The Descent of Inanna

Seven Gates, One Substitute

First attested
around 1900 BCESumerian manuscripts copied in Old Babylonian scribal schools, chiefly at Nippur with fragments from Ur, roughly 1900-1600 BCE. The composition is known only from these copies; no third-millennium manuscript of it survives, and whether it is an Old Babylonian composition or an older one transmitted in school copies is disputed — Dina Katz treats the relation between the school copies and the date of composition at length. Samuel Noah Kramer published successive reconstructions over fourteen years: Revue d'Assyriologie 34 (1937), 93-134; additional material in Revue d'Assyriologie 36 (1939), 68-80; "Inanna's Descent to the Nether World" Continued and Revised, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 4 (1950), 199-214, the instalment that published the Yale tablet YBC 4621; and the revised edition, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 5 (1951), 1-17. He issued a correction to the ending in BASOR 183 (1966). William R. Sladek's 1974 Johns Hopkins dissertation is the full edition standing behind the ETCSL composite (c.1.4.1), which numbers 412 lines. A separate and much shorter Akkadian poem, the Descent of Ishtar, 138 lines in the standard count, is known from first-millennium copies and was being read in Europe from the 1870s — George Smith published a translation in 1873, and Eberhard Schrader an edition, Die Höllenfahrt der Istar, at Giessen in 1874 — six decades before the Sumerian text could be read at all.
Claimed
around 3500 BCEasserted by James George Frazer, who wrote in 1914 of the surviving Sumerian Tammuz hymns that they "were written down not later than about two thousand years before our era but were almost certainly composed at a much earlier time" — a hedge about hymns, not about this poem, and the framing behind popular datings of the descent itself to the fourth millennium, for which no manuscript exists and at which date the writing cannot yet carry the load: fourth-millennium cuneiform is administrative notation, and connected Sumerian literary narrative is not attested in manuscript until the Fara and Abu Salabikh tablets of about 2600-2500 BCE.

The claim runs about 1.6 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

The West met this poem backwards — Frazer in 1914 had Ishtar descending "in quest of" her lost lover Tammuz, and the Sumerian text Kramer began assembling in 1937 shows the goddess handing her husband to the demons instead.

Not a rescue — the goddess returns from the dead by handing her husband to the demons in her place.

The composition ETCSL prints as Inana's descent to the nether world survives on Old Babylonian school tablets from Nippur and Ur, roughly 1900-1600 BCE; its composite text runs to 412 lines. She unseats her sister Ereshkigal, is stripped at seven gates, is judged by the Anuna, and hangs three days and three nights a corpse on a hook before two creatures Enki makes revive her. Her escort of demons requires a substitute: she finds Dumuzi enthroned and not mourning, and hands her husband over. Samuel Noah Kramer worked at the text from 1937; the Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton Perera read the descent in 1981 as a model of feminine initiation, two years before Wolkstein and Kramer's translation put the poem in general circulation. Dumuzi does not consent — he weeps, begs Utu, and runs; his sister Geshtinanna does, and the poem closes with the two of them holding the underworld half a year each, an ending Kramer only got right in print in 1966.

Light

A descent and return set down a millennium before the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and it refuses the cheap version: the way back costs someone. Ninshubur mourns at three gods' doors as Inanna instructed her before going down; Enlil and Nanna turn her away, and only Enki acts — so a servant who keeps her orders and a god's cunning do between them what the goddess's own power could not.

Shadow

Read as a map of transformation, the poem charges a man for the journey. Dumuzi never agreed: he weeps, begs Utu to turn his hands into snake's hands, and runs before the demons take him. Alster's 1996 study of the ending is titled "Inanna Repenting".

Sources and verification12 sources · 7 links

Primary source

  • Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer, 1983, New York: Harper & Row; art compiled by Elizabeth Williams-ForteThe translation and arrangement that carried the Inanna cycle to a general English readership, and the wording most quoted from it ("Inanna fastened on Dumuzi the eye of death"); the collaboration of a folklorist and storyteller with the Sumerologist who had spent forty-six years reconstructing the text.
  • Stephanie Dalley (trans.), Myths from Mesopotamia, rev. ed., 2000, Oxford World's Classics; Descent of IshtarThe Akkadian Descent of Ishtar in a line-numbered translation with its gaps marked — the separate, much shorter first-millennium poem still routinely quoted as though it were the Sumerian composition. Cited for the translation and its length only; the date at which Europe first read the poem rests on Smith 1873 and Schrader 1874, not on this volume.
  • Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson, Gábor Zólyomi et al., The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, "Inana's descent to the nether world" (c.1.4.1), 2006, lines 1-5, 14-19, 85-89, 129-163, 164-172, 173-175, 306-347, 348-353, 354-358, 368-383, 404-410, 411-412; etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.ukThe wording of the poem and its structure: the opening "From the great heaven she set her mind on the great below"; the seven divine powers gathered before she sets out; the stated errand as the funeral rites of Gud-gal-ana, husband of her elder sister Ereshkigal; the removal of turban, lapis beads, egg-shaped beads, pectoral, gold ring, measuring rod and line, and pala dress at the seven gates, each with "Be satisfied, Inana, a divine power of the underworld has been fulfilled"; her unseating of Ereshkigal; the Anuna's judgement, "They looked at her -- it was the look of death", the corpse hung on a hook; "After three days and three nights had passed"; the sparing of Ninshubur, Shara and Lulal; Dumuzid "clothed in a magnificent garment and seated magnificently on a throne" at the great apple tree in the plain of Kulaba, and "She looked at him, it was the look of death" and "How much longer? Take him away"; Dumuzid's weeping, his appeal to Utu and the snake's hands and feet; the half-year alternation with his sister; and the closing line, "Holy Ereškigala -- sweet is your praise." The translation is 412 lines.

Scholarship

  • Samuel Noah Kramer, Dumuzi's Annual Resurrection: An Important Correction to "Inanna's Descent", Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1966, no. 183 (October 1966), p. 31; DOI 10.2307/1356459Kramer's own published correction to the ending of the poem, announced in his own title as a correction: that Dumuzi and his sister Geshtinanna divide the year between them in the netherworld. The date establishes that the moral climax of the poem was still being repaired in print in 1966.
  • N. J. Richardson, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 1974, Oxford: Clarendon Press; introduction, on the date of the HymnThe dating of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter on which the comparison in the Light field depends.
  • Bendt Alster, Inanna Repenting: The Conclusion of Inanna's Descent, Acta Sumerologica, 1996, vol. 18 (1996), pp. 1-18A dedicated edition of the poem's conclusion: Alster's translation covers the closing lines 385-413, chiefly from CBS 6894, and is published under the title "Inanna Repenting". Cited for the existence of a specialist edition devoted to the ending, and for that title; the entry states the title rather than claiming, on the title alone, what the article argues.
  • Dina Katz, How Dumuzi Became Inanna's Victim: On the Formation of "Inanna's Descent", Acta Sumerologica, 1996, vol. 18 (1996), pp. 93-103The argument that two central episodes are later additions: that the first part was an Inanna myth ending with her release through Enki's trick, and that the Anuna's intervention and Dumuzi's substitution were joined to it later in order to harmonise an Inanna myth with a Dumuzi myth. The substitute ending is on this reading a seam, not the original design.
  • Dina Katz, The Image of the Netherworld in the Sumerian Sources, 2003, Bethesda, MD: CDL PressThe relation between the Old Babylonian school copies and the date of composition of Inana's Descent — the dispute the attestation reports without taking a side.

Where this claim originates

  • James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd ed., Part IV: Adonis, Attis, Osiris, vol. 1, 1914, New York and London: Macmillan, Book I, ch. 1, "The Myth of Adonis", pp. 8-9What the West believed before the Sumerian text could be read, in Frazer's own words: "every year Tammuz was believed to die" and "that every year his divine mistress journeyed in quest of him," returning "in company probably with her lover Tammuz." Cited for the claim and its date, not as evidence about the poem; Frazer's dying-and-rising grouping of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis is superseded.
  • Sylvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women, 1981, Toronto: Inner City Books, Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts 6; 112 pp.The source of the therapeutic reading: a Jungian analyst's use of Inanna's descent and of Ereshkigal as the rejected dark feminine to model a course of initiation for women, published in 1981 — two years before Wolkstein and Kramer's translation appeared, so it cannot rest on that volume.
  • C. G. Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932, 1996, ed. Sonu Shamdasani; Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XCIXThe date and setting of Jung's kundalini seminar — four lectures to the Psychological Club, Zurich, autumn 1932 — asserted in the kundalini relation note.

Further reading

  • William R. Sladek, Inanna's Descent to the Netherworld, 1974, PhD dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University; UMI reprint 1988The full scholarly edition — transliteration, translation and manuscript apparatus — that stands behind later composite texts of the poem, including ETCSL's.

Linked entries

  • Set againstThe KojikiAttested

    Izanagi goes down to Yomi to bring Izanami back and fails, fleeing when he sees what she has become; the Kojiki was presented in 712 CE, some two and a half thousand years after these tablets were copied, and nothing links the two but the shape of the story.

  • Set againstYggdrasilA modern connection

    Inanna hangs three days and nights as a corpse on a hook; Hávamál 138 has Odin hang nine nights on the windswept tree. Popular writing files them together as one initiatory pattern, but the Hávamál survives only in the Codex Regius of about 1270 and no transmission between them is attested.

  • Set againstKuṇḍalinīA modern connection

    Both reached Western readers as psychological itineraries rather than as texts: Jung lectured on kundalini yoga in 1932, and Perera turned the descent into a course of feminine initiation in 1981. In each case the map is twentieth-century and the source is not.

  • Set againstPerunA modern connection

    What an attested myth about a god looks like: the Sumerian descent survives on Old Babylonian tablets in its own words. No narrative of any kind survives for Perun — the combat with Veles that fills the gap was assembled by Ivanov and Toporov in 1974.

  • Set againstThe GāthāsAttested

    Inanna's descent survives on Old Babylonian clay of about 1800 BCE, close to its own composition; no object carrying the Gāthās was made before 1323 CE. What a culture chose to write on, more than how old its words are, decides what can be recovered from it.

  • Set againstEnūma ElišAttested

    Called "the Mesopotamian creation myth" as though there were only one: the Sumerian compositions copied at Nippur centuries before Enūma eliš was composed give a different cast, a different order of the world, and no Marduk at all.

  • Set againstXibalbaAttested

    Inanna's road down is seven gates, each taking an ornament from her; Xibalba's is steps, two canyons, three rivers and a crossroads where the Black Road calls out to be taken. Both underworlds are reached by travelling rather than by dying. No transmission is claimed - the comparison is a reader's.

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