synonyms of technical terms, such as religious titles (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 86). Furthermore, the assinnu seemingly were famous for performing a song titled “Battle is my game, warfare is my game” (mēlilī qablu mēlilī tāḫāzu; presumably purposely a nod to terms often  used to describe Inanna’s warlike characteristics). They also danced the “whirl dance” (gūštu) - which likely also had belligerent connotations, and which quite importantly is the main topic of the poem Agušaya, which entirely focuses on Inanna as a warlike deity (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 93).  Yet more important is the fact that UR.SAL is not the only combination of logograms which could be used to render the term assinnu. The other option, SAG.UR.SAĜ, literally means “foremost hero” - in other words, it does appears to point at some sort of “warlike” or, to be more precise, “heroic” role  (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 85). Zsolnay accordingly concludes that the ordinary role of the assinnu was most likely that of an exaggerated “heroic strongman” performing war dances, and that with time an association between these specialists and festivals associated with the military aspect of Inanna (and similar deities like Annunitum) developed due to obvious similarities (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 98).

Nonetheless, just due to the association with Inanna combined with possibly vaguely gender nonconforming behavior (I will not attempt to evaluate whether it was a staple of their activities or only one of the celebrations they took part with), they came to be described in questionable scholarship as “temple prostitutes” (not an actually attested insitution, though it is evident we are dealing with a multi level conflation of crossdressing, being gay or trans, and sex work based on quotes from previous studies provided) whose very existence simultaneously must have terrified the general populace (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 85). 

I feel obliged to point out in a footnote Zsolnay states that after finishing her article she was informed by a reviewer similar conclusions about assinnu have been independently reached by Julia Assante in Bad Girls and Kinky Boys? The Modern Prostituting of Ishtar, Her Clergy and Her Cults. Sadly, while I am quite sympathetic to the latter author’s valiant struggle against the myth of “sacred prostitution” and related problems, her methodology is much more flawed than Zsolnay’s, and at times it feels like she herself falls into some of the pitfalls she correctly points out in other studies. I also feel obliged to warn you that for reasons uncertain to me, Assante at some point in the 2010s abandoned academic work and became a medium. Therefore, I would engage with her publications cautiously, to put it very lightly.

There’s at least one point Assante raises which warrants further consideration, though (even if she phrases it very differently than I would). She notes it is peculiar that any individuals whose gender might have been perceived as non-normative or ambiguous, or whose gender is unclear, are automatically presumed to be AMAB, and the possibility that women might have been gender non-conforming, or that people whose gender identity might have differed from Mesopotamian norms were AFAB, is not considered seriously. As an example, she points out that a passage according to which an enigmatic cultic official, the pilipili, received a weapon “as if she were male” sparked little, if any discussion (Bad Girls…, p. 36). This is definitely agreeable, and if nothing else a good start for further inquiries, considering no detailed studies of the pilipili alone have been conducted, as far as I am aware.

It might be worth noting that in the satirical Old Babylonian literary text The Old Man and the Young Girl the second of the eponymous character tricks her way into temporarily reversing gender norms through a royal court verdict, which prompts her to encourage other women to “behave like the pilipili” to celebrate her victory (Jana Matuszak, A Complete Reconstruction, New Edition and Interpretation of the Sumerian Morality Tale ‘The Old Man and the Young Girl’, p.192-193). While more evidence would be necessary to make a genuinely strong case, the possibility that the pilipili were women perceived as gender non-conforming does seem compelling to me on this basis - so, I suppose, credit to Assante in that regard, even if her treatment of the matter leaves a bit to be desired. It’s worth noting a similar proposal about the identity of the pilipili has recently been advanced by Sophus Helle based on the same passage Assante cited (Enheduana. The Complete Poems of the World's First Author, p. 158).

On a further related note, as a pure curiosity it’s worth mentioning that a single lexical list, Malku, lists the feminine form of assinnu - assinnatum - who never sparked the sort of discussion her counterpart did. It should be noted that this label is explained in this context as a synonym of ugbabtum, a fairly widespread type of priestesses (attestations are spread virtually everywhere from Terqa to Susa) involved in the cults of various deities (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 86). As far as I am aware, this is an isolated example, so for the time being it’s impossible to determine if assinnatum ever designated a distinct class of performers or cultic personnel or if it was a scribal invention. I’ll refrain from any speculation about whether it might have anything to do with the women who appear alongside assinnu in the Old Babylonian hymn discussed earlier.

To go back to the assinnu themselves one last time, a further thing to note is that sometimes far reaching dubious conclusions are drawn based not even on information pertaining to these performers themselves, but rather the gala and an enigmatic class of cultic officials presumably involved in mourning, the kurgarrû. However, while the latter two occur together quite often in literary texts (recall that the two clay beings in Inanna’s Descent bear the names Kurgarra - an obvious variant of kurgarrû - and Galatura, ie. “little gala”; however, note as well that gala also commonly occur alongside ašipu), there is very little evidence for any actual close association between them and assinnu - they only occur side by side in a single literary text, the lament Uru-Amirabi (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 91).

The gala (Akkadian kalû; not to be confused with galla, either literally a “gendarme” or town guard, or a type of demon fulfilling an analogous role in the underworld) themselves warrant some further discussion, as they are probably the most egregious example of the phenomenon discussed in this section of the article.

The primary role of the gala was performing various types of hymns, prayers and laments in emesal, a dialect of Sumerian (Paul Delnero, How To Do Things With Tears. Ritual Lamenting in Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 41). Through the third and second millennia BCE, gala most commonly occur alongside temple singers (nāru), for reasons which should be self explanatory, while in the first millennium BCE - alongside āšipu, a type of exorcist, which reflected the involvement of both groups in scholarship (Uri Gabbay, The kalû Priest and kalûtu Literature in Assyria, p. 116).

The gender identity of the gala is a subject of much debate. It might have been unique to them (in other words, they were nonbinary, with gala being both a professional designation and gender identity) or alternatively they might have been men who engaged in broadly speaking gender nonconforming behavior (How To Do…, p. 109). I am not going to attempt to convince you one option or the other is more plausible, I personally don’t think the matter will ever be possible to fully settle unless texts written by gala themselves going in depth into how they perceived themselves ever emerge. Obviously, we also have to take into account what exactly being a gala entailed varied between time periods and locations.

The only thing that can be said for sure is that the gala were not regarded as women. This seems to be an entirely online misconception, though one with an enormous reach - a post making similar claims garnered some 40k notes on this site recently. Said post also stated that they underwent “gender affirming surgery”; it needs to be noted that the status of the gala - or any other type of clergy - was in fact not attributed to any medical procedure (and I don’t think Magnus Hirschfeld, who pioneered gender affirming surgery and deserves more credit than he gets for it, lived in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia…). Obviously, this is not a denial of the possibility the gala weren’t cis (to put in in modern terms) - but it seems beyond credulous to both claim their identity depended on a medical procedure alone, and to project a fairly recent accomplishment for which a genuinely heroic maverick should be credited into incredibly distant past. I don’t think we need a trans version of “ancient matriarchy” mirages, personally.

However, ultimately the main misconception about gala is that they were “priests of Inanna” - and various mortifying hot takes emerge specifically from that. Especially online, more or less haphazard attempts are made to prove that, despite the plentiful evidence for what being a gala entailed, their role - and the roles of any even just tangentially related religious personnel - was innately sexual, since it was tied to Inanna (we have such choice tidbits as “males who engage in transgendered or prostitute behavior”, courtesy of Patrick Taylor, The Gala and the Gallos, p. 176; unclear to me how these labels are in any shape or form interchangeable). 

To put it bluntly: it seems like to some the fact the gala might have been, broadly speaking, lgbt (or just gender non-conforming) is in itself something sexual, much like the possibly gender nonconforming performance of the assinnu. 

What differentiates this view of the gala from similar faulty opinions about the assinnu is that I think at least online the intent often isn’t malicious - it is not wrong to hope someone in the past was similar (as I understand, the underlying assumption behind many misguided post is that the gala were trans women). However, sadly the underlying motivation of the authors whose takes end up laundered to teenagers online this way is ultimately an example of the same phenomenon which, in a more extreme form, leads to various suspicious groups calling for removal of the tamest possible literature for teenagers from libraries because a gay or trans character appears.

A further problem is that while the assinnu indeed occur chiefly in association with Inanna, the gala were not innately associated with her (and especially not with her sexual side) - referring to them as “priests of Inanna” is a misconception at best, and outright malevolent at worst (in bad faith cases, the logic follows what Bahrani described pretty closely). They were actually present in the cults of numerous deities, most of whom were paragons of gender conformity and had no sexual aspect to speak of - in other words, whatever the identity of the gala was, it was disconnected from the identity of the deity they performed for. Every single major temple dedicated to a city deity had a “chief gala” among its staff. Such an official oversaw the activities of other gala employed by it, but also took part in day to day economic activities of the temple, like managing prebends (How To Do…, p. 110). To go through all of the available evidence would take too much space, so I will only list a handful of particularly notable examples.

There was a “chief gala” among the staff of Ninurta’s main temple Eshumesha in Nippur, as attested in a list of provisions where this official appears next to a “chief singer” (Wolfgang Heimpel, Balang Gods, p. 583). In Old Babylonian Kish another “chief gala” was the second most important religious official in service of Zababa, with only the temple administrator ranking higher (Walther Sallaberger, Zababa, p. 165). A further “chief gala” resided in the temple of Sin in Harran, as attested in sources from the Neo-Assyrian period; the holders of this office were tasked with sending astronomical reports to the kings of Assyria (Steven W. Holloway, Aššur is king! Aššur is king! Religion in the exercise of power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, p. 409). A “chief gala”, as well as a number of regular gala, were also part of the staff of the temple of Nanshe in NINA (reading uncertain; Tell Zurghul) in the Early Dynastic state of Lagash (Gebhard J. Selz, Untersuchungen zur Götterwelt des altsumerischen Stadtstaates von Lagaš, p. 205-206).

It’s important to note that the arts of the gala and the knowledge transferred among members of this profession - kalûtu - were associated with Ea, not with Inanna; the closest parallel are, once again, the arts of the āšipu (The kalû Priest…, p. 116). However, it would be disingenuous to call them “clergy of Ea” - I’m just highlighting they had no specific connection with Inanna. Stressing the lack of any unique degree of connection between her and the gala is not supposed to be an argument against inquiries into their gender identity, either - though I do advise to be cautious which authors are consulted. 

Maternal obsessions: do deities even follow gender roles?

While I dedicated a lot of space to warnings about questionable motivation behind some arguments pertaining to the gender of Inanna and especially clergy with varying degrees of association with her, it needs to be stressed that there’s a need to be cautious about the exact opposite attitudes too sometimes. While skepticism is generally a virtue in scholarship, it is hard to deny that some of the opposition to inquiries into Inanna’s gender and related matters also has highly questionable motivations behind it. 

For instance, my reservations towards Julia Assante’s article discussed earlier come from the fact that at least some of her criticism is rooted not in valid reasoning, but in what appears to be a degree of homophobia -  for instance, part of her opposition to interpreting cultic officials like the assinnu or gala as gay men (for which the evidence is indeed hardly sufficient - we have evidence for crossdressing in one case, and for either gender nonconformity or a unique gender identity in the other) stems from her conviction that this is an example of “abnormal male sexuality” (Bad Girls…, p. 37). 

Interestingly this is a selective case of homophobia, though, since she simultaneously voices a perfectly valid complaint that earlier scholarship has “not allowed discussion on lesbianism other than to dismiss it” (p. 36; it needs to be noted that in contrast with gay men, direct evidence for lesbians is lacking altogether in cuneiform - see Sexuality A…,  p. 414 for reference to a MLM love incantation and absence of a WLW equivalent - but you’d at least expect some serious inquiry into Ninshubur’s portrayal in literary texts by now). Some examples are even more blunt. For instance, Wolfhang Heimpel, after concluding that references to “bearded” Inanna reflect the perception of the planet Venus as opposed to the deity (which is not too dissimilar from the interpretation I highlighted as plausible earlier) reassures the reader that Inanna was therefore not an “androgynous monster” (A Catalog of Near Eastern Venus Deities, p. 15) - I am somewhat puzzled what exactly would be “monstrous” about facial hair. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that in contrast with the newer study of the same passages which I discussed in detail and have no objections to, it’s not the weakness of the evidence that bothers the author, but the slightest possibility of androgyny.

Not everyone is so direct, though. There are also more insidious cases - and these invariably focus on Inanna herself, as opposed to any religious officials. What I’m talking about are sources which refer to Inanna as a “mother” or “fertility” goddess or some nondescript “divine feminine” entity entirely detached from historical context. As a result Inanna is essentially forced into an incredibly rigid feminine role she never actually fulfilled. I won’t dwell upon the abstract maternal obsession itself much here. I already wrote a separate article a few years ago about its impact, exemplified by the recent portrayal of Inanna as a grotesque pregnancy monster in a certain videogame (this is not an exaggeration) and I think that was enough. It will suffice to say that these visions belong not in Mesopotamia at the dawn of recorded history, but rather in the most feverish depths of Victorian imagination (I won’t explore this topic here; Cynthia Eller’s publications are a good start if you are interested, though). Interestingly, simultaneously sources of this sort basically never investigate Mesopotamian texts which actually focus on motherhood - which is a shame, because compositions such as Ninisina A are filled with genuine warmth. However, they don’t deal with some sort of overwhelming Frazerian ur-mother reduced to bare biological essentials.

To go back to the main topic of this section, the  true crown jewel of the discussed subgenre of Inanna literature has to be this paragraph courtesy of Tzvi Abusch (Ishtar in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, p. 453):

One is tempted to ask why Abusch argues Inanna is “incomplete” or exhibits “psychic wounds” due to her character not revolving around being a wife or mother. How about her roles as a war deity, love deity, personified astral body or representation of political interest of one city or another? Roles which are, quite obviously, fully realized? As a war deity, she was believed to assist kings, deprive their enemies of the ability to fight, and to confront various supernatural adversaries like rebellious mountains; as a love deity, she was invoked through love incantations and acted as the archetypal lover in erotic poetry; as Venus, she shone in the sky. 

Should we also question why, for example Tishpak’s roles as a husband and father are not fully realized considering he primarily plays the role of a warrior and divine sovereign of Eshnunna (the human ruler was merely acting as a governor on his behalf, a fairly unique situation otherwise only attested for two other gods)? Very few male gods actually match the image of masculinity presented in Instruction of Shuruppak as an ideal to strive for - just as very few goddesses fit the image of the ideal wife preserved in proverbs.

This is not the first time this comes up in this article, but while the world of gods, and the character of its individual inhabitants, obviously arose in specific historical context, it was not a perfect mirror of the world of humans and its mores  (Do Divine Structures …, p. 105-106). Ilona Zsolnay outright argues that even if some (but not all) of the Mesopotamian deities were at least in part characterized based on normative patterns of behavior tied to them - there are, after all, deities defined at least to a degree by, for example, fatherhood (like Enlil) or marital status (like Aya) - ultimately they were not bound by the same gender norms as humans. Furthermore, religious and political factors, as well as natural phenomena deities could be linked with, influenced their character considerably more (Do Divine Structures …, p. 116).

Granted, it should be noted that Abush is basically writing about an Inanna he made up. As you’ve seen earlier, the first attestations of Inanna already sound fairly similar to her most famous portrayals from later periods. However, he instead argues that the original Inanna lost to time was one of “primitive earth of mother goddesses” and that from the fourth millennium BCE onwards (coincidentally when the first actual attestations of Inanna emerge thanks to the advent of writing) Mesopotamians simply couldn’t grasp her true character (Ishtar, p. 454). The need to portray Inanna as she actually was imagined as some sort of aberration, coupled with a desire to uncover an “original” version which just so happens to conform to an incredibly rigid vision of femininity is quite something. Rarely do you see someone basically recreating the Madonna-whore complex so literally.

Absent parents, ever present children

While as I said I won’t engage in depth with the peculiar obsession with making Inanna into a maternal figure evident in Abusch’s treatment of her, I do feel obliged to cover a related phenomenon: the obsessive focus on the quite rare cases where some minor deities are identified as her children. This is a particularly big problem online, though vintage scholarship and publications aimed at general audiences (even very recent ones) are equally, if not more, guilty of it. 

The nominal assignment of largely irrelevant deities as children to Inanna was ultimately inconsequential, and in particular it had nothing to do with her erotic role - or with Dumuzi, for that matter, as he is never identified as their father (Inanna and Ishtar…, p. 339). Pregnancy, childbirth and maternity are not topics dealt with in compositions focused on the two of them (Gendered Sexuality…, p. 95). 

Only three deities have ever been described as Inanna’s children in primary sources: Shara, Lulal and Nanaya. In every single case caveats apply.

Shara’s connection to Inanna was geographically limited. It wasn’t a pan-Mesopotamian convention to regard them as related, but rather a local tradition restricted to Zabalam (Goddesses in Context…, p. 202). Julia M. Asher-Greve suggests that it might have originally been little more than a way to give Inanna access to the epithet ama, literally “mother” (but metaphorically, as a divine epithet, something like “venerable woman”; Jeremy Black, Songs of the Goddess Aruru, p. 48), which was however primarily used not to indicate motherhood but rather a position of authority in the pantheon (Goddesses in Context…, p. 140).

It’s also important to note that Inanna of Zabalam didn’t really start as (an) Inanna, since the earliest literary text she appears in, the Early Dynastic Zame Hymns from Abu Salabikh, refers to her with the enigmatic name Nin-UM. Joan Goodnick Westenholz assumed that Nin-UM was the original name of the goddess of Zabalam, with the name Inanna (and many of Inanna’s traits) effectively imposed upon her due to the theological and political influence of nearby Uruk (Goddesses in Context…, p. 42-43). Whether this was the case or not, the two are treated as functionally separate deities in god lists (Goddesses in Context…, p. 79-80). 

While this is far from certain, Douglas Frayne proposed that this phenomenon might also be the motif of conflict between Inanna and Gilgamesh, first attested in the standalone poem Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven from the Ur III period, and fully developed in the considerably later standard edition of the Epic of Gilgamesh (which might reflect what Paul-Alain Beaulieu described as “anti-Ištar sentiment”; The Pantheon..., p. 108). He assumes that it reflected hostilities between Uruk and Zabalam, with the antagonist actually being Inanna of Zabalam and not Inanna of Uruk (The Struggle for Hegemony in "Early Dynastic II" Sumer, p. 63-64). In any case, the connection with Shara cannot be taken out of context and applied where it is not explicitly mentioned.

The other most frequently cited case, that of Lulal, is even weaker than Shara’s. He is addressed as Inanna’s son exactly once, in a fragmentary hymn published in the 1960s (Anna Glen, Jeremiah Peterson, The Lulal širgida Composition CBS 12590 (HAV 5, pl. 7, VIII), p. 169) - so he has an equally firm claim to being her son as the personified Styx has to being Persephone’s mother. In Inanna’s Descent, the composition most often “enriched” today with forcible assertions of familial bonds between Inanna and miscellaneous side characters, the connection between them is merely “close, but unspecified” (Wilfred G. Lambert, Lulal/Lātarāk, p. 163). Anna Glen and Jeremiah Peterson assume he is an attendant, not a family member, and point out elsewhere (Inanna D, line 32) he is portrayed only as a minor warrior god acting on her behalf (The Lulal širgida…, p. 169). An annotated edition of the Weidner god list equates Lulal with Sin (Klaus Wagensonner, CCP 6.7.A - Weidner’s God List A) which, as it will become clear very soon, creates some issues for claims of widespread acceptance of his status as Inanna’s son.

The third deity sporadically addressed as Inanna’s child was Nanaya. In contrast with both Shara and Lulal, she was actually a major figure in her own right, and her connection with Inanna is attested in various cities and time periods. Ironically enough I don’t think I’ve ever seen her described as her daughter online, though. I suspect the explanation is fairly straightforward: she doesn’t appear in the “canon” of shoddy vintage translations of a small handful of texts on which the online image of Inanna often seems to be built.

However, the fact Nanaya had a firm connection to Inanna doesn’t mean undue importance should be assigned to the cases where they are presented specifically as mother and daughter. Only three sources actually refer to them this way: an inscription of king Lipit-Ishtar, a first millennium recension of an older balag song, and a unique oath formula. Olga Drewnowska-Rymarz assumes the relation described in them might very well be metaphorical (Mesopotamian Goddess Nanāja, p. 30).It would not be hard to find parallels proving this is a distinct possibility: Ninshubur was demonstrably not Inanna’s mother, and yet she addresses her as such as a sign of respect in at least one composition. Ninshubur herself has no known parentage, and yet refers to every high ranking god as “father” in Inanna’s Descent. The examples of using terms of kinship as an indication of respect or closeness are numerous.

Furthermore, multiple genealogies could be assigned to Nanaya. In laments, she is consistently the daughter of Urash, the tutelary god of Dilbat, for instance (Mesopotamian Goddess Nanāja, p. 31). Obviously, the fact that Nanaya could also be at least partially identified with Inanna (though this is a late phenomenon; Goddesses in Context…, p. 131) poses some problems for viewing them as child and parent. In most cases it’s probably best to agree with the description of the relationship between the two as “definite, but unspecified” (Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Nanaya: Lady of Mystery, p. 68). 

On a side note which is not directly related to the main topic of this article, it is quite peculiar that preoccupation with Inanna existing as a part of a family never seems to extend to highlighting her connection with her parents. Ironically, the family connections people downplay online are the ones which actually mattered the most theologically.

The tradition making Nanna (Sin) and Ningal Inanna’s parents was by far the most widespread one, and it is reflected in various genres of texts across history (Aino Hätinen, The Moon God Sin in Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Times, p. 309-310; Goddesses in Context…, p. 230; The Pantheon…, p. 111; even Abusch’s Ishtar, p. 452). References to this connection are frequent in literary texts, even ones which don’t focus on Inanna, let alone on her family ties. For instance, Ka Hulu-a, which isn’t even a composition dealing with deities on the most part, casually refers to Inanna as “wise daughter of Sin” (dumu galzu Suenna; Jana Matuszak, Don’t Insult Inana! Divine Retribution for Offense against Common Decency in the Light of New Textual Sources, p. 361). 

The connection between Inanna and her parents was so strong it could be transferred to other deities by proxy. Both Shaushka (Marie-Claude Trémouille, Šauška, Šawuška A. Philologisch, p. 102) and Pinikir (The Goddess Pirinkir…, p. 27) - not to mention an entire host of major and minor Mesopotamian goddesses, ranging from Annunitum (The Moon God…, p. 313), though Belet-ekallim (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 160) to Nanaya (The Moon God…, p. 312) - could be addressed as the moon god’s offspring (or, at the very least, as the offspring of a moon god since at least in Shaushka’s case the name is in all due likeness used as a logogram).

Perhaps even more importantly, the connection between Inanna and her father was also responsible for her well attested association with the number 15, best reflected in the use of this numeral to represent her name from the Old Babylonian period onwards. Since Sin’s number was 30 (a reflection of the number of days in the lunar month), a half of that was deemed a suitable number to represent his daughter by ancient theologians (Wolfgang Röllig, Götterzahlen, p. 499).

Conclusions

I was initially reluctant to cover the topic of the gender of Inanna and related deities in depth, I’m frankly not sure why. It is not my intent to boast, but much of my online activity has consistently revolved around assyriology since 2020 (technically it has been my interest for much longer, but my methodology required refining). I wrote 200+ wiki articles about Mesopotamian deities, including multiple which specifically required dealing with the matter of gender; in contrast with the overwhelming majority of hobbyists I keep up with academic publications.

To go back to the question which originally inspired this article, I don’t think it’s possible to give a straightforward answer. I’d say at least some of the current mainstream Assyriological scholarship (by which I mean roughly from the mid to late 1980s to now) offers a fairly accurate evaluation of what can be said about Inanna’s gender, and about the gender of related figures - Ninsianna, Shaushka, Pinikir etc.; I hope spotlighting sources which can be described this way through the article makes this clear enough. Some specific details are definitely overemphasized (the eerie quest for a beard is the prime example but I’d be lying if I said Wiggermann’s puzzling views on femdom didn’t make me laugh). What is definitely overestimated is to what degree the supposed ambiguity of Inanna’s gender was tied to her sexual aspects. The general lack of any such characteristics among deities even more firmly associated with sexuality than Inanna was - I highlighted it in the case of Nanaya, but it holds equally (if not more) true for Ishara, Gazbaba, Kanisurra, Bizilla, the list goes on - also doesn’t seem to ever be highlighted. While obviously each of them was a deity with own unique character and not just a carbon copy of Inanna (for example, Ishara was associated with weddings in a capacity no other love goddess was, while Nanaya persistently appears in texts dealing with unrequited love or rejection), convergence of traits was a fairly common phenomenon in Mesopotamian religion. For example, numerous couples consisting of a medicine goddess and a war god emerged over the course of the late third and second millennia BCE - so surely it would eventually reemerge in one of these cases?

A further problem is of course the questionable scholarship based on these misconceptions which focuses less on Inanna herself and more on clergy associated with her, or even just vaguely adjacent to her. While a lot has changed since the early 2000s, let alone the 1980s, it is still arguably a major weakness of assyriology as a discipline that often gender, sexual orientation and presentation are often treated as entirely overlapping phenomena. There are numerous authors who write about relevant matters thoughtfully, but this is hardly the rule; especially when assyriology intersects with Bible studies or classics, the problem remains strong (meanwhile, in depth studies of, say, transmission of laments will often be quite cautious; it’s also not as easy as just blaming the age of some researchers and calling it a day).

However, there are also matters related to the gender of Inanna and related deities which definitely receive too little attention. To which degree what we know about Ninsianna can be applied to Inanna? Why the planet Mercury, despite also being regarded as switching between two genders, seemingly never came to be personified the same way as Venus? Why Shaushka and especially Pinikir appear in firmly masculine attire, while Inanna basically never does? All of these questions require further in depth inquiries. Much as I can’t give an unambiguous response to the initial question, I honestly don’t think it’s possible to give a straightforward answer on the matter of Inanna’s gender in the first place. Obviously, it’s impossible to disagree that fundamentally she was primarily a feminine figure. However, it’s also important to remember she essentially took a masculine role in the military context. I still stand by my joke chart from a few months ago:

While as I demonstrated things get much more murky when it comes to outright ambiguity or fluidity of gender, I would not rule it out entirely either, at least in an astral context - though I also doubt it’s fair to speak of anything directly comparable to the cases of Ninsianna, Pinikir or Shaushka. 

Perhaps in the end we have to simply accept how Inanna’s character is summarized in an Old Babylonian composition I brought up much earlier:

[along-the-silkroad]

A small terracotta cylinder recording the work on the walls of the city of Babylon by the king Nabopolassar (r. 626-605 BCE), founder of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. From Babylon, Mesopotamia, Iraq. Neo-Babylonian period, 625-605 BCE. British Museum (ID: BM 26263)

[whencyclopedia]

Mesopotamian Art and Architecture

Ancient Mesopotamian art and architectural works are among the oldest in the world, dating back over 7,000 years. The works first appear in northern Mesopotamia prior to the Ubaid Period (c. 5000-4100 BCE) and then developed in the south during the Uruk Period (4100-2900 BCE) in Sumer which established the first historical civilization.

According to some scholars, the works of the Indus Valley Civilization (c. 7000 to c. 600 BCE) pre-date those of Mesopotamia, but the Indus Valley developments do not appear until the Early Harappan Period (c. 5500-2800 BCE) by which time Mesopotamian works were already established. Early artwork and construction are evidenced in northern Mesopotamia at sites such as Göbekli Tepe (c. 10,000 BCE) and Ҫatalhöyük (c. 7500 BCE), both in modern-day Turkey, and Tell Brak (c. 6500-5000 BCE), in Syria.

The development of these works then progressed through the following eras, though, owing to space limitations, the Hittite and Kassite periods will not be addressed:

Ubaid Period – c. 5000-4100 BCE

Uruk Period – 4100-2900 BCE

Early Dynastic Period – 2900-2334 BCE

Akkadian Period – 2334-2218 BCE

Ur III Period – 2047-1750 BCE

Old Babylonian Period – c. 2000-1600 BCE

Hittite Period – 1700-1200 BCE

Kassite Period – c. 1595 to c. 1155 BCE

Assyrian Period – c. 1307-912 BCE

Neo-Assyrian Period – 912-612 BCE

Neo-Babylonian Period – 626-539 BCE

Achaemenid Persian-Sassanian Persian Period – c. 550 BCE to 651 CE

Artworks included reliefs, sculpture, statuary cast in metal, ceramics, jewelry, cylinder seals, stele & monuments, obelisks, and wall paintings. Mesopotamian monumental architecture is epitomized by the ziggurat, but the Sumerians were also responsible for the first large-scale palaces and temples, as well as urban planning, the arch, canals, and aqueducts, landscaped gardens, and architectural ornamentation. These early innovations would become more refined in the region through succeeding periods and influence the works of other cultures in the Near East and Mediterranean regions.

Earliest Sites & Base Materials

Although the Göbekli Tepe site is dated to c. 10,000 BCE, the first permanent settlements in that area are thought to have been established earlier, and, possibly, for the sole purpose of building the structure which most scholars believe was a temple. Göbekli Tepe is among the earliest sites, along with others such as Nevalı Çori (also in modern-day Turkey), to feature monumental architecture – including the oldest known megaliths in the world at Göbekli Tepe – as well as reliefs.

Architecturally, the site is comprised of circular areas and rectangular buildings with T-shaped pillars of limestone, some carved with images of wildlife in low and high relief. There is little evidence of human activity in the sculptures which seem to emphasize the natural world and, in some interpretations, the people's relationship with their gods. Some scholars associate the site with the later settlement of Ҫatalhöyük, though this claim has been challenged as the design of Göbekli Tepe, and the tools found there, differ from the later site.

Whatever purpose Göbekli Tepe originally served, it was a communal site associated with ritual, while Ҫatalhöyük was entirely residential. No public buildings have been found at the site which is comprised of tightly clustered mudbrick residences accessed by ladders or steps from a hole in the roof. Artwork from the site includes murals and statuary – such as the famous Seated Woman of Ҫatalhöyük – as well as ceramics. The artwork seems to focus on the natural world and the concept of fertility as several pieces represent female figures and erect phalluses.

The people of Ҫatalhöyük used clay, limestone, marble, and other materials for their statuary and paint created from natural substances. The figurines, statuary, and murals are usually interpreted as representing religious concepts, but this claim is not universally accepted. There is no evidence of urban planning at the site; it seems to have developed organically with buildings attached to each other and people using the rooftops for communal activities and movement as there are no streets, courtyards, or public squares.

Continue reading...

[21st-century-minutiae]

Mesperyian was an early twenty-first century Tumblr hoax, a fake Greek Goddess of Torture and Punishment. Mesperyian became a meme after people (either legitimately or as part of a joke, depending on the person), started to include her in lists of Greek mythology.

Lies and fake history are a common practice in human mythology. Syncretism, oral traditions, and political/cultural forces, combined with the lack of official 'canon' as would be understood now for myths that are thousands of years old, means that this sort of creation from whole cloth happened frequently in history. However, we seldom have direct evidential proof of hoaxes in mythology, to the degree of Mesperyian.

Any textual reference to Mesperyian, attributing her existence to before the early twenty-first century is either a joke, an outright lie, or an ignorant claim made by one who fell for a joke or outright lie. Historians should not be confused about this fact. People in the early twenty-first century do not believe that people in classical antiquity worshiped a goddess names Mesperyian. But people in the early twenty-first century did joke about tricking other contemporaries into believing such a claim. The above analysis is an example of somebody playing into the joke. It does not indicate that the above poster believes Mesperyian was a worshiped deity.

you know what's really interesting is that by the rules of ancient Greek onomastics and their anglicizations via Latin, Mesperyian should be a masculine name (Mesperyianos/Μεσπερυιανός), formed by adding the adjectival suffix -νός, -νή, -νόν to indicate that the bearer had something to do with a 'Mesperyia' (Μεσπέρυια), since -yia (-υια) is a common feminine ending found on perfect active participles as well as the proper names of several minor goddesses and nymphs (e.g. Eileithyia, Idyia). I might further conjecture that this name is a corruption of 'Hesperyia' (´Εσπέρυια), perhaps connected to a dialectical variant, and that this name referred to a goddess of the evening star, which is otherwise usually imagined in Greek myth as male. 'Mesperyian' thus probably reflects the attempt of the people who considered the evening star female and referred to her as 'Mesperyia' to accommodate other Greek-speaking peoples' perception of the evening star as male: they gave the male evening star a masculinized version of their feminine name for it, 'Mesperyianos.' however the shift in the grammatical gendering of the name seems not to have been accompanied by a shift in the perception of the gender of the evening star itself; thus the evening star comes to be referred to, as a woman, with a male version of her earlier name. in this essay i will

[ayin-me-yesh]

I'm not going to reblog the post, but I am once again going to fight people who use the Roman period as the evidence that all Jews, in modern times, are colonised people and Indigenous to Palestine

like, ok... Jews established kingdoms in Palestine as far back as the Bronze Age. the kingdom of Judah was then crushed by the Neo-Babylonian Exile, and many Jews were brought eastward in the Babylonian exile.

the conquest of Alexander the Great allowed a new kingdom, of Judea, to be established with its capital in Jerusalem. but not all Jews returned from the east, and Jews under Hellenistic rule also spread westward into Hellenized Egypt and northward into the Balkans. this was the situation when Rome conquered the Judean kingdom.

during the Roman period, Jews spread further into North Africa and Europe, establishing communities throughout the Roman Empire. when Judea was eventually crushed by the Romans and its citizens expelled, there was already an extant international Jewish community. the eastern community I mentioned from the Babylonian captivity had already existed for 500 years.

when Jews were expelled from Judea, many also eventually returned. a major community was almost immediately established in Tiberias, for instance. Jews would even resettle in Jerusalem. the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled a couple hundred years after the Roman expulsion.

so we start seeing these unique and widespread Jewish communities with their own minhagim (customs) and centuries to eventually millennia-long histories in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Jews were part of established pan-ethnic groups in these regions, so, for instance, there are Amazigh Jews, Arab Jews, Persian Jews, Russian Jews, French Jews, etc.

some of these communities in Africa and Asia would also go on to be colonised by European powers, such as France and the UK. colonisers like the French made distinctions between French Jews and native North African Jews.

Jews largely share common origins from the Near East, and there were Jewish kingdoms in Palestine whose histories are part of our religious identities, but we do not belong exclusively or even generally in Palestine more than wherever we found ourselves in the world. some of us are the colonised, but generally the displaced colonised of other parts of West or Central Asia or North Africa. others of us have been colonisers in those very same regions or elsewhere.

TL;DR Jews are diverse. we have a long history and geographically vast history that encompasses but is also much more than the Biblical narrative.

"Indigenous" in a political sense is not just being from somewhere, but having a relationship with a colonising power. and with that being said, Palestinians, the people being colonised by Israel, are Indigenous to Palestine.

[sane-human]

Halaf culture ( 6100 BC and 5100 BC.) prehistoric period , They have very cool Stamp seals, mostly geometric. Many Halafian settlements were abandoned around 5000 BC , and the remaining ones showed Ubaidian characters. I gave them traits of the Anu (An), God of the sky in Sumerian Mythology!

Samarra culture (5500 and 4800 BCE.) is a Late Neolithic archaeological culture of northern Mesopotamia! The culture is primarily known for its finely made pottery decorated with stylized animals, including birds, and geometric designs on dark backgrounds. I gave them traits of Ki, the Godess of Earth in sumerian mythology! Sumerian Mythology inspired many religions!!

The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100–1800 BCE) references an early flood myth!

This is Read as An-Ki (Sky-Eath) It indicates the set of opposites, the still formless universe, composed of the names of the two gods An and Ki! The Epic tells of a the separation of the sky and eath , reminds me of the Pangu myth for China but also the Genesis , I find it pretty cool ! :D Here's the map of the general zones of where they were :

Sumerian Civilization (Sumer) , I've decided to make them the continuation of the Uruk period and before that of the Ubaid period. I also decide to give them the charetteristics of Gilgamesh still, a historical/mythical king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk! (Ubaid Period 5500 – c. 3700 BC)->(Uruk Period 4000–3100 BC)->(Sumerian Civilization! that is from 5500 – c. 1800 BC)

Elam was an ancient civilization centered in the far west and southwest of Iran. I've decided to give them the traits of Enkidu, wartime comrade and friend of Gilgamesh!

The main division of Elam in time is as follows: (wiki)

Proto-Elamite: c. 3200 – c. 2700 BC (Proto-Elamite script in Susa) Old Elamite period: c. 2700 – c. 1500 BC (earliest documents until the Sukkalmah Dynasty) Middle Elamite period: c. 1500 – c. 1100 BC (Anzanite dynasty until the Babylonian invasion of Susa) Neo-Elamite period: c. 1100 – 540 BC (characterized by Assyrian and Median influence. 539 BC marks the beginning of the Achaemenid period.)

Akkadian Empire was the first known empire succeeding the long-lived city-states of Sumer, it was centered on the city of Akkad

Decided to base them on the bull of Heaven , a mythical beast fought by the King of Uruk Gilgamesh. (The Bull was identified with the constellation Taurus)

"The gods, particularly Ishtar, were angered by Enkidu and Gilgamesh's actions, including killing the Bull of Heaven and rejecting Ishtar's affections."

I've not followed the Epic exactly since a parallele can't be exactly be made between the characters and the civilizations, also because Sumer dissapears before Elam, so I effectevly inverted the roles with them ;v; Songs about the myth for anyone intrested:

GILGAMESH LAMENT FOR ENKIDU

Lament For GILGAMESH, The Gold Lyre Of Ur

Babylonia (1890 BC–539 BC) was an ancient Akkadian-speaking state and cultural area based in the city of Babylon in central-southern Mesopotamia I gave them Lion traits fro the Lion of Babylon.

Babylonia was retrospectively called "the country of Akkad" (māt Akkadī in Akkadian), a deliberate archaism in reference to the previous glory of the Akkadian Empire.

Persis "The Persian ethnic group are thought to have initially migrated either from Central Asia or, more probably, from the north through the Caucasus.They would then have migrated to the current region of Persis in the early 1st millennium BC." I gave them Shahbaz Traits , a bird in Persian mythology!

Achemenid Empire (550–330 BC) Called as Persian Empire by the Greeks and Romans.

The name "Persia" is a Greek and Latin pronunciation of the native word referring to the country of the people originating from Persis (Old Persian: 𐎱𐎠𐎼𐎿, romanized: Pārsa). The Persian term 𐎧𐏁𐏂 Xšāça, literally meaning "The Kingdom", was used to refer to the Empire formed by their multinational state. Also: "A Greek folk etymology connected the name to Perseus, a legendary character in Greek mythology. Herodotus recounts this story, devising a foreign son, Perses, from whom the Persians took the name."

[santoschristos]

Image: Goddess Ishtar Mahaboka

Inanna, or Ishtar, is said to be associated with the planet Venus.

Inanna (Sumerian) is among the most important deities and the most important goddess in the Mesopotamian pantheon. She is primarily known as the goddess of sexual love but is equally prominent as the goddess of warfare. "Give praise, for she has no equal."

Ishtar The Ancient Queen which time forgot:

Origin: the Anunnaki (group of Mesopotamian deities) written during the Third Dynasty of Ur, each god had its own cult.

Seven deities: An, Enlil, Enki, Ninhursag, Nanna, Utu, and Inanna aka Ishtar who is now often connected to eggs (Easter). Ishtar was the goddess of love and war and sex, as well as protection, fate, childbirth, marriage, and storms (sometimes fertility).

In mythology, Ishtar was believed to have descended to the underworld during the winter months, representing a period of dormancy and death.

Ishtar was then reborn and ascended back to the surface during spring, bringing the return of life and abundance.

Ishtar wasn't originally connected to eggs.

However, Eggs, a symbol of new life and fertility, came to be associated with the concept of rebirth and resurrection.

In certain other religious rituals and festivals dedicated to Ishtar that later followed, eggs were often used as offerings or as symbols of her power to bring about new beginnings.

And as time went on, many other religious beliefs started incorporating eggs as a symbol.

Ishtar's symbols are the lion, the morning star (Venus), and eight/sixteen pointed star.

Contrary to some beliefs she was never originally associated with Easter, rabbits or eggs.

Anthropological studies have unveiled many misunderstood interpretations.

Later "The Ishtar Gate" was built to show the power and wealth of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.

To which animals and flowers decorate and symbolize the gods Marduk and Adad and of course the Goddess Ishtar.

Set up on a monumental entrance to the city of Babylon, this and hundreds of other dragons and wild bulls in brightly colored friezes of molded and glazed brick protected the city.

Associations: lions with Ishtar, bulls with Adad and dragons with Marduk. Source: DestinyArmoryDefined @ArmoryDefined

[sag-dab-sar]

I saw you have a link in your pinned post about where to start with hellenic polytheism. Do you have anything like that for Sumerian polytheism?

{Currently creating new version of this}

Unfortunately no, I never had the energy to make one that intense for Sumerian. So here is the best I can do now. Revivalist Perspective.

I used "Mesopotamian" over Sumerian here because research cannot be parsed out to "just Sumerian" it will always include Akkadian and all time periods. However, in this post, when it comes to Gods, I am discussing their role in the Sumerian pantheons. Not later Akkadian with Babylonian Marduk or Assyrian Aššur as king. "Mesopotamian Religion" is kind of a misnomer, there were multiple religions, pantheons, and related but distinct cultures. These are usually broken up in academia based on time period for example Ur III vs Neo-Assyrian; by city Uruk vs Isin; and by the ruling "ethnic group" such as Amorites vs the Kassites. It is a maze of information, you don't have to be concerned about it in the beginning but I just wanted to mention that there is a large variety of religious traditions.

Diĝir Sumerian for God/Goddess. Diĝirene is plural.

🌾 To begin I suggest:

Learn a bit, even just reading Oracc's information, on the Diĝir.

Get some water (or other drink, especially beer) for them.

Offer them up some words of praise, tell them the liquid is for them.

"Holy An, Unalterable Decision Maker, Who Determines The Place of all Diĝir. May this water show my reverence for your power."

Pour the water out.

Tah dah you worshiped a Diĝir.

Now go learn some more.

Rinse repeat adding to your worship as you learn.

Practicing and learning can be side by side events, doing both at once.

Your research doesn't need to be academically intense like your taking a course. Go at your own pace when researching information, and don't force yourself to read things you won't understand. But don't neglect it either it's still important to learn, especially about the Diĝirene themselves.

Don't fear making mistakes. If you do something you think is a mistake simply say sorry and give a libation, that is enough. Thus don't be afraid to start despite little knowledge — the Diĝirene will not be mad at you so long as you are a sincere worshipper.

🌾 Learning

Use a combination of Frayne, Black, Leick's dictionaries and Oracc to learn about a specific Diĝir (linked below). Sources will conflict with each other. This can be due to multiple reasons: publication timing & something being out of date; differences of opinions/interpretations of the academics; differences in translations by academics; and honestly I think Assyriologists just enjoy fighting each other...that is only half a joke.

In other words, be willing to combine the things you learn into your own composite view of information on any Diĝir. Actually basically any topic in Mesopotamia.

My Post on Resources for Researching — Link

Some tips:

Make sure it's a reliable source. Vetting sources — Link

Focus on academics of various disciplines especially Assyriologists; but also archeologists; anthropologists specializing in that region; historians whose topic is related.

Websites specifically designed for Mesopotamian History by academics / academic institutions.

Check the publication date. If the date is newer it probably is more accurate. Unless the concept is 100% novel, in which case they will usually explain why this new interpretation is more accurate.

Use three sources. If source A and B conflict. Search for source C and see if it agrees with A or B. ... sometimes it'll agree with neither.

Being real for a second as a worshipper: sometimes something from an academic will just resonate with you and sometimes it just won't. For example Jacobsen's view of Inana did (link); while Boterro's view of religion lacking love did not (link). Despite both being Assyriologists.

Links to Dictionaries, Websites, Online Books etc — Link

Not available online but I highly suggest:

A Handbook To Life in Ancient Mesopotamia by Stephen Bertman 2005 for general Mesopotamian history — Google Books 43 pages available

Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamian Religion by Tammi Schneider 2011 — Google Books 33 pages available

Both are written for the average reader not academically thick.

❗️If you can't do a lot of research for whatever reason (disability, education level, access to information etc) then I suggest reading Jeremy Black's dictionary cover to cover like a book. Some info is outdated, but if it's all you can manage it's a good way to have a base of knowledge for your practice. And it is free online.

For more information about learning see the part about Inana below.

🌾 Prayer & Praise

In Mesopotamian cultures giving praise to a Diĝir is important. Period. Even if it's "you're awe inspiring" or something else simple.

For prayers you can say what you feel comfortable with in the moment, you can write your own, you can adapt from the ETCSL or other reliable translations. I suggest reading through the ETCSL hymns or other reliable translation to get a feel for how the Diĝirene were praised even if you don't use those hymns directly.

Something specifically about that Diĝir, or lines taken from the ETCSL hymns to that Diĝir, add an extra touch to show your appreciation for them in my opinion.

Based on artwork praying position was either hands up, bent at the elbow so hands are level with your shoulders, and palms facing outwards. Or hands clasped together at your sternum. The first one is easier if you have a cup in your hand.

ETCSL Hymns — Link

How to end Mesopotamian prayers — Link

Prayer to a personal Diĝir adapted from ETCSL, can be replaced with a named Diĝir — Link

🌾 Offerings & Libations

I do not have a historical example of a Mesopotamian libation or offering incantation or prayer so I use the steps I outlined in the first section.

Say a prayer, designate the offering as for that Diĝir/Diĝirene then:

Any libations should be poured out and made "unrecoverable"

Food is eaten

Objects offered can either be used or set aside on an altar/shrine.

Incense is lit and let burn to the end if possible.

Mesopotamian Offerings — Link

Historical Incense — Link

Low Energy / No Energy offerings — Link

I consider this is fundamentally necessary in Mesopotamian tradition. Hence the low to no energy offering ideas.

🌾 Altar / Shrine

The most important thing to Mesopotamian religious cult was the animated cult statue. While you don't need an altar/shrine I do suggest having a spot for them with a representation if you can. The Word Cult — Link

There were also street shrines located in the city for the average (acceptable) citizen to use, but I don't know anything about them except that they existed. So I stick to what is known about temple cults.

The representation doesn't have to be a statue it could be anything so long as it is chosen thoughtfully, is clean, and specifically set aside as a representation for them not used for anything else. For example for me: Gibil is a candle, Dumuzid is beads, Ninazu is a pendant, Damu is a snake ring that I will not wear... so on.

Assuming you don't have to worry about being secret: Put the representation in a clean spot, and you would add something like an incense holder to light some (alternatively a good smelling candle), or a bowl/cup to use for libations.

Again, this isn't absolutely necessary. However, with the importance of temples and cult statues in Mesopotamian history, combined with the fact that we don't have a dedicated priesthood at a temple in our cities/towns to diligently worship the Gods, I think its a good way to adapt a very important aspect of the religion to the modern world.

There is no difference between altar vs shrine. The Sumerian dictionary gives 18 results for "shrine" and 2 results for "altar." So usage of those words is defined by yourself.

🌾 Good Diĝir to Start With

An — Sky, Heaven, Highest Authority. He received some worship, but importantly he was frequently invoked in the worship of other Diĝirene. For example, Inana is made significantly important by An's power. He might be a good stepping stone to give your first libations to if you really don't know where to start, since he is the highest of them all and gave them their authority. His symbol 𒀭 was the divine marker in cuneiform; written at the beginning of (almost) all divine names.

Enlil — King of Gods. Since he is literally king I suggest worshipping him along side an intercessor Diĝir such as his wife Ninlil or sukkal Nuska. Then again that advice could go for any high ranking Diĝir.

Enki — He is significantly more involved with humanity than An or Enlil is. He is usually the Diĝir willing to help humans in myth (like the flood myths), or willing to help other Diĝir that have deemed unworthy of help (like Inana in her descent myth). In one myth he is also the Diĝir who brings order to the world. He is also in some ways the source of life as he is fresh water.

Utu — The Sun and Justice

Nanna/Suen — The Moon and Cycles (time, the tides, etc); also fertility of cows.

Iškur — Storm God

Gula — Goddess of Health

Inana — See below.

Dumuzid* — [Edit] Shepherd, Milk, Agriculture, Spring Vegetarian, (later) Power of Grain

*Treasures of Darkness by Thorkild Jacobsen (1976) Chapter 1 is a very good resource for this, even if his opinions on Inana are not always agreed upon, I have found his conclusions on "Dying Gods of Fertility" to be accepted in academic literature — Google Books [Edit] I messed up with wording and used "Dying and Rising God" which is an archetype idea proposed by James Frazer in 19th century and his iteration of this concept is rejected. I meant to write what Jacobsen uses "Dying God of Fertility" which discusses his death and possible return outside Frazer's archetype framework and based on an amalgamation of different local cultus and ancient texts. Frayne's Dictionary p 75-77 is also a good overview of his roles.

🌾View of The Diĝirene

A pantheon of over three thousand gods seems too large to consist solely out of distinct, well defined natural and cultural agents, and in fact it didn't. The most important agencies are covered by a relatively small and stable core pantheon of some ten to twenty deities of nature, in the texts summarized as the seven or twelve "Great Gods". These few great gods, the ones that "determine destiny", constitute an overarching national pantheon, while the many lesser gods, the "gods of the land", head local city panthea, or serve the courts of the great gods in specialized functions: spouse, child, vizier, herald, deputy, messenger, constable, singer, throne, weapon, ship, or harp. — The Mesopotamian Pandemonium by Frans Wiggerman Link

There are many more Diĝir, even extremely important ones. Those I listed are very straight forward in my opinion and thus good options for someone just beginning. Except perhaps Dumuzid where I messed up.

In Mesopotamian Religions we are not equal to the Diĝirene we are below them, that is undisputed. Unless you are an king or extremely accomplished ancestor... and even then those divine Kings seem to be below the cosmic Diĝir.

Serving the Gods was of high importance. My opinion, based on ancient texts, about how modern individuals can "serve the Gods" without temples, theocracy, or religious tax etc is to maintain 'The Order' — Link.

While Mesopotamians feared their Gods I don't suggest adding that into your religious mindset until you can really understand it and divorce it from anxiety, self-esteem, self-doubt, trauma, etc— which I doubt is easy.

The important part is: their love is not unconditional for example you could lose their favor if: you cheat on your partner, snub the poor, or purposely try to curse a God (which occasionally happens on TikTok). Additionally, they embody the forces of nature including destruction.

You can lament to them about dire situations and seek their help and guidance; lamentation is said to sooth their hearts. But again divorce this from "Gods are mad at me"

🌾 A Word About Inana

Usually spelled Inanna, I use ETCSL proper noun spelling. She probably has the most available information but also the most misinformation unfortunately. Straight up disinformation as well in my opinion.

She was a Goddess that spread far and wide geographically and is found in basically every time period of Mesopotamian history, and spread to many neighboring cultures. She absorbed many local Goddesses and covered many aspects of life, depending on which culture, location, and time. Most well known for fertility, love/lust, great power, and war.

While she is a very utilitarian Goddess, I only suggest starting with her if you know how to parse out the disinformation and misinformation spread about her. Which can be done but it will take a bit more diligence when researching.

Good ways to do that:

🔹Stick to academic sources where the author is an Assyriologist or historian in a related field like ancient literature or archeology.

Good book specifically for her would be Ishtar by Louise M Pyrke (2017) Google Books 57 Pages Available

If you're willing to learn about numerous Goddesses at the same time the book: Goddesses in Context by Julia Asher-Greve and Joan Goodnick Westenholz (2013) PDF Book Full

Do not use neo-pagan, new age, occult, witchcraft, by polytheists-for-polytheist, books about her.

Don't use books written by Jungian Analysts. My beef with them is A.) Jungian archetypes specifically are inherently Euro-centric western and try to shove all world cultures into them. B.) Every single piece of information on Mesopotamia I have ever read from these authors is always inaccurate C.) Education/Degree/License as a Jungian Analyst is not an academic credential for Ancient Mesopotamian resources. | If you work with archetypes in your religion that is up to you, but as sources of accurate information these authors are not useful.

People often try to find sources on a singular Mesopotamian God, but thats very uncommon. If you want to learn about any Diĝir in-depth you will end up reading articled and books on a variety of ancient religious topics.

🔹Utilize translations by academics not other sources:

ETCSL Inana Entries: Inana Myth — Link • Inana & Dumuzid Myth — Link • Hymns to Inana — Link • Hymns to Inana & Dumuzid — Link

The Harps that Once by Jacobsen (1987), Google Books 109 Pages Available

Enheduana by Sophus Helle (2023), Google Books 58 Pages Available. Companion Website Link, he offers up other translations for the same compositions too.

Not Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth by Diane Wolkstein. A good story but not fully faithful to the ancient story as it shoves compositions together leaving out entire sections of those compositions. It then presents those 3 hacked up compositions as if they were one story and changes the meaning of some. All of the actual compositions are available on the ETCSL in order of how she used them: Inana-Dumuzid A 4.08.01; Dumuzid and Enkimdu 4.08.33; Dumuzid-Inana I 4.08.09. Her "Introduction" barely goes a sentence without misinformation.

Not Lady of The Largest Heart by Betty De Shong Meador, no translator credentials. Shes also a Jungian Analyst.

Nor anyone else that doesn't have direct credentials to translate Sumerian or Akkadian.

.▪️.

I hope this is helpful in some way.

-Dyslexic, not audio proof read-

[enkhanthor]

LEGACY HISTORY CHALLENGE - INTERLUDE - THE GREAT FLOOD (JEMDET NASR PERIOD)

*Note: English isn’t my mother language and I’m not an expert in idiomatic expression. So if you find any errors or something weird, please forgive me and let me know on “ask me” if you want.

Tradução em português aqui.

LHC Doc - EN/US - Complete Doc with all Ages.

LHC Doc - PT/BR- Doc Completo com todas as Eras.

INTRODUCTION

Many civilizations have in their beliefs the story of a great flood, sent by one or more deities, which devastated humanity at some point in ancient times. In Greek mythology, Zeus became enraged with mankind and decided to destroy humanity by asking the God of the Sea, Poseidon, to flood the world. However, the Titan Prometheus warned his son Deucalion and his daughter-in-law Pyrrha, who built a chest and saved themselves. After the flood, Deucalion and Pyrrha repopulated humanity by throwing stones (the bones of the earth) onto their backs. Pyrrha's stones formed women and Deucalion's stones formed men.

The Greek story finds parallels in the biblical narrative, where God regretted creating man and decided to kill humanity because of their vices and perversities, causing a flood that lasted 40 days. Nonetheless, God knew that Noah was a devout and just man and ordered him to build an ark to save himself and his descendants. Noah was tasked with placing a pair of animals of each species inside this ark and repopulating the world. After the flood, the ark ran aground on Mount Ararat (Turkey), Noah became a vineyard worker and made a sacrifice to God. Then, God made a covenant with Noah, promising never to try to destroy humanity with another flood and commanding Noah's children to multiply on the earth.

The biblical story probably originated with the Sumerians. In the Eridu Genesis, after the creation of the world, each god was given a city to rule until the gods An and Enlil decided to destroy humanity with a flood. The God Enki, who was a friend of men, warned the king of Shuruppak, Ziusudra, to build a large boat and save himself. This story was found on several cuneiform tablets with slight variations. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a tale found in the library of the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, the hero who built the boat, called “The Preserver of Life,” was Utnapishtim. Another Babylonian poem, Atrahasis, names the owner of the boat as Atra-Hasis, telling the story of the creation of humans by Ninhursag and Enki to work in the place of the gods. Then, humans become too numerous and noisy, angering the God Enlil, who decides to kill them with pestilences, droughts, famine and finally a flood.

These narratives have led to theories about tsunamis, floods, or large-scale sea level rises in the Mesopotamian region. However, a flood on a global scale finds no correspondence in natural history or geology. Likewise, there is no possibility of building such a large ark in the Fertile Crescent region due to the lack of local vegetation with sufficient raw materials. Nevertheless, archaeological discoveries in Shuruppak and other cities suggest the occurrence of a pluvial flood around the year 2900 BCE, in the Jemdet Nasr period (3100 BCE - 2900 BCE), which marks the transition between the Uruk Period (4100 BCE - 3100 BCE) and the Early Dynastic Period (2900 BCE - 2334 BCE). Based on dust deposits found at archaeological sites, the french geologist Marie Agnès Courty has also proposed that some event that occurred between 2350 BCE and 2000 BCE triggered a series of natural disasters in Mesopotamia. An asteroid impact could have triggered local flooding, among other catastrophes.

Adapting the myth to The Sims 4, in the twenty-first year of the Sim Calendar, your heir Sim received a mission from the Watcher: to build an ark, as it will rain for 28 days. Your heir Sim tried to warn everyone in the neighborhood, but they didn't believe him. They think the Watcher is nothing more than a lunatic's fantasy. So, your heir Sim must build the ark alone, to ensure the preservation of life. Just like the Original Age - Genesis, this Age is optional, if you want to remove the mythological part you can skip to the next Age, but you must simulate a flood and roll the dice to reduce the local population. If you skip this Age, roll the dice for your heir Sim and descendants too, without exceptions.

RULES

1 - Noah, the Public Enemy:

1.1 - Choose one of the descendants of the Matriarch's lineage who already has 3 male children to be the heir of that Age or has 3 male children who are teenagers and married until the day 22p1 on the Sim Calendar.

1.2 - “Noah” and his three sons, “Shem”, “Ham” and “Japheth”* don't need to roll the dice. They received the Watcher’s blessing to survive, because they need to produce heirs. (*You can name your Sims whatever you want.)

1.3 - The sons of “Noah” must marry women of different ethnicities: “Ham” with a black woman, “Japheth” with a white woman and “Shem” with an oriental woman (with physical characteristics of the Middle East).

1.4 - Your Heir Sim's aspiration must be Public Enemy and he must complete it only up to the second level, without entering the criminal career.

1.5 - One of your Heir Sim's traits must be “Erratic”.

1.6 - Have 10 declared enemies.

1.7 - Be hated by the entire neighborhood.

1.8 - Start fights and trouble with all neighbors whenever possible.

2 - The Ark

2.1 - In the second week of the 21st Sim Year (21v1), start building a gigantic boat with materials that appear to be made of wood. The ark must have 3 floors and each week you can build one of them. You have until day 21i7 of the Sim Calendar to finish it and you must live in it while you build it. The boat must have a roof and windows are only allowed on the third floor.

2.2 - Equip your ark with everything you need to spend 1 Sim year (28 days) inside it without being able to leave.

2.3 - The rules about money, lots, crops and skills from the Early Simvilization still apply.

2.4 - Until the 21i1 day in Sim Calendar you must withdraw 90% of your household's money as if you had bought wood with that money.

2.5 - Until the 21i1 day in Sim Calendar you must stock up on as many cooking supplies as you can buy from merchants (requires “The Sims 4 Cottage Living”) and harvest from your crops or the world.

2.6 - On 21i7, day in Sim Calendar moves at least one pair of lions, one pair of raccoons, and one pair of zebras into your household. Or other types of wild animals of your choice (requires “The Sims 4 Cats & Dogs”  and  “The Sims 4 Horse Ranch”). If you want, you can increase the number of households to have more animals. (Wild Animals Creators in the Gallery: TheKalino, Pugowned, hingedrocket233, Krestovka2137, SimShizo.)

2.7 - If you don't want to use cheats or mods to increase the number of households, you can use rooms as rental housing and move your sons and their spouses into them. Requires the expansion “The Sims 4 For Rent”. If you don't have the expansion, move your sons and their wives to other worlds.

2.8 - Purchase a rooster and a hen, two cows, two mini goats, and two mini sheep (requires “The Sims 4 Cottage Living” and “The Sims 4 Horse Ranch”). You cannot milk one of the cows and one of the mini goats, but you must care for them. They represent the male pair.

3 - The Flood

3.1 - On 22p1 day in Sim Calendar you must lock the doors of the Ark to all Sims. No one can enter or leave for 28 days.

3.2 - Place the “Private Dwelling” lot trait (so no one can visit) and the “Quake Zone” lot challenge (to simulate fluctuations during storms) Requires  “The Sims 4 City Living” expansion pack.

3.3 - Use cheats to activate stormy weather in the mailbox. Requires “The Sims 4 Seasons” expansion pack. It must rain for 28 days, or 672 hours. (Requires MC Command Center. Click on the mailbox, choose the “change weather” option, then choose “storms” and enter the value 672 for the number of hours the storm will last.)

3.4 - Keep all Sims and animals alive and well cared for until the flood ends.

3.5 - You can't buy supplies while the flood lasts.

3.6 - There is no refrigerator, so leftover food can't be preserved and will spoil.

3.7 - You don't have to pay bills while the flood lasts. (Observe the household simoleons before paying the bill. Pay the bill. Press “Ctrl+Shift+C”, activate testingcheats.true and type “money” + observed amount. The amount paid to the bills will be added.)

3.8 - Roll a dice for each Sim in all Worlds except your heir, their descendants, and their spouses. Even numbers mean the Sim lives, odd numbers mean the Sim dies.

4 - Repopulating the world

4.1 - On 23p1 day in the Calendar Sim you can leave the Ark.

4.2 - On 23p1 day in the Calendar Sim free the wild animals from the ark. Pass them on to NPC families or delete them.

4.3 - You can keep with the domestic animals.

4.4 - Send your sons married to the black and white women to other worlds, “Cam” to Oasis Springs and “Japheth” to Willow Creek, and let the stories of the neighborhood or MC Command Center continue their descendants.

4.5 - Choose “Shem” or his firstborn son to be the heir of the next Age.

5 - Requirements to advance to the Ancient Age (Bronze Age Part I):

5.1 - Build the ark.

5.2 - Noah, his sons and the animals must survive the 28-day flood.

6 - Expansions, Game Packs and Stuff Packs:

6.1 - The Sims 4 Seasons (essential) - Make rain for 28 days.

6.2 - The Sims 4 City Living (optional) - Enable earthquakes as fluctuations.

6.3 - The Sims 4 Cats & Dogs (essential) - Have animal pairs.

6.4 - The Sims 4 Horse Ranch” (essential) - Have animal pairs.

6.5 - The Sims 4 Cottage Living (essential) - “Simple Living” lot challenge and farm animals.

6.6 - The Sims 4 For Rent (optional) - Your sons' rooms inside the Ark.

7 -  MC CC Settings:

7.1 - Keep the settings from the Early Simvilization (see item 14).

7.2 - Increase the household size so that all Sims can fit inside the Ark. (I usually increase it to 16, as up to this number it is easy to quickly remove them by creating another household through the “Manage Households Menu”.)

8 - Recommended mods:

8.1 - MC Command Center by Deaderpool - Manages various game resources.

8.2 -  T.o.o.l. by Twisted Mexi - Add and edit objects in the world.

8.3 - Blowtorch by Simsverses - Modern items are already deleted.

8.4 - Sulani Hiders - Early Simvilization Saves by Enkhanthor - Hides items from the world that don't match the Age. Note: If you use Blowtorch most items in the world will be deleted, however my Sulani Hiders mod is still useful for hiding buckets when making sculptures and beach trash. You can download the Modders version of Sulani Hiders and choose just which items you want to hide.

8.5 - Assign NPC Jobs (before No Random Townies) by Zero - Allows you to assign roles to NPCs.

8.6 - Arranged Marriages by MizoreYukii - Allows you to make marriage agreements without the need for romance.

8.7 - No Sad Moddlet on Birthday by ClaudiaSharon - Removes forgotten birthday buff.

8.8 - Cut Down Tree by LiraSims - Cut firewood.

8.9 - No Bicycle Bicycle by Bosselady - No NPCs riding bicycles. It probably comes into conflict with Dapple the Donkey.

8.10 - Custom content befitting the Age. You can check the list of CCs I found in CC Links - LHC Directory in my homepage.

9 - Sources (Books, Series and Movies):

9.1 - The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian (Book translated by Andrew George - 2003).

9.2 - Eridu Genesis - World History Encyclopedia (Website about history).

9.3 - Genesis - The Creation and the Flood (Italian film directed by Ermanno Olmi - 1994).

9.4 - Noah (Movie directed by Darren Aronofsky - 2014).

9.5 - Noah’s Ark Part 1 and Part 2 (TV series directed by John Irvin - 1999).

9.6 - Gênesis (Brazilian TV series by TV Record).

[miochimochi]

Simplified History of Canaan/Israel/Palestine

A good story starts at the beginning. In this case, about 15 thousand years ago in Canaan. The Canaanites were a Northwest Semitic people in the late bronze age comprised of a number of tribes: the Edomites, Amalekites, Phoenicians, Samaritans, and the Israelites, among others.

One of these tribes, the Israelites, revered the Canaanite god Yahweh above the rest. He would be worshiped alongside his consort Asherah and fellow gode El, and Baal. Over time, Yahweh came to lead the whole of the pantheon and became the sole subject of worship - a stage in the Israelite religion dubbed Monolatrism. This would later develop into a Monotheistic position, with gods like Baal being subject to demonization and El being to various epitaphs of Yahweh such as El-Shaddai. This change happened over a number of centuries, although we're unsure how many. What we do know is that the Monolatrist Yahwism was still a major religion in the region around 600BC.

Then came the Iron Age and the establishment of an Israelite kingdom in 1047BC. Saul rose as the first king of the now united Israel. It would continue until Jeroboam's Revolt in 930BC which would split the kingdom into two. Israel to the north, Judah to the south. Israel held control from east of the Jordan to the Mediterranean sea. Judah, on the other hand, had only the Jordan as its bordering water. The west side of Judah was held by the Philistine city states in what is today Gaza.

The Kingdom of Israel, also called the Kingdom of Samaria, had 4 capitals over its short time: Shiloh, Shechem, Tirzah, and Samaria. They lasted for 210 years before being subjugated by the Assyrians. The Assyrian Exile saw the forceful relocation of thousands of Israelites. There were 2 waves out of Israel up into Assyria and 1 other relocation that happened later in Beth-Eden out to Media. They took the northern Israel and dubbed it the province of Semarina. But the Assyrians would find themselves up against the Babylonians who sought the land for themselves. The Neo Assyrian Empire fell to the Neo Babylonian Empire and the lands of Israel, down to Judah as well, would be under Babylonian control.

Jerusalem was the capital of Judah, part of what was known under the Neo Babylonian Empire as the province of Yehud. Judah was not very happy about or compliant with their Babylonian captivity. The Judahite revolts lasted about 15 years and concluded with the Neo Babylonian Empire laying seige to Jerusalem. The seige lasted 2 years, ending in 587BC, ending the Kingdom of Judah after 343 years with the Babylonian exile. The Kingdom of Judah was later granted permission by the Babylonians to return, but no such Edict was made for the Kingdom of Israel. The split is said to be 2 tribes returning to Judah, 10 tribes still in exile. Fun fact: there are actually 13 tribes, the 13th being the Tribe of Levi, a tribe with no territory!

It's likely that this Babylonian exile was a big catalyst for the monotheistic Judaism we know now and a good portion of the Tanakh was written during this time. This was the period in which the Hebrew identity really began to take shape. From their faith, to their politics, and even the writing of their history. It's possible that either the majority of Judah was exiles or that only the few elites, now embittered by their exile and the taking of their land by those who were below them, were the only ones taken into exile.

Keep in mind that since the seige of Jerusalem, the Israelites did not have their temple. It was almost a century later under the Persian empire that the second temple would be built, starting a new age of Hebrew identity. The Persians were rather open to Jewish self-governance, allowing an autonomous kingdom of Israel to rise in the province of Yehud Medinata.

Israel stayed relatively undisturbed for centuries after. The Greeks would conquer Persia and establish the province of Celesyria. The Hasmonean dynasty took rise in 140BC and lasted until 37BC. It was first under the Seleucid empire and then gained a brief period of autonomy until the Hasmonean Civil War broke out and the Roman empire took the opportunity to intervene and subjugate the kingdom in 63BC. The dynasty would collapse with the rise of the Herodian dynasty.

This Herodian Kingdom would continue to be a client state of the Roman empire. After the death of King Herod, the Romans divided the kingdom among his children, marking the beginning of the Herodian Tetrarchy. This too would come to an end and Provincia Iudaea and Iturea would take its place. It was during this time that a man named Yeshua had done his teachings - teachings which would have a great effect on the region in later years. It was also during this time that the Second Temple period came to an end when the Romans besieged Jerusalem in the First Jewish-Roman War.

Provincia Iudaea would find itself changing as a result of the Bar Kokhba Revolt. The region would be named Provincia Syria Palastina in its restructuring and the Jews once again found themselves in exile. Those who remained after the defeat and execution of Bar Kokhba would be themselves executed or enslaved. But the Roman Empire began its decline and would break apart some time later. The region would fall into the hands of the Byzantine Empire. The Jewish land was now under the first empire to be Christian from its founding.

This Christian control would hold until the Muslim conquests began. These conquests fundamentally changed the cultural and demographic landscape of the whole Levant. What was once Northwestern Semitic was now decisively Arabic, a Central Semitic culture. The land of Israel was split between Jund Filastin and Al-'Urduun. It would remain this way under three separate caliphates until the Pope declared the First Crusade which established the Kingdom of Jerusalem which lasted for almost 200 years, then had a 5 year gap in which it was under Muslim control again, and then a nearly 100 more years after it was recaptured with the Third Crusade.

From here, the lands gets continuously taken and divided between various Caliphates, Sultanates, Emirates, and Principalities. But none of them quite got a great hold of the region until the Ottoman Empire got in the game. The empire lasted over 600 years, although the first half of it did not have the region under its control. A joint effort of British, French, and Arab forces would take control of the region away from the Ottoman empire in 1917, and in 1920 there was the establishment of Mandatory Palestine.

In the 1800s, a nationalist movement arose among the Jewish diaspora within Europe called Zionism. The movement called for a Jewish homeland to be reestablished within the region of Palestine, at the time under the control of the Ottoman Empire. It partly rose as a response to the Haskalah, an intellectual movement among Jews in Europe and the Middle East. The Haskalah saw a turn away from traditional dress and institutions, but, likely more importantly, a revival of the Hebrew language. You see, Hebrew at this point was only a liturgical language, the way Latin is in Catholicism. The Haskalah sought for it to be used among even secular society. The Haskalah helped to unify Jews, especially in Europe.

Zionism was always a diverse movement with various leaders holding various different positions, but all agreed on the thing that unified the whole ideology: a return to Israel at any cost. At this point, Jewish identity was still scattered and the bloodlines were muddled by centuries of exile. The Jews were found throughout Eurasia and Africa, but it was particularly the European Jews that had the biggest push towards resettlement and the reestablishment of an Israeli state. The Aliyah had picked up more in earnest.

It's believed that less than 1% of the Jewish diaspora were living in the Palestinian region in the late 19th century. Many Jews began to make aliyah to the region in the 1880s and they began to settle into the land. This was further spured on by the various persecutions Jews had faced in various places, making for a refugee settlement within the land. Through the involvement of the British, French, and Arabs, the political landscape shifted around these new settlers until 1948 when Israel officially became a sovereign nation. In 1950, Israel issued the Law of Return, calling for the global Jewish diaspora to return to the region and be granted citizenship within Israel.

There were clashes between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine during their migrations, but it was at the founding of an Israeli state that tensions soared. Both Israel and new Palestinian states of Gaza and the Jordanian Annexed West Bank argued over their capital. East Jerusalem was held as the Palestinian capital and West Jerusalem was held as the Israeli capital, but both wanted full control of Jerusalem. The conflicts would see the scales tilted most towards the side of Israel, with Palestinians taking the most casualties since Israel's founding.

Thy founding of Israel wasn't a peaceful one. The Arab League was instantly hostile to David Ben Gurion declaring an independent Israel and on May 14th 1948 attacked. The war was decisive, but bloody. Israel lost around 6,000, two thirds of that being civilians, while the Arab League had a combined loss upwards of 20,000 soldiers and civilians. This conflict established the All-Palestine Government, Egyptian occupation of Gaza, the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank, the cementing of Israel as a new nation. The Nakba occurred during this war and is what contributed most to the civilian casualties on the side of the Arab League. This event is seen as an ethnic cleansing of Palestine, with many targeted massacres of Arab majority towns and villages. Israel had displaced over 750,000 Arabs from the region during this time.

The Armistance signed at the end of the war was being observed by the parties involved but there was tension over the Straits of Tiran. This culminated in an Israeli invasion of Egypt when Egypt closed off the Suez Canal to Israel. This invasion reopened the canal and placed UNEF forces at the Egypt-Israel border. Israel would then threaten Egypt with a casus belli should they close the canal again. About a decade later, Egypt would mobilize troops to a defensive position at the border, call for the UNEF to leave, and closed the canal again. The UNEF obliged and began to leave. In response to all of this, Israel launched airstrikes against Egyptian airfields and other locations. Israel would simultaneously invade the Sinai peninsula and Gaza sparking the Six Day War. Jordan would launch attacks aimed at slowing the Israeli forces. Syria would join in the fifth day with attacks in the north, and on the sixth day Egyptian president Nasser would call for an evacuation of troops and civilians from the peninsula. The casualties were in the thousands for one side and the hundreds for the Israeli side. Israel didn't even believe Egypt would attack Israel, as the troop movements were not significant enough to engage an offensive.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) would exchange fire at the Israel-Lebanon border, resulting in a number of soldier and civilian casualties on both sides. Back in the UK, a gunman tried to assassinate Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov. Prime Minister Menachem Begin blamed the PLO for the attack and launched an invasion of southern Lebanon. In reality, the PLO had nothing to do with it - in fact, it was one of the PLO's enemies, the Abu Nidal Organization, that attempted the assassination. With the help of a number of domestic Lebanese-nationalist Christian groups, Israel occupied territory in southern Lebanon. Again with thousands dead on one side, hundreds on the Israeli. The invasion led to an Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, to the chagrin of their Christian allies who had proclaimed the land the Free Lebanon State.

In the 80s, a series of protests and acts of civil disobedience occurred in the Israeli occupied Palestinian territories. People would take to the streets, fights would break out, and people would be killed. It lasted until 1993 with the Israel-PLO mutual recognition letters. These letters saw the PLO recognizing Israel as a sovereign state and Israel recognizing the PLO as the legitimate Palestinian authority. This set the groundwork for the Oslo I accords which resulted in the creation of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). Upwards of 200 Israelis were killed and almost 2,000 Palestinians were killed, about 350 of those were killed by other Palestinians.

The accords would call for a 5 year period of peace in which plans for permanent peace could be negotiated. The PNA were to have administrative control of Palestine and the IDF would withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank. Oslo II would be signed in 1995 as an agreement by Israel to transfer authority of the Palestinian Council while also making it so the only armed groups allowed in Palestine would be the Israeli police, Israeli military, and Palestinian police. This would bar Palestine from any formal military or militia.

In 2001, Netanyahu would be secretly recorded as he said "They asked me before the election if I'd honor [the Oslo accords]... I said I would, but [that] I'm going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the '67 borders. How did we do it? Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I'm concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone. Go argue."

Hamas was founded in 1987 and was an opposition force to, not only Israel but, the ruling party of Palestine: Fatah. It formed out of a charity affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. By 2006, they had won the majority vote in the Palestinian legislative election and in 2007 they seized control of Gaza from Fatah. Their position was a reinstatement of Mandatory Palestine, but over time they declared they would settle for the 1967 border. They offered a truce with Israel should they honor the '67 border, to which Israel rejected.

Hamas had received backing from Israel during its foundation, according to Israeli officials Yitzhak Segev and Avner Cohen. It was meant to act as a sort of balance to act against the PLO and Fatah. This means that Hamas, considered a threat to Israeli security, began as a sort of proxy for Israel, although likely unknowingly. Israel would find themselves regretting this decision as Hamas would commit multiple acts of violence against Israeli citizens and soldiers over the years since their creation. Even with as much as there is documented, though, much of what is attributed to them is rather unclear as to whether they were actually their acts.

On October 7th, Hamas would launch a small scale attack around a music festival. Israel is believed to have also contributed to the fatalities that day. More people would be killed amidst the fallout of this event and many unsupported accusations would be made by Israel, such as a claim that Hamas engaged in mass rape during this event. Netanyahu would use this event as a springboard for what he viewed as just cause to launch an invasion of Palestine, focusing heavily on the Gaza Strip. Since then, there has been documented atrocities committed by Israel, little reliable coverage of what Hamas has been doing during this time frame, and a lot of unsubstantiated claims from both Israel and Palestine. Among the documented atrocities committed would be: humiliation and execution of Palestinians (including children), firing upon medical personnel and journalists, giving as little as only 5 minutes of warning before dropping bombs in heavily populated areas, firing upon Israeli hostages Hamas had released while they waived white flags, invaded a hospital and killed people (including children) lying in hospital beds, kidnapping, and executing an unarmed old man begging for his life at his bedside.

I've brought everything here up to show that history is not as simple as people like to present it as. There are many ups and downs, twists and turns, and even fabrications. I've seen people on both sides of the aisle present false information, deny history, and act like everything is entirely black and white the whole way down. And when I speak, I'm accused of supporting the worst things imaginable. Ancient Israel and the Israelites has been a topic of interest for me at different points in my life, I've done my digging. It would be wrong to say that the Arab Palestinians are the indigenous people and that ethnic Jews aren't. It would also be wrong to say that Israel has done no wrong, acting only in defense.

I don't take a side between Israel and Hamas. I take my side with the people caught in between this conflict that's been going on for a long time. It did not start October 7th. It all started much much much more long ago. Knowing your history is important to understanding today.

Also I wrote this on and off for about a month now and I just want to finally finish and post it, I'm not proofreading to make sure everything's entirely cohesive and strung together the best way possible, don't ever just trust some rando on the internet, do your own research.

No, I'm not pro-genocide nor antisemitic. I just like history and hate statists. Fuck this all. Heartless bastards always running the show and the people pay the price.

[mightyostanes]

The Covenant of Shem

(TW: Using the Talmud and Midrash to commit Heresy)

First off, I don't take any narrative in Genesis as literal truth at all even if I find it spiritually meaningful. I am of course, of the opinion that anything even remotely resembling hard historical fact starts around Exodus and Numbers. And even then, I'm not sure how much of it is distorted by the multi century long gap between when the events purportedly happened and when they were written down. I am also of the opinion that Judaism fundamentally grew out of the milieu of Syro-Mesopotamian and Hurro-Hittite religions that surrounded the ancient Israelites. It is of course, absolutely an evolution and a step forward in the same way that Homo Sapiens are more evolved than Homo Erectus, but to deny its roots is completely illogical in my opinion.

Because of this, I find comparing the Tanakh to other stories in the ancient semitic world incredibly valuable both spiritually and academically. Especially by seeing what Judaism chose to change and alter versus what they kept. Studying these ancient faiths can also help add context to various passages by putting them into the context of the religious and cultural norms of the time they were written down. Of course, this may sound denigrating to look for answers in scriptural interpretation in the Ugaritic Ba'al cycle and the Neo Babylonian Enuma Elish but it's also important to outreach with other small MENA ethnoreligions around today. Many of whom share ideas both with us and the Ancient Semitic, Hurro-Hittite, and Iranic religions that would also evolve and coalesce into Judaism. The key to this linkage both with the Ziggurates of Ur, and the Yazidis, Druze, and Mandaeans of the modern age is the biblical figure of Shem.

For those of you that don't know Shem is the third son of Noach and the ancestor of most peoples who speak semitic languages (Bereshis 9:18). Like his brother Japeth, Shem covered his drunken naked father and received a blessing instead of receiving a curse like Ham (Bereshis (9:20-27). For the record Ham isn't strictly the father of Africans, instead he was mainly the father of groups the Israelities didn't like, such as Egypt (Mitzrayim), Nimrod, the Canaanites (Canaan) and even the probably Indo-European Philistines (Through his Grandson Caphtor). It's entirely possible that Ethiopians and Nubians simply got caught in the crossfire because they were very closed to and partially related to the Egyptians. Especially as the Pharaohs of the period most of our earliest Hebrew texts come from (The 8th to 7th centuries BCE) were members of the purely Nubian 25th Dynasty that was in close contact with the monarchy in Jerusalem (2 Kings 19:9). Therefore, contrary to what racist asshats may think the curse of Ham wasn't black skin (The Philistines were described as fair, and most Canaanites resembled Israelites and modern Lebanese Maronite Christians), it was getting their asses handed to them by the Israelites in the biblical past.

Moving back from that tangent on taking biblical quotes out of context to fuel racism, let's return to the topic of Shem. Because Shem was the direct ancestor of Abraham it makes a lot of sense for Jews wanting to give Abraham an impressive pedigree for a Hellenistic gentile audience to start writing about Shem and how Abraham either inherited his library or studied with him in person (1). According to these texts such Pagan luminaries as Galen, Hippocrates and even the Greek demigod Asclepius used various medical treatise supposedly written by Shem. The fact that Nehushtan resembled the Greek symbol of Asclepius, a deity who had temples in and around Eretz Israel most likely did not go unnoticed by Jewish intellectuals (2). Shem's academy also gave pre-Mosaic patriarchs and Matriarchs somewhere and something to study (Bereshit Rabbah: 63: 10) thus making them more rabbinic figures who also poured over texts for secret meanings and consulted their seniors on matters of Jewish law.

In addition to his study hall, Shem was associated with the character of Melchizedek found in Genesis 18 (Nedarim 32b:6). The enigmatic priest of El Elyon who blesses Abraham after his war against the Babylonian and Elamite forces. In that same Talmudic section, it not only states that he was born circumcised thus putting him in quite an exclusive club, but also that he was the one who transmitted priesthood to Israel. Similarly his study hall/court also hosted the divine presence (Makkot 23b:12, Yoma 10a:1). Something those passages say had only happened three times in human history. In the non-rabbinic but contemporaneous, Qumran literature Melchizedek is also seen as the earthly incarnation of the Archangel Michael, while some Heikalot literature identified him as another angelic being (1). While this may seem odd to reference, it's quite clear that Jews deemed 'rabbinical' by Karaites had access to texts like these or texts with similar themes. Later on in the Zohar Melchizedek is hinted at as a potential past incarnation of the Messiah (Zohar Lech Lecha 240:24), and as a potential Partzuf of the Sefira of Malkuth (Idra Zutra 79). It's relatively obvious that the writers of these passages would've been familiar with the tradition that Shem and Melchizedek were the same person.

Ironically this high esteem for Shem may not simply come from his ancestral status but also his name. In second temple and heterodox Rabbinic Judaism there was this idea of G-d's name as a hypostatic entity that could reside inside or rest on human beings allowing them to act as superhuman, possibly even super angelic intermediaries (3). With the idea that this name somehow contained all divine knowledge and even had an accompanying angel in the form of either Yahoel or Metatron, beings that though not identical with the name did act as the ultimate wielders and guardians of the name if not direct emanations of the name which emanates from G-d (3). This theology was known as Shem theology as opposed to the image focused Kavod theology, so it becomes pretty obvious who the Rabbis and other interpreters would assume the Shem of G-d definitely rested on (3).

In fact, it's quite possible that some commentators may even have thought that Shem was an actual incarnation of Yahoel or Metatron. Before everyone gets their undergarments in a twist, the main issue between Jewish and Christian theology is the idea that G-d cannot incarnate as a human. This does not mean that angels including incredibly important ones can't incarnate, possess people, or even shape embryos in their likeness (4). In the Merkavah Rabbah, Rabbi Ishmael Hakohen is said to be either the son, the image, or the earthly double of the archangel Gabriel whom he receives his power from (4). Indeed, angelic doubles or personal angels are mentioned in a literal translation of Tractate Kallah 3:4 when Rabbi Akiba argues with some other sages is, "How dare the angel of your heart transgress the words of your colleagues.". Therefore, rather than Shem being seen as exceptional for having an angelic aspect it'd be more likely that Shem's importance came from having a much more important angel in that role than most people. As well as offering an easy way to tie rabbinic doctrine into popular ideas of Melchizedek being intimately connected with high-ranking angels. More importantly unlike most people, Shem would probably be intimately aware of said personal angel.

Because of his relatively high-ranking status and role as a source of esoteric wisdom it'd make sense that he'd at least teach his sons certain things regarding theology and cosmology. Even if over time, said knowledge became garbled and corrupted over time. The sons of Shem are Arphaxad (Jews, Chaldeans, Sumerians, and Akkadians), Lud (Kurds and Anatolians), Elam (Medes and other southern Iranians), Ashur (Assyrians), and Aram (Amorites and other related groups). Therefore, the religions of those groups descended at least partially from the teachings of Shem who in some circles was a figure superior to Noah, and Avraham, and potentially equal to Enoch, Jacob, and Moses in some respects.

Indeed, there is precedence for giving less favored sons secret knowledge as a consolation prize in Jewish texts. Avraham gives his other sons occult secrets as a gift in Sanhedrin 91a. Mysteries that Medieval Kabbalists would consider somewhat unsavory but important to being a fully realized mystic capable of enacting Tikkun on the divine.

As a pre-Diluvian and thus pre-Jewish patriarch, Shem also acts as a backdoor for non-Jewish ideas by putting them within the Jewish tradition. Because it was claimed that Galen and Hippocrates got their knowledge from Shem (1), it was therefore allowed to bring some of their ideas into Jewish thought on the basis that Jews were simply retrieving them. A similar process was applied to Hermetic literature by implying that Hermes Trismegistus was either Moses or Enoch (5). Indeed, in Avodah Zarah 43a:5, using amulets with pagan gods such as Apis or Isis was allowed under the assumption that they represented biblical figures such as Joseph or Eve. Figures that if their amulets worked even if made by Akumim meant that these figures had some powers in and of themselves.

Lastly, unlike in Islam Judaism has an idea of an evolving covenant that continually gets added onto by various divine revelations. The Covenant of the sons of Noah was the precursor to the Covenant of Abraham, which was the precursor to the Covenant at Sinai, which included and preceded the covenant of David. None of these covenants is rendered invalid but it's clear that they aren't all revealed at the same time. So at least for certain groups of people those covenants are still valid even if they aren't members of the Mosaic covenant. Of course, the ancient Mesopotamians and Amorites didn't follow the 7 Noachide laws. But there are groups that explicitly claim Shem as a prophet (Or syncretize another figure to Shem) today that follow these laws assuming one takes Shituf into account.

These groups are the Yazidis, the Druze, the Mandaeans, the Yarnasans, the Alawis, and to a lesser extent, Zoroastrians and Nestorian Christians. All of which are like us, in that they're small persecuted Near Eastern Ethno-Religions. Groups that have found common ground with the Jews while living in diaspora (6). So much so that one Mandaean was shocked with how similar Mandaeans were to the Hasidic Jews he worked with (7). More importantly many of these groups share similar esoteric doctrines to Judaism, including the role of the alphabet in creation, reincarnation, angels incarnating into humans throughout history, angelic doubles, Enoch is Metatron, ostensible monotheism focused on the G-d worshipped by the antediluvian patriarchs, a reluctance to accept converts, the importance of the antediluvian patriarchs, a world soul, as well as an aversion to Pork. Therefore, I'd like to propose a fourth major covenant given to these groups that keep the Noachide laws, the covenant of Shem. Who entrusted the secrets of the universe to his children so that they may heal the world.

More importantly these are esoteric doctrines that Nicene Christians and non-Sufi Muslim don't accept due to their wars on heresy. These are the same esoteric doctrines that Groypers and Anti-Semitic Fundamentalists cite as reasons why Rabbinic Judaism is 'Satanic' or 'evil'. These groups are also metaphorical children of Shem but ones that denied their heritage. Creeds that have disowned Shem and turned to persecute their brothers under the unconscious urgings of Ur, of Habtar, of Samael. By denying or mystical traditions, by shoving Kabbalah under the rug, by considering Heikalot and Shi'ur Qomah as shameful works contaminated by foreign superstition, we potentially risk the same outcome. To become the same Sadducees that our Rabbis fought against for the sake of majority approval in the vain hope that said majority won't persecute us. This isn't to say that mainstream Christianity and Islam won't rejoin the covenant of Shem. Maybe someday they will, but until then it's important to focus on those who still hold this covenant, and as the most numerous and powerful community in this group we should make it our duty to protect them. If we do follow this route, and keep our responsibility to our partners, than who knows, maybe the court of Shem will be rebuilt and once more the Divine Presence shall dwell within it.

Non-Primary Source Bibliography

1.Reeves, John C. Heralds of that good realm syro-mesopotamian gnosis and Jewish traditions. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996.

2. McCasland, S. Vernon. “The Asklepios Cult in Palestine.” Journal of Biblical Literature 58, no. 3 (1939): 221–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/3259486.

3.Orlov, Andrei A. “Praxis of the Voice: The Divine Name Traditions in the ‘Apocalypse of Abraham.’” Journal of Biblical Literature 127, no. 1 (2008): 53–70. https://doi.org/10.2307/25610106.

4. Idel, Moshe. Ben: Sonship and Jewish mysticism. Continuum, 2008.

Pgs 138-139

5.Lelli, Fabrizio. "Hermes among the Jews: Hermetica as Hebraica from antiquity to the Renaissance." Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 2, no. 2 (2007): 111+. Gale Literature Resource Center (accessed February 17, 2025). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A171889288/LitRC?u=anon~68c01c5c&sid=googleScholar&xid=ac6d5f42.

6.

Russell, Gerard. Heirs to forgotten kingdoms: Journeys into the disappearing religions of the Middle East. New York: Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group, 2015.

Pg 270

7. Buckley, Jorunn Jacobsen. The Mandaeans: Ancient texts and modern people. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Pg 27.

[arthistoryanimalia]

#TwoForTuesday + #TilesOnTuesday:

2 of 120 lifesize #lions that lined the Processional Way from the Ishtar Gate to the Temple of Marduk at Babylon.

Striding Lion Panels

Mesopotamian, Babylonian Neo-Babylonian Period, reign of Nebuchadnezzar II 604–561 BCE

Findspot: Iraq, Babylon, 1899, excavated by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft for the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin

Terracotta glazed bricks

1. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 106 x 232 cm

2. RISD Museum 104.1 x 228.6 cm

[yamayuandadu]

Is Humbaba's appearance ever described in detail in any written sources? When looking online, I keep seeing artists depicting him in very specific ways (head covered in entrails, scaly skin, snake phallus...), but I'm having trouble finding the sources for those same specific details

This is something I've spent quite a lot of time investigating myself last year when I was working on his wiki article. The short answer is that not really, but we can piece something together from the available scraps - and it’s not really similar to the modern standard you're describing. You are definitely looking in the right places for Humbaba information if you found no trace of these traits - only one of them goes back directly to an actual source, and even then it’s less firm than it might seem at first glance. More under the cut. 

The textual sources are actually very lax when it comes to describing Humbaba’s appearance, What is emphasized are his supernatural powers and authority granted by the gods - Wer (they set this guy up like he’s the next arc villain in a shonen in the Old Babylonian version’s Sippar fragments) and Enlil or Enlil alone. There’s a decent chance he was viewed as largely human-like. Andrew R. George ( The Babylonian Gilgamesh epic: introduction, critical edition and cuneiform texts, p. 144) describes him as “essentially anthropomorphic” though speculates he might have been imagined as tree-like. Multiple considerations regarding Humbaba’s iconography can be found in the articles from Gilgamesch: Ikonographie eines Helden, especially in Lambert’s and Collon’s. Collon essentially just concludes that Humbaba was simply depicted as an unusually tall and/or broad but still largely human-like figure, Lambert notes similarities to the lahmu (so we’re still within the realm of burly hairy men, essentially). Piotr Michalowski (A Man Called Enmebaragesi, p. 205-206) argues that at least in the standalone narratives Humbaba was essentially a parody of various peripheral “barbarian” rulers. It is perhaps worth pointing out that while the etymology of Humbaba’s name is up for debate, it is clear that it was originally an ordinary personal name, and individuals bearing it appear in administrative texts from the Ur III period before Humbaba the literary character arose.

While myths and the epic itself are lax, plenty of information about Humbaba’s appearance can be found in other genres of texts. This evidence has been collected by George (same monograph as above, p. 146-147). His face was regarded as outlandish, with a bulbous nose and big eyes. There are references to diviners spotting Humbaba’s face while analyzing animal entrails. An artistic representation of this phenomenon is seemingly known from one exemplar, and is the source of “entrails-faced” Humbabas in modern work.

A unique sculpture from Neo-Babylonian Sippar seen above (you can view it from more sides here) is inscribed with a short formula starting with “If the coils of the colon resemble the head of Huwawa”, and has accordingly been described as the visual representation of this statement since the 1920s. Identification as Humbaba has been affirmed for example by Anthony Green in his 1997 article Myths in Mesopotamian Art (p. 137-138 + 150 for a confirmation of the museum number; published in Sumerian Gods and their Representations; you can find it online,it’s worth checking out since it also includes timeless classics like Wiggermann’s Transtigridian Snake Gods and Westenholz’s Nanaya, Lady of Mystery). I’m not actually aware of any parallels, but it’s a cool, striking visual and I personally don’t find its modern fame undeserved.

However, it needs to be stressed that it’s not standard. Humbaba’s face is also quite common in visual arts. In fact, it’s so common that Frans Wiggermann (Mesopotamian Protective Spirits: the ritual texts, p. 150) argues that the face came first, with the name perhaps representing a unique sound made by the creature while grinning or laughing (what is this, One Piece?) and only developed into a literary character later. These images served an apotropaic purpose guarding doors (examples have been discovered in situ), appear chiefly in Old Babylonian times, and show remarkably consistent traits, here are some I’ve assembled for the wiki article last year:

Scaly skin doesn’t show up anywhere as a trait of Humbaba’s, as far as I am aware. That’s Tishpak’s thing. However, it is perhaps worth noting that a type of lizard, ḫuwawītum, was named after Humbaba (George, p. 145). This was discussed briefly by Claus Wilcke a long time ago in Humbaba’s entry in the Reallexikon (p. 535); he pointed out the animal was compared to a gecko or what he identified as some variety of agamid. Not sure if anyone ever tried identifying it more precisely with any species of reptile which can be found in Iraq or Syria. Given Humbaba’s apparently outlandish looking eyes my first thought was a chameleon, honestly, but don’t quote me on that, plus note that it seems chameleons were called bargunna (or bargungunna).

As for the other reptilian matter, snake phallus is a part of Pazuzu's iconography (see his Reallexikon entry by Wiggermann, p. 377), not Humbaba's. As far as I can tell, the Humbaba plaque above is naked and shows no such characteristics. Many other possible depictions of Humbaba show him in some sort of kilt with no phallus of any sort in sight (see the numerous seals shown in Collon’s article mentioned above, for instance). I know the snake phallus claim was even on wikipedia at some point - long before my involvement - but it doesn’t come up in any publication about Humbaba I read from within the past 40 years.