The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld
Ishtar's Descent
A shorter, harder-edged Akkadian retelling argues that Ishtar's absence from the world of the living has a direct physical cost, no beast will mount another, no man will impregnate a woman, until the queen of heaven is released.
- direct Akkadian adaptation of the Sumerian source
- fertility crisis as consequence of divine absence
- compression as a distinct literary strategy
- seven gates as a structuring device
A compressed Akkadian adaptation, roughly a fifth the length, of the Sumerian Inanna's Descent, stripped of the earlier poem's Dumuzi backstory and sharpened into a tighter narrative: Ishtar descends to the netherworld ruled by her sister Ereshkigal, is stripped at seven gates and struck dead, and her absence halts all sexual reproduction on earth until the gods force her release. Both surviving witnesses, from Ashur and Nineveh, are early first-millennium Standard Babylonian copies; no second-millennium manuscript survives, and while the Akkadian vocabulary and structure are usually read as pointing to an earlier, Old Babylonian or Middle Babylonian original, the actual composition date is unsettled rather than a matter of record.
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