The oldest surviving account of anyone going down to the land of the dead and coming back is Sumerian, it is about four thousand years old in the copies we have, and its most striking feature is bureaucratic. The underworld does not refuse to release her. It releases her on a condition, and the condition is a replacement — one body out, one body in. The rest of the story is a goddess walking around her own country deciding who to hand over.
Setting out
Inanna turned her ear towards the great below. The poem's opening does not explain why, and the reticence is deliberate; later in the text she gives the gatekeeper a reason, and it is not obviously the true one.
She abandoned her temples — the list runs through city after city, Uruk, Badtibira, Zabalam, Adab, Nippur, Kish, Akkad and more, each one named and each one left standing empty. Then she gathered up the me, the divine offices and prerogatives that are hers, and put them on her body as clothing and jewellery: the crown of the open country on her head, a wig arranged across her forehead, small lapis beads at her throat and a double strand of egg-shaped beads on her chest, the robe of ladyship, kohl on her eyes, a breast-ornament and a gold ring on her hand, and in her grip the lapis measuring rod and line — the surveyor's instruments, which are the emblem of the right to judge.
Before she went she briefed her minister Ninshubur with the precision of someone who has thought hard about failure. If three days pass and she has not come back: raise a lament for her at the ruined mounds, beat the drum in the assembly, tear your face, cut your mouth and thighs, dress in a single soiled garment like a pauper, and go — first to Enlil at Nippur, then to Nanna at Ur, then to Enki at Eridu, in that order, and tell them not to let their daughter be put to death in the underworld.
Then she went down.
Seven gates
At the outer gate she hammered and shouted for it to be opened. The gatekeeper Neti asked who she was and what her business was, and she said she was going to the east and had come for the funeral rites of Gugalanna, the husband of her elder sister.
Neti took the message to Ereshkigal, queen of the great below, and the queen's response is one of the great physical descriptions in Sumerian literature: she bit her lip, took the matter into her heart, and her reaction is rendered as a body reacting — the poem gives her a spasm of dread, not fury. Then she gave instructions. Bolt the seven gates. Open each one a crack. And as Inanna comes through, take from her, one at a time, the emblems of what she is.
So at the first gate the crown was removed, and she asked what this was, and was told: be silent, the ways of the underworld are perfect and are not to be questioned. At the second the beads were taken from her throat; at the third the beads from her breast; at the fourth the ornament from her chest; at the fifth the gold ring from her hand; at the sixth the measuring rod and line; at the seventh the robe of ladyship.
She entered the throne room naked and bowed. Ereshkigal rose; Inanna sat down in her place. The seven Anunnaki, the judges, pronounced against her, and Ereshkigal fixed on her the eye of death and spoke the word of wrath. She was turned into a corpse, and the corpse was hung on a hook on the wall.
Fingernail dirt
Three days and three nights, and Ninshubur did exactly what she had been told.
Enlil refused. His answer is that his daughter craved the great below, and that whoever goes to the underworld does not come back, and that anyone who asks otherwise is asking for something improper. Nanna at Ur gave the same answer in nearly the same words. The repetition is doing work: this is a cosmos with a rule in it, and the rule has just been stated twice by its highest authorities.
Enki did not refuse. He asked what had happened to his daughter, said he was worried, and then scraped the dirt from under two of his fingernails and made from it two creatures — a kurgarra and a galatur, figures of the cultic performers of Inanna's own establishment, whose defining quality in the text is that they are neither male nor female and therefore not covered by the rules governing who may enter. To one he gave the food of life; to the other, the water of life.
His instructions were extraordinary, and they are not a plan of attack. Go in like flies through the pivot-hole of the door. You will find the queen of the underworld lying uncovered and in pain, groaning, with nothing over her body and her hair matted like leeks. She will cry out about her insides, and about her outside. Say back to her: my lady, your insides — my lady, your outside. Whatever she is suffering, echo it.
That is what they did. And Ereshkigal — who is in labour, or in some kind of birth-agony the poem does not clarify, and who has nobody attending her — heard the only sympathy anyone in the story offers to anyone, and asked who they were, and offered them a reward. She offered them water, a river's worth; they refused it. She offered grain, a field's worth; they refused it. They asked for the corpse hanging on the hook.
She gave it to them, and they sprinkled the food of life and the water of life on it, and Inanna stood up.
The price
She did not get out free. The poem states the rule flatly: no one ascends from the underworld unmarked; whoever goes up must provide someone to stay. So she came up surrounded by galla demons, who are described with grim comic precision — beings who know no food and no drink, who eat no offerings, who accept no gifts, who take the wife from a man's embrace and the child from a nurse's knee — and their function is to collect.
They came first to Ninshubur, waiting outside the gate in filthy sackcloth, and offered to take her. Inanna refused: this is the one who saved my life. They came to her son Shara at Umma, dressed in mourning and singing laments for her; she refused. They came to Lulal at Badtibira, likewise in mourning; she refused.
Then they came to Kullab, and found Dumuzid sitting on a magnificent throne in fine clothes, not mourning at all.
Inanna looked at him and fixed on him the eye of death, and said the word, and told the demons to take him away.
What follows is the most sympathetic sequence in the whole composition, and it is about the man she has just condemned. He weeps, and prays to the sun god Utu, his brother-in-law, to change his hands and feet into a snake's so he can escape; Utu does it, twice; twice the demons find him. His sister Geshtinanna is tortured and will not say where he is, and is offered the river-gift and the grain-gift and refuses both; a friend takes the bribe and tells them. In the end, in the closing lines and in the companion poem Dumuzid's Dream, it is Geshtinanna who resolves it, by offering to take his place for half the year — so that he is below for half the year and she for the other half, and Inanna, having killed him, sets the terms of the arrangement.
The Sumerian and the Akkadian are two different poems
This matters and is constantly got wrong. The Sumerian Inanna's Descent — around four hundred lines, known from Old Babylonian copies from Nippur and Ur and pieced together over decades, most famously by Samuel Noah Kramer — and the Akkadian Descent of Ishtar are separate compositions on the same subject, not versions of one text in two languages. The Akkadian is roughly a third the length and differs at almost every point of interest:
- The threat at the gate. Ishtar tells the gatekeeper that if he does not open, she will smash the door, break the bolt, and raise the dead so that they eat the living and outnumber them. It is the single most quoted line in Akkadian literature and it has no counterpart in the Sumerian.
- The consequence above. While Ishtar is below, sexual reproduction stops on earth — no bull mounts a cow, no man approaches a woman. The Sumerian poem shows no such effect. This is the detail on which most fertility-goddess readings of the story actually rest, and it belongs to the later, shorter, Semitic-language text.
- The rescuer. Ea does not make two beings but one, a figure named Asushunamir, an assinnu — a cultic performer of ambiguous gender attached to Ishtar's service. Ereshkigal, tricked, curses him with a future of street gutters and drunkards' abuse, which reads uncomfortably like an aetiology for the actual social position of such performers in Babylonian cities.
- The ending. The Akkadian text closes with instructions about Tammuz, washing and anointing him and the wailing of the women, which suggests it was attached to an actual liturgical occasion.
What it is not
Two modern readings have become so widespread that they need separating from the tablets.
The dying-and-rising vegetation god. Frazer's framework has been applied to Dumuzid for over a century, and the texts do not support it well. He does not rise; he alternates with his sister, half a year each, which is a substitution arrangement rather than a resurrection. Everything that survives in the ritual record is lament — the wailing over him is abundantly attested and a festival of his return is not.
The seven veils. The garments removed at the seven gates have been fused in popular imagination with the dance of the seven veils, which is not ancient at all: the dance is Oscar Wilde's invention for his Salomé of 1891, made famous by Richard Strauss's opera. The Sumerian stripping is not erotic and is not a performance. It is the systematic removal of the insignia of office, item by item, until the person entering has no authority left.
The other great modern afterlife is the Jungian and feminist one. Diane Wolkstein and Kramer's Inanna of 1983 put the poem in front of a general readership, and Sylvia Brinton Perera's Descent to the Goddess of 1981 read it as a template for psychological breakdown and reintegration. Both have been enormously influential in contemporary spirituality. Neither is what the poem is doing, and the difference is worth stating plainly rather than sneering at: a four-thousand-year-old text about divine prerogative and substitutionary death has been repurposed as a therapeutic narrative, and the repurposing is itself now a real cultural fact.
Questions this text raises
Why does Ereshkigal collapse when she hears Inanna is coming?
Nobody knows, and the ambiguity may be intentional. She is later found in physical agony, unattended and uncovered, in a state the poem describes in the language of childbirth. Read one way, she is genuinely in labour and her sister has arrived at the worst possible moment. Read another, the great below has no comfort in it even for its queen, and the description is simply what her existence is like. The text does not choose, and the two beings sent to help her succeed precisely because they do not try to interpret her — they only repeat her back to her.
Is Inanna's stated reason for coming true?
Gugalanna, the "great bull of heaven", is Ereshkigal's husband, and Inanna says she has come for his funeral rites. Readers have long noticed that a related tradition has Inanna herself responsible for the Bull of Heaven's death — in the Gilgamesh material, she demands it and it is killed. If those are the same bull, then she is presenting herself at a funeral she caused, which would explain her sister's reaction rather well. The connection is attractive and the texts do not confirm it.
What does it tell us about Mesopotamian ideas of death?
That the afterlife was not a reward or a punishment but a place, administered, with a queen, a gatekeeper, judges and a rule book — and that its rules were not negotiable even by the gods, only satisfiable. There is no paradise here and no torment; there is dust, and there is a procedure. The same underworld appears in the Gilgamesh material and in the incantation literature, and it is why so much Mesopotamian religious practice concerns feeding and remembering the dead rather than saving them.
How much of the Sumerian text is actually preserved?
More than people assume, but it is a reconstruction. The composition is known from multiple Old Babylonian school copies, mostly from Nippur, none of them complete, and the modern text is a composite assembled from overlapping fragments across many decades of work — with the ending in particular clarified by later tablet joins. Where translations differ from each other, it is often because they are working from different reconstructions rather than making different interpretive choices.