Two names, two languages, and a question underneath them that has never been fully settled. Inanna is Sumerian, attested in the earliest legible tablets from Uruk in the late fourth millennium BCE — her reed-bundle standard appears in the archaic sign lists before anyone was writing sentences. Ishtar is her Akkadian name, in use from the middle of the third millennium onward, and it belongs to a Semitic family of names that also produced the Levantine Astarte and the South Arabian Athtar. The usual textbook line is that they are one goddess called two things. The honest position is narrower: an old Sumerian goddess of Uruk and a Semitic astral deity converged early and thoroughly, and by the Old Babylonian period the fusion is complete enough that separating the strands is guesswork. Where a text is Sumerian, this page says Inanna. Where it is Akkadian, Ishtar. The difference is not cosmetic — the Sumerian poems are longer, stranger and more interested in her appetite for authority; the Akkadian ones are tauter and more explicitly military.
What she actually governs, and what she does not
Popular writing files her under fertility. The texts do not. She has no agricultural portfolio worth the name, no responsibility for the harvest, and no children — the god who makes the grain grow is elsewhere in the pantheon, and the mother goddess is Ninhursag. What Inanna wants, in poem after poem, is office. She takes the me from Enki by getting him drunk at Eridu and shipping them home to Uruk before he sobers up; the me are not powers in a magical sense but the ordered functions of civilisation — kingship, the priesthoods, the crafts, truth, descent to the underworld, the arts of the scribe, and, in one of the list's more startling entries, sexual intercourse and prostitution alongside "the kindling of strife". In Inanna and Ebih she demands that a mountain bow to her, is refused, and levels it. In the Akkadian hymns she is bēlet tāḫāzi, lady of battle, and Assyrian kings addressed her before campaigns.
Sex is genuinely central, but as force rather than fecundity. The Dumuzi–Inanna courtship songs are frankly erotic and were copied in scribal schools; they belong to a body of love poetry, not to a fertility rite. Where the sacred-marriage texts describe a king coupling with the goddess — the hymn of Iddin-Dagan of Isin is the fullest — the debate over whether anything physical happened, and with whom, is unresolved, and the older certainty that a priestess played the goddess in an annual public act rests on thinner evidence than a century of popular writing assumed.
The descent, and the fact that there are two of them
No earlier journey below and back again survives in any literature: the Sumerian Descent of Inanna is where that plot first enters the written record, and it charges her for the return trip. She sets out for her sister Ereshkigal's realm, instructing her minister Ninshubur to raise the alarm if she does not return. At each of seven gates the porter Neti removes one item of her regalia — crown, lapis rod, beads, breast-stones, gold ring, pectoral, garment — so that she arrives naked and unarmed before the Anunnaki, who fix her with the eye of death. Her corpse hangs on a hook for three days. Enki, alone among the gods approached, makes two sexless beings from the dirt under his fingernails, sends them down with the food and water of life, and instructs them to do nothing but echo Ereshkigal's groaning back at her until she offers a gift in gratitude. Sympathy, offered by creatures who want nothing, is the mechanism that gets her out. She still has to send someone back in her place, and she picks her own husband — the full sequence is on the Descent of Inanna page, and its consequences fall on Dumuzid.
The Akkadian Descent of Ishtar is a different composition, not a translation. It is roughly half the length, it opens with the standard Ishtar threat — smash the gates of the underworld and let the dead out to eat the living — and its rescuer is a figure called Asushunamir whom Ea creates and Ereshkigal curses on his way out. Nothing on earth reproduces while she is below — a detail the Sumerian poem lacks and the source of the "fertility goddess" reading. It is one text's line, not the tradition's position.
Uruk, Nineveh, Arbela
Her house at Uruk was the Eanna, "house of heaven", which she shared with — or took from — Anu; the archaic administrative tablets from that precinct are the earliest writing anyone has found, so her temple accounts are, in a real sense, the first documents in human history. The Warka Vase, looted from the Baghdad museum in 2003 and returned damaged, shows a procession bringing produce up to her standard.
The Assyrians made her theirs twice over. Ishtar of Nineveh and Ishtar of Arbela were treated as distinct goddesses with separate temples and separate oracles, and the Neo-Assyrian prophecy tablets preserve their speech in the first person to Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal: fear not, I am the one who says it. These are among the very few ancient Near Eastern texts where a deity's voice is recorded as spoken aloud by a named prophet on a datable occasion.
Venus, and why this matters for the zodiac
She is the planet Venus, and the identification is exact rather than decorative: morning star and evening star, appearing before dawn and after dusk and vanishing for weeks between, which the texts read as her descent and return. The Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa records her risings and settings over twenty-one years and is still used in arguments about Bronze Age chronology. Her eight-pointed star is the standard writing of her name in the Neo-Assyrian period, distinct from the single star that marks divinity generally, and the earlier rosette does similar work. Because Babylonian celestial observation is the actual ancestor of the zodiac and the horoscope, the goddess of Venus is not a decorative footnote to astrology's history — she is near its root, and the planetary associations Western astrology still uses for Venus track the split in her own character between love and war.
Where her name went afterwards
Two claims circulate widely and only one holds. The name Esther in the Hebrew Bible has been derived from Ishtar by a long line of scholars, alongside Mordecai from Marduk, in a story set in the Persian court; the derivation is plausible and standard in the commentaries, if not provable, and Esther and its variants are a living given name with that argued ancestry behind it. The claim that Easter comes from Ishtar does not hold at all. It originates with Alexander Hislop's polemical The Two Babylons in 1853, the English word derives from a spring month named by Bede after a Germanic goddess Ēostre, and most European languages call the festival some form of Pascha. There is no line of transmission and no phonetic relationship.
Modern readers mostly meet her through Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer's Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth (1983), which put the descent into general circulation and framed it as a psychological journey — a reading that made the poem famous and that its own translators would not have claimed the Sumerians intended.
Awkward questions the sources answer badly
Was Enheduanna really the author of the hymns bearing her name?
She was high priestess of the moon god at Ur, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, and active around 2300 BCE, and three Sumerian compositions name her — most famously Nin-me-šara, the Exaltation, in which she describes her own expulsion from office and asks Inanna to restore her. That makes her the first person in world literature whose name is attached to a work in the first person. The complication is that every surviving manuscript is an Old Babylonian school copy made roughly five centuries later, and a number of Assyriologists argue the attribution is traditional rather than documentary. The claim worth making is precise: the earliest named authorial voice we have, transmitted by later copyists whose fidelity we cannot check.
Why do the texts say she turns men into women?
A hymn states that she changes man into woman and woman into man, and the temple personnel associated with her — the assinnu, kurgarrû and kulu'u — appear in ritual texts as performers whose gender presentation was ambiguous or inverted, carrying weapons in one hand and a spindle in the other. The material is real and reasonably well attested; what those roles meant socially, and whether the men who filled them were castrated, is argued from fragments and should not be reported as settled.
Is she the figure on the Burney Relief?
Possibly. The winged, taloned goddess in the British Museum has been identified as Inanna/Ishtar, as Ereshkigal and as a demon; the museum's own label calls her a goddess or demoness without committing. The popular label "Lilith" is the weakest of the three, for reasons set out on the Lilitu page.
How does she compare with the great goddesses of other pantheons?
Badly, if you expect equivalence — she is not a mother, not a wife in any stable sense, and not a patron of the household, which is what most cross-pantheon lists want from a major goddess. The comparison of great mothers explains why she keeps being placed in that category and why she does not fit it. Her family position, including the dispute over whether her father is Anu or the moon god Nanna, is drawn on the Mesopotamian family tree; the wider tradition and its sources are set out on the Mesopotamian hub.