Akkadian Ishtar, goddess of love and of war, of the morning and evening star, and patron of Uruk; the most vividly drawn figure in the Sumerian corpus and the subject of its best-known narrative, the descent to the underworld.
What she does in the texts
She takes the me, the offices and instruments of civilisation, out of Enki’s Abzu by getting him drunk and then refusing to give them back. She descends through seven gates, is stripped at each, is killed and hung on a hook, and is retrieved at the cost of a substitute. And she is the deity Assyrian and Babylonian kings most often name as present on the battlefield, which is the material The Wars of Gods and Men opens with.
In the ancient-astronaut reading
Zecharia Sitchin makes her the proposer of Marduk’s live entombment in the Great Pyramid of Giza and the sponsor of Sargon’s empire, and reads a Sumerian line about heavenly kingship seized by a female as a coup. The me he suggests may be something like computer chips on which data and operational orders have been recorded, which is the clearest single example of his method: a term whose meaning is genuinely difficult in Sumerology, resolved by analogy with the most advanced technology available to the writer.
Connections
Enki · Marduk · Enlil · Anunnaki · The Wars of Gods and Men · Zecharia Sitchin · Great Pyramid of Giza · Ninurta · Erra Epic