Pod Insights The Ancients Inanna: Mesopotamian Sex Goddess About this episode Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr. Kate Lister to take us on a journey through the fascinating history of Innana, an ancient goddess of love, war, fertility, and political power. They delve into her evolution from a humble agricultural deity to one of the most powerful and complex figures in ancient mythology, revered in Mesopotamia and beyond. This one goddess influenced millennia of religious and cultural history, possibly extending even to Persephone and the Virgin Mary.
MORE
Persephone: Queen of the Underworld https://open.spotify.com/episode/6BsalsqSLNqd5DGi5tPzo1
Sex Work in Pompeii with Kate Lister https://open.spotify.com/episode/2k5CQDHXHmIRKCmu4kk9SB
Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan and the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Tristan Hughes? Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. Hey guys, I hope you're keeping well. I'm doing all right. I am a bit under the weather at the moment, so I'm just sitting in my living room. I'm drinking a cup of tea and let my current condition not take anything away
0:41 Tristan Hughes? from how excited I am for today's release because it's a History Hit crossover episode. We are talking with the host of the Betwixt the Sheets podcast, the sex historian Dr Kate Lister. She's a lot of fun and she's here on the show today to take us back initially more than 5,000 years to explore the story of a deity, a goddess of sex and so much more called Inanna. I really do hope you enjoy. Let's go.
1:22 Tristan Hughes? She was a goddess of love, war, fertility and political power. She was worshipped for thousands of years by different peoples and under different names across ancient Mesopotamia and beyond. From Uruk and ancient Sumer to Ishtar at Babylon, to Aphrodite, the island of Cyprus and the Greco-Roman world. Her story is one filled with myths and movement over millennia. This is the story of Inanna with our guest, Dr Kate Lister.
2:03 Tristan Hughes? Kate, it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast. It has been too long.
2:07 Speaker 01 Hasn't it? I'm very excited to be here with you.
2:11 Tristan Hughes? We are talking ancient Mesopotamian gods, in particular, one god, Sumerian god of Inanna. Now, no such thing as a silly question. Who exactly was Inanna?
2:22 Speaker 01 That's not a silly question at all. She is, she's such an important goddess in ancient mythology, and certainly with ancient Sumerian and Arcadian mythology. She was one of the most powerful goddesses that they had, and her influence over not just Sumerian, Arcadian mythology, but European ancient mythology has been quite profound. So who was she? Well, she starts to show up in literary records round about 3000 B.C.-ish, but she will have been knocking around before then. And when she turns up, she's actually, it's quite a humble origin story. She's a goddess of the store,
3:06 Speaker 01 of like storing wheat and sort of things like that. So she's quite important, an agricultural goddess, basically. But by the time she fully develops, she's become this hugely powerful goddess of both sex and war, those two dominions. So there's quite a career shift that she's had. But those are primarily her domains, sex and war.
3:29 Tristan Hughes? It's quite an interesting contrast as well, isn't it? You wouldn't think that they would go together.
3:33 Speaker 01 No, no, not at all. And when you first hear it, you're like, I'm sorry, what was, what was that? Like, that's, like, how do those things fit? But when you think about it, and really think about it, sex and war actually have quite a lot of things in, in common. They're both very physical acts that at the time, certainly if you're going to war and to battle with someone, you would be getting very close to them. Not to get too graphic, but penetration and bodily fluids feature quite prominently in both of these acts for very different reasons. And one can create life and the other can kill and destroy life. So there is a sort of a poetic juxtaposition between the two states.
4:18 Speaker 01 And I think that's kind of what they were calling on. And also, there are other gods and goddesses that preside over both of these realms, like Freya in Norse mythology, for example. She's about sex, well, she's about lots of things, but she's definitely presides over sex and war.
4:34 Tristan Hughes? In regards to the Sumerian pantheon, and actually, maybe we should get a date first of all. So with the Sumerians, we're talking more than 5,000 years ago, right?
4:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's some of the earliest, but it is the earliest archaeological evidence that we've got of a civilization with written down cuneiform language that we can actually trace. And we're looking at what's modern day Iraq, and when we're looking at Sumerians, we're in southern Iraq. But that's where we are looking at, and that's the time span that we're, that we're looking at. So very ancient.
5:03 Tristan Hughes? And great cities like Uruk and the like. In regards to Inanna's characteristics, I mean, was it quite unique in the Sumerian pantheon of gods? Were there others who had this seemingly kind of contrasting, you know, a sex and war idea? I mean, how did her attributes compare to other deities of this pantheon?
5:21 Speaker 01 There were lots of other really powerful deities. And one of the, the interesting things about this particular line of mythology is that you can trace its development. And that's something that you don't get with a lot of other gods and goddesses in other religions and cultures. They sort of show up, they do their thing, and then they disappear again. This mythology stretches thousands and thousands of years. So Inanna is, I'm going to get this right. She's the daughter of Nana, who is a moon god. She's not the daughter of the most powerful god. That was the sun god, and he was called Utu. But you do get other powerful women. One of Inanna's big enemies is the goddess of the underworld, and she was called Orishkagaw.
6:01 Speaker 01 And they seem to fight with each other quite a lot. But Inanna is, she, as I said, she comes from quite modest background story, but by the, by the time her character is fully developed, she is one of their most powerful and worst behaved goddesses as well. She's, she's really naughty.
6:19 Tristan Hughes? So what are some of the most significant myths or stories that we have about Inanna that maybe show us, is really naughty or something like that? I've got in my notes, Inanna and the hullipoo tree, but I don't know if that's the one you want to talk about.
6:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, so Anana and her tree that she really, really likes. This is one of the surviving stories that we've got of her. It's not my favourite, but it's an interesting one. So she wants to plant a sacred tree, basically. And she finds this tree and she nicks it and she goes and plants it in her garden. And she keeps trying to grow it. And then a demon takes over the tree, like a serpent lives in it. And she gets really upset with it. And then at one point, I think Lilith, the demon, is there as well. So we get a bit of a shout out to Lilith and her origin story. And she's really upset that she can't get the demons out of this tree that she wants. And then Gilgamesh shows up. So this is pre epic of Gilgamesh. And he goes to war and he rips this
7:16 Speaker 01 tree up. And then he gives Anana a bit of what's left of the tree and she makes this throne out of it. In a nutshell, so it's partly about terrible gardening practices, because that's, as anyone on Gardener's Question Time will tell you, that's not how you get a demon out of a tree. But it's also like, like, look at the violence that was unleashed by her on this tree to get what she wants. And then rather than continuing life, she's made a throne out of it and this throne of power. So it's, there's a lot going on in that story for Anana.
7:53 Tristan Hughes? It's interesting though. So you mentioned a snake in a tree. And that immediately makes you think of Adam and Eve, right?
7:58 Speaker 01 Doesn't it? Doesn't it? I mean, you don't have enough sources to be able to directly link it up and go, oh, that was that and that was that. But it's one of those things that scholars have to look at and go, well, we can't deny that sounds incredibly similar. And one of the things that you get with Anana is there's a lot of stories about her that you go, hang on a minute, that sounds a lot like, because there's this other one that's the descent of Anana, it's called. Now, Anana is a goddess, this is her being naughty. She's not supposed to go to the underworld, which is ruled over by a Rishkagel. Like, you're just not supposed to do that. Don't go there. So what does she do? She goes. And the only motivation for this seems to be, I just wanted to know. I just wanted to know what it was like. So she goes
8:43 Speaker 01 and a Rishkagel loses her stuff completely and basically traps Anana in the underworld, effectively killing her. And the only way that she can get back to the world and to be alive again, is to trade her place with her husband at that time, Demuzi, who was a god of- Harvesting, I think he was. So she trades places with him and then Demouzi will be there for six months of the year and then he will go back to the world of the living. And does that sound similar?
9:12 Tristan Hughes? It does, doesn't it? Certainly with a young Greek goddess.
9:15 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. Persephone in Hades. And that myth developed to explain again the changing of the seasons, as does the Persephone in Hades story. But that's, that's one of hers. And there's lots, just these little similarities that you listen to them and you go, that just it's too much of a coincidence for that to have been no influence.
9:37 Tristan Hughes? Do you think this also emphasizes how, I also can't get my head around is that these myths were more than 5,000 years old. And yet you can talk through them with those amazing details now, Kate. And it's testament how they've endured through history.
9:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, they have. Because they're foundational myths, not just of this culture, but they are some of the earliest stories that we've got from what we call civilization, just because we have the written word. And we tend to view ancient cultures, or at least some people do, in isolation to one another. But the influence that they have on one another, as these cultures are invading and conquering and borrowing and stealing and appropriating. And it does all start to come together and you get this real melting pot of gods merging onto one another. And so the stories continue.
10:27 Tristan Hughes? I must also ask then about the nature of the source material that we have. So do we learn about these stories in their detail from the cuneiform tablets?
10:36 Speaker 01 Yes, mostly. And that wasn't done until, it's like the 19th century, the late 19th century, when people could start to be able to translate them. Because we don't have a situation where, you know, a lot of nice books showed up with very clear textual evidence that people can go, oh, this is what happened. You're dealing with tablet form and cuneiform tablets. And it's so difficult to actually read and translate it. There's only a handful of scholars that can actually still do that to this day. And we're all reliant on them producing their work. And that didn't happen until, I think it was the 19th century and it was the epic of Gilgamesh that was first translated by a scholar in the British Library. And he was so excited when he first realised that he could understand it, apparently started
11:21 Speaker 01 dancing around the British Library, singing and shrieking, very unbecoming for a scholar. But it's from that that we start to get this information. And then other sources are obviously archaeological finds. You mentioned the city of Uruk. That is today in southern Iraq. It's now an archaeological site known as Warrick. And they find evidence of temples and then you might find things scrawled on walls. So this is a real piecemeal of information that's put together, which is frustrating for scholars because what they wouldn't give for a book to turn up with just really clear stories all laid out in.
12:02 Speaker 01 But at the same time, it gives people a lot to discuss and to mull over and to try and piece this world back together.
12:10 Tristan Hughes? So are there any other particular myths, stories about Inanna that really focus on that duality between love and war?
12:20 Speaker 01 Stories about Inanna. So we get fractional stories from her, from the very early sources. You've got a lot of songs that are dedicated to her and they tend to be incredibly raunchy in nature. Because she is a goddess of sex. Sometimes scholars try and say that she's a fertility goddess, which it's, no, she's not. She's not really, at no point is she displayed as a mother, at no point is she celebrated for being a dutiful, sensible wife. She is very dramatic, she's very petulant and she appears to be very horny most of the time.
13:00 Speaker 01 So you get some of the earliest records are songs that she sings to her husband Demuzi, where she sings about, please plough my furrow and she talks about her wet lettuce and about her.
13:16 Speaker 01 You know, like her grass that is wet and that she wants tending to. And it's all so erotic, what she's doing here. And it caused quite a shock to the 19th century scholars when they first started translating this stuff. Because it is very open. I mean, it's obviously it's dressed up in poetic language, but there's not much disguise in what's actually going on here.
13:40 Tristan Hughes? This is Fifty Shades of Inanna, almost.
13:42 Speaker 01 This is Fifty Shades of Inanna. Yes.
13:45 Tristan Hughes? So how was she worshipped in a place like Uruk more than 5,000 years ago? Do we know much about the worship of Inanna?
13:53 Speaker 01 We know bits and pieces, but again, the scholarly debate around this is quite ferocious. So for the longest time, people thought that Inanna was worshipped through a practice called sacred prostitution. And that that story took hold, that there were that women would go and sell sex in the temples of Inanna. And it became this whole thing. But when you actually break it down, and this is largely the work of Stephanie Boudin. When you break it down, really what that is, is Herodotus saying stuff. It comes from his account of ancient Babylon, where women would sell. Every woman who was devoted, and I don't even think he says it was Inanna, I think he says it was Aphrodite.
14:36 Speaker 01 But all women have to worship the goddess by selling sex to anybody who would buy sex from them. That's his big claim. And as a lot of stuff with Herodotus, you have to kind of go, that's a nice story. That I like the story, but can you show me your source work there? And so when you break it down, there isn't much evidence to this, other than Herodotus saying it himself. And then other people take up the story and keep repeating it. When you look at the literature of Inanna, you do get this word kharkid or himratu, which is associated with Inanna. And for the longest time, that was translated as prostitute. And Inanna herself is described as a himratu. Again, that strengthened this argument around sacred prostitution.
15:21 Speaker 01 But the work of Stephanie Boudin has investigated it a bit further. And she's suggested that that's not what that word means. And what that word means is just a single woman. And the the evidence that she gives for that, that there's quite a lot of it. But what I find most convincing is that in the records, you've often got people who have jobs who are also described as Himratu. So you have bartenders and you have people that work in shops, for example. So why would you give them two professions? And you've got wills that exist where a father has left money to his daughter if she's a wife or if she's a Himratu. Now, there might be fathers going, look, either you're going to be a wife or you're going to be on the game. But it seems more likely that they're saying you're going to be married or you're not going to be married.
16:06 Speaker 01 So for the longest time, there was this idea that worship of Anana was done through sex. And certainly, as we've seen, Anana liked to have a lot of sex. But that has been challenged repeatedly. What we do have is there's evidence of priests and priestesses. The priests in particular are really interesting. They were called the Gala, G A L A. And they seem to have been an example of gender variance from the ancient world. When they started worshipping Anana, they would often use feminine pronouns. They would often take on women's names. And there's some, there's quite a lot of erotic verse around them where they are having sex with other men, with them bottoming.
16:45 Speaker 01 And and again, we're piecing together little bits of information here and try, you've got to try and make a story out of it, but not get too carried away. But that was, the the Gala are definitely associated with worshipping Anana. And they were the male priests. The female priests, the debate will go on whether or not they were having sex in celebration of Anana. We don't know.
17:08 Tristan Hughes? And do we think that the kings of Arokin, people like that, the prominent figures would have gone to one of these temples? And now he ties on whatever rites were actually going on there?
17:18 Speaker 01 That, I know, that's another thing where you're like, I hope that's true. I want that to be true. There's some suggestion that the kings would have married the goddess symbolically. And maybe that's what these songs of Anana were doing, these erotic songs where she's singing and calling out to Damuzi. Plow my furrow and tend my lettuce and all the rest of it. The the king might have symbolically married the goddess. That has been suggested, but we don't know. But what's interesting though is that there were male priests. Of Inanna, because a lot of the time when you get goddesses that are worshipped, the idea that men worshiped them as well, that's a really interesting conversation,
17:59 Speaker 01 like what happened to them. And there certainly seems to have been a slight feminising of them. Although I know some scholars have disagreed with that and said, no, they were very manly. But, so, I mean, the king may well have worshipped us, and he certainly wouldn't have ignored her because she was a very, very powerful goddess.
18:16 Tristan Hughes? Absolutely. I'd like to ask about that fertility word next, because of course it can, it can allude to sex and reproduction. But I always think with fertility, it could also be about farming, isn't it? And when you think about the Sumerians and ancient Mesopotamia, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, irrigation, the importance of farming to these societies. So can you see an agricultural tilt to the worship of Inanna?
18:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, definitely, definitely. I think you'd be foolish to ignore that as well, especially because she does start as an agricultural goddess and then her role develops. And fertility and about calling life back is important to the ancient world in ways that we can't really even comprehend. I mean, you know, we can go down the garage at the end of the road and get food, but it's, it really is life and death stuff. So the land being fertile, of being able to help animals reproduce with one another, I should stress, and, you know, help crop cycles. All of that is caught up with the worship of this goddess.
19:21 Speaker 01 And even if, when she's in her full realisation, she doesn't seem to be associated with agriculture anymore, those were her roots, that's where she's, where she comes from. So you can see that there is a link there between agriculture, tending the land, and later this association with both life and death, which is effectively sex and war in Inanna.
19:43 Tristan Hughes? Do we think there would have been like an equivalent of the harvest festival today in regards to like a festival of Inanna regarding, you know, the blessing of the land so that they had good crops and so on?
19:55 Speaker 01 Would you even want Inanna to come to your harvest festival? I've just got this, this image of like kids in secondary school singing about the harvest festival and this mad goddess showing up.
20:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, there does seem to have been evidence that she was worshipped, that she had her own festivals. I mean, a temple of Inanna was discovered in, again, in southern Iraq. I think it was in Nipaur in the 1950s. So we know that she was worshipped. And again, it's just one of those examples of like, we know she would have been worshipped. We know there would have been festivals, but finding the exact details lost amongst the sources is quite difficult.
20:32 Tristan Hughes? Did the worship of Inanna, did it also influence Sumerian ideals and norms around marriage?
20:40 Speaker 01 Oh, there's a question. Because it's very tempting to look at Inanna, who is unashamedly erotic and explicit and makes demands of her husband sexually that she wants. And also throws tantrums when she doesn't get her own way and also disobeys laws and think that must have been what life was like for a Sumerian woman. And we've got to be careful before we make that link because the gods have always been allowed to be extraordinary. So we can't think just because we have a creation myth of the goddess behaving like this, that it was all right for other people to behave like this. But one of the things that I think that we can extrapolate is at least the kind of discussions
21:24 Speaker 01 and the kind of things that were important to these people. Sexual pleasure being quite a big one, it seems, because the goddess is very unashamed in asking for it. She isn't judged and she isn't shamed. This is her loving her husband and she's going to do it physically. So I think that this would have been a culture where women, we need to be careful. I don't think that they were emancipated. There's clear evidence it was a very patriarchal culture. But sex doesn't seem to have been pushed up and stigmatized in the way that we might recognize it today. To the point where a goddess is openly saying, plow my furrow.
22:01 Tristan Hughes? And does it almost seem like it's the extraordinary case with the king, with the leader of Uruk, and this almost sacred marriage to Inanna, like him being united in marriage to a god? Like, that was very much to emphasise their, I guess, their unique connection they had with the divine, I'm presuming?
22:20 Speaker 01 Yes, I mean, the kings and royalty, they always want that connection, don't they? They've always got some kind of link to it, whether it's our own royal family going, well, look, God decided, he chose, and he chose us, or whether it's creation stories about, I mean, you've told me before on my podcast about the stories about Alexander the Great, and he was conceived because his mum had sex with a god in the shape of a snake, and all of these things, and it's always trying to get that link to the divine. Otherwise, what are you? You're just a guy with a crown on his head. So I think the idea of marrying, or symbolically marrying, Inanna would have been very important in this idea of legitimising what, ruling or kingship in itself.
23:05 Tristan Hughes? And given her importance in agriculture, the success of crops, maybe that could also play into it as well, that you need to keep the goddess happy?
23:13 Speaker 01 And war. These were very warlike people. You know, if you're gonna go into war, if you've got it in your head of like, I'm gonna go and invade the next group of people, Inanna is a goddess that you would want on your side and that you would pray to, to get her support, and you would, you'd want her backing. I don't think you'd go without it.
23:32 Tristan Hughes? Do we have any idea, and I appreciate we may well not, of how, let's say, a Sumerian army from Uruk was marching out to battle, would they be worshipping Inanna as they went into battle, or anything like that, when they were actually actively on campaign?
23:45 Speaker 01 We don't have evidence from this point, but as the goddess develops and she merges into other goddesses later on, then we start to get a sense of how these goddesses would have been worshipped in battle. So, without giving the game away too much, but there's a lot of evidence, and a lot of scholars agree, that Inanna probably developed into the cult of Venus and Aphrodite.
24:08 Tristan Hughes? Wow.
24:08 Speaker 01 That's, that's the straggled route that she takes. And some of the clear evidence that we have for that, although we think of Aphrodite and Venus as being rather soft, opulent goddesses draped on a chaise longue and being fed grapes, they were originally war goddesses. Especially someone, I mean, Aphrodite was worshipped by the Spartans as a war goddess. And sometimes she's shown with a beard in some like, rarely, but it happens. The bearded Aphrodite and Venus as well. She's one of the only Roman goddesses that her name, her suffix Venus, that's not feminine. That's a masculine end to that name. And she was worshipped as a war goddess.
24:47 Speaker 01 Certainly Julius Caesar took her on as his patron and he had a ring with Venus on. And he tried to claim descendants from Venus. And when he won in campaigns, he built temples to Venus. So you can get a sense of how a goddess of war would have been, or at least how she was worshipped later on.
25:08 Speaker 02 So there could be an idea that if a returning, successful Samarian army came back to Uruk, they could erect a trophy or a monument or an inscription and have Inanna right there in the centre. So they're thanking Inanna for the victory.
25:20 Speaker 01 We better thank her. That is, that's not a goddess that you would want to upset or miff off in any way at all. So yeah, I think that, you know, temples would have to be built, prayers would have to be offered, thanks would have to be given.
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26:32 Tristan Hughes? Before we really explore that evolution of Inanna in Mesopotamian cultures, I'd like to ask one more question about a particular myth you talked about earlier, which was her descent into the underworld. Can you elaborate a little bit more on this and just how significant this myth was for the Sumerians?
26:50 Speaker 01 Well, again, we need to be very careful because we have evidence of this myth surviving. That's how we know that they believed this, that they spoke about it. But what we don't have is all the other evidence from all the other myths. So we are extrapolating how important that myth was. Just because it's the only one that we've got left, or one of the only ones, doesn't mean that it was the most important myth to the Sumerians. But it is an important myth to them because it helps them understand the shifting of the seasons. And as you've already said, that was life and death and that was their world was built around that. But also it helps set up Inanna as a very disobedient goddess. She was told not to go and she went anyway.
27:33 Speaker 01 And the fact that she offers up her husband to take her place, I think, I just think that that's quite an important part of her story because she's not submissive. She's not cowed. This isn't, oh, poor Inanna went and gave herself up. He does and she's, because she went and did something that she wasn't supposed to do. And she's off. And I think that it's very important when we look at this mythology to see that this behaviour doesn't seem to impede her being worshipped. If anything, it adds to it. There's a sort of a certain sense of, oh, Inanna, not again.
28:09 Tristan Hughes? I've also realised that I haven't asked you yet, one of the questions that I feel I always normally ask you at the start, which is what she looks like? I mean, do we have any depictions of Inanna from Sumerian times and what symbols she's associated with?
28:22 Speaker 01 We have got some images of Inanna, but again, I'll tread carefully because there are always scholars that go, that's not Inanna, that's Arishka Gyal, that's Lilith, that's somebody else. But... In the very early versions of her, she is associated with the morning star. She is associated with the symbol of the lion, which I suppose that might represent her ferociousness. As she develops and the Arcadians come in and they take over Samaria, she is merged with another goddess, Ishtar. And again, there's some debate around, is Ishtar a completely separate goddess or was this just a rebrand? Which they just arrive and they go, oh, we really like that. Well, we'll have that one too.
29:04 Speaker 01 But Ishtar and Inanna, basically the same person, it's just a change in name. But Ishtar, she is represented by clearer images. And she tends, there are claws and there are wings and you look at these images and you go, oh, wow, that is not a soft, drapey goddess. And one of the most famous images is the Bernie relief, which is in the British museum. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Again, there is debate around who this goddess actually is. Some people think that it could be Lilith, but other scholars, including Professor Ronald Hutton. So as far as I'm concerned, you can just put the pot on for that one. He says that that is Ishtar and that she's, and there are two owls there as well, which he says are there to
29:48 Speaker 01 represents that the morning star, the evening star and that her role there. So if you go and look that one up, the Bernie relief, you can get a sense of what this goddess looked like. Not very sexy, it has to be said, but you start to get nude iconography developing around this time as well.
30:07 Tristan Hughes? Wow.
30:07 Speaker 01 Hmm.
30:08 Tristan Hughes? Well, you mentioned there, Ishtar. So Kate, talk us through this evolution of Inanna that happens through, you know, Mesopotamian history is vast, it's thousands of years. So what do we know about her evolution?
30:21 Speaker 01 This is, again, this is, it's very difficult to join up the dots perfectly to the point where you can go unequivocally, this is what happened. But Inanna and Ishtar, almost all scholars agree that this is basically the same goddess. She had a rebrand, a slight upgrade. We start to get clearer stories about her. She starts to appear in more mythologies. One of my favourite stories about her is she was associated with the city of Uruk. She was supposed to be the patron of Uruk. And one of their foundational stories is that the townspeople there asked Ishtar if she would be their patron. And she only agreed if she could have sex with every male adult in the city.
31:04 Speaker 01 So they all duly line up to do this. It's a bit of a Bonnie Blue situation before Bonnie Blue was a thing.
31:10 Tristan Hughes? Yeah, okay.
31:11 Speaker 01 But the point of the story is that Ishtar, when they've all finished, she's ready to go again. She was like, well, let's do it again. And all of the men are too tired to possibly carry on. So they beg her, stop, please, please, we can't, did. And the poem that we've got left says, Ishtar will not tire. Ishtar never tires. And so she kind of eventually, oh, for God's sake. And then she goes, all right, fine, I'll be your goddess anyway, even though all of your men were too pathetic to actually satisfy me. And that's one of their founding stories.
31:44 Tristan Hughes? And does Inanna, in the guise of Ishtar, does she remain important for many different Mesopotamian civilizations as time goes on?
31:51 Speaker 01 Yes, she does. We know there are temples devoted to her. She starts turning up in the early story. So she's in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest story that we have written down. And again, being her usual awful self, there's a story where she really fancies Gilgamesh. You're getting a theme developing here about Ishtar. She really fancies him and she basically goes up to him and she goes, look, I'll give you the best sex you've ever had and I'll give you a chariot. Like that's, come on, what do you reckon to that? And Gilgamesh knows the story of Demuzi, who's presumably still in the underworld at this point, not to mention all of the other lovers that she's been through and says, no, he said, no, not on your life.
32:35 Speaker 01 This is, this is awful. And one point he calls her the shoe that bites the wearer's foot. So he's like, he's just like, no, I value, I'm not, I'm not going to be your lover. And Ishtar is furious with this. She is so angry. She goes to her father to basically say, I need you to kill Gilgamesh right now. And we're going to do it by releasing this mythological creature called the Bull of Heaven, which will kill everybody, basically. And her dad gently points out that, well, I know you're angry, but Gilgamesh might have had a point.
33:07 Speaker 01 She's so cross and she's so anxious goes and her argument back from that is like, look, it doesn't matter if he's right. He's a horrible, stupid little mortal and they don't get to talk to the gods like that. Right? And then she goes even further, says, if you don't give me this bull, I'm going to go and release all of the dead back into the world of the living and basically undo creation as we know it. So the dad reluctantly goes, fine, fine, have the bull. And then there's a whole thing about how Gilgamesh kills the bull and then Ishtar's even angrier. But that's how she appears in that story. So you really do get a sense of how volatile she is, how violent she is, how capricious
33:49 Speaker 01 and how horny she is as well. That's a running theme throughout Inanna. She is the goddess of sex after all, but it doesn't seem to have diminished her popularity at all. She was a really popular goddess.
34:03 Tristan Hughes? Well, I mean, absolutely. I must admit, when someone says Ishtar, I would think initially, immediately of Babylon. Now, I know, so it sounds like, you know, that kind of legacy of Inanna or Mesopotamian cultures endures and she's so popular that she even becomes incredibly prominent in great cities like Babylon.
34:22 Speaker 01 She does. And also she keeps moving from Iraq and from Palestine and she's moving west towards Cyprus, basically. And she gets picked up in Semitic religions as well, where she's worshipped as Astarte. And there's actually a reference to her in the Hebrew Bible. I think they've changed her name Astarte to Astarath, but King Solomon shouts all the Israelites for their worship of this cult of this woman. And scholars believe that that is Astarte, who is Ishtar, who has been upgraded. And then she appears in Cyprus. And who else comes from Cyprus?
35:00 Tristan Hughes? Oh, Aphrodite.
35:01 Speaker 01 Aphrodite, right? And all scholars understand that Aphrodite is quite a late arrival to the Greek pantheon. And remember when I said about Herodotus was worshipping with his idea about sacred prostitution? He's talking about Babylon. He talks about Aphrodite. So you've got this merging of, he understands it's Babylon, but he's put the goddess Aphrodite in there. And the earlier sources as well show us that Aphrodite is Ishtar.
35:30 Speaker 01 And Anastatae, that they're all the same goddess that has moved and who has developed and retaining that emphasis on sex and war. And you can see it in the iconography as well, because the morning star is consistent, right? That Venus is associated with the morning star, so is Aphrodite. Doves seem to be fairly consistent as well, and so do lions. So their imagery remains the same as she's moving west to Europe, her cult.
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36:57 Speaker 02 So Kate, how far does Ishtar, does Enanna go westwards? So we've reached the eastern Mediterranean already, and how much further?
37:07 Speaker 01 Well, this is where we're slightly into the realms of speculation, but I quite like this story. So she's clearly an influence on Aphrodite, who in her earliest incarnations is also a war goddess, not just a sex goddess, who in turn inspires Venus. And again, we've already alluded that she was a war goddess with Venus. Well, so eventually Christianity comes in and kind of steamrolls all of the old gods. We have to let them go. But that was obviously not an overnight process. It wasn't that everyone got a memo of right now we're Christian. It's an eventual process, and quite a violent one at times. But it has been suggested that perhaps the cult of Mary was influenced.
37:53 Speaker 01 By Ishtar, by Anana, by Aphrodite, by Venus. Because if you look at the cult of Mary, she's not quite a goddess, but people pray to her. She's not quite a saint, but she occupies that position within the Christian mythology. She certainly isn't the petulant horny teenager that we see in Anana and Ishtar, but she is someone who's defined by sex, or at least her absence to it. And she is also symbolized by the morning star and by dawn. So it has been suggested that perhaps what we see in the veneration of Mary is the fact that ancient civilizations weren't quite ready to let go of their goddess just yet.
38:36 Speaker 01 That the idea of a powerful goddess to pray to was important, even if she was completely unsexed. She's still there in some guise or another. And I don't know if that's true, but I want that to be true. I want that to be true so badly.
38:53 Tristan Hughes? Do you think there could be hints of Anana, Ishtar in quite a few of the great goddesses of the eastern Mediterranean? I might think immediately of Aphrodite, of Ephesus, or from ancient Egypt, you've got Isis as well.
39:06 Speaker 01 Yes, you do. And there are some discussions that link that up, that Isis and Ishtar are one and the same. But it's not really surprising because these cultures are merging all of the time through conquest and through colonization. And not, not only through violent means, but through opening up trade routes. And as you said, this is thousands of years of history. This isn't like one week in ancient Mesopotamia that this all happened. So you do get these cultures bleeding into one another. And it has been suggested that there is a link between Isis, the veneration of Isis and Ishtar. And you can, again, we don't have the smoking gun. We don't have the cuneiform tablet where somebody says, that's definitely what's happening here.
39:48 Speaker 01 But it's that same presiding over sex, death, violence, the strong veneration, the cult that emerges. All of those things do seem to be tangled up as this mythology develops. It's not neat and it's very messy and a lot of it is open to speculation. But there's no denying that there were very formidable cults of female goddesses at this time that seemed to be drawing on one another.
40:17 Tristan Hughes? It's an amazing story. And if we go to the present day, so more than 5,000 years after Inanna emerged, can we still see the memory of Inanna, of Ishtar today, the legacy?
40:30 Speaker 01 She's having something a bit of a resurgence. Scholars have been working very diligently on Ishtar for a number of years. But what's interesting about that is that a lot of that has been scholars, perhaps they have to work on their own assumptions. Like the 19th century scholars, when they were looking at it, were quite clear, it's a fertility goddess, stop asking his questions. And then you kind of like, as you explore her more, and people are more and more prepared to talk about this powerful sexual nature to this goddess can be quite challenging. But there's some amazing scholars who are doing work on this now and bringing her verses and her songs and her stories to us today. And I think
41:11 Speaker 01 that she's having a bit of a resurgence. And I think that that's partly because of where we are personally. We find it quite comforting that once upon a time, there was this great sex goddess who misbehaved and challenged all the men in Uruk to a shagging competition. But we need to be careful as well that we're not projecting back on to her and turning her into something that perhaps we need her to be. But yeah, she's certainly, she's as popular as ever with scholars. And I think that her story is becoming more and more widely known because she is one of the oldest and the most powerful goddesses that we have.
41:48 Tristan Hughes? Kate, this has been absolutely fantastic. Before we completely wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to mention about Inanna before we finish?
41:56 Speaker 01 Oh, there's one poem, I think it's Ishtar, it's a little bit later on, where there's a reference to something called a dub dub bird, which scholars suggested that that's the clitoris, which I quite like. Okay, I just, I just want to drop that in there, that one of her songs mentions a dub dub bird, and they think that that she might be referring to her clitoris.
42:15 Tristan Hughes? Well, on that note, Kate, this has been wonderful. Always pleasure getting you on the podcast. Tell us a bit about where people can find you and your work.
42:23 Speaker 01 Well, you can find me on the sister podcast to this particular podcast, fabulous. But you can find me on Betwixt the Sheets, where we look at the more scandalous side of history. And you can find me on social media as well, if you really want to. But find me mostly on Betwixt the Sheets.
42:39 Tristan Hughes? Kate, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast.
42:43 Speaker 01 My pleasure, thank you for asking me.
42:51 Tristan Hughes? Well, there you go. There was Dr Kate Lister, host of our History Hit sister podcast Betwixt the Sheets, explaining the story, the fascinating story of Inanna and how it evolved over the centuries and millennia. I hope you enjoyed the episode, thank you for listening. Please follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, that really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's enough from me, I'll see you in the next episode.
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