ISHTAR. - Principal female divinity of the pantheon of the Babylonians and Assyrians, as well as of numerous other stocks of ancient western Asia, although not all of them gave her this name. Among the Babylonians and Assyrians she was, in many of her traits, of Sumerian origin, although it cannot be asserted that this goddess derived from the Sumerians among all the other ancient Eastern nations as well. The Sumerians called her Inninni.
Already among these she bears those two principal characteristics that are found described or alluded to many times in the Babylonian or Assyrian texts: goddess of love and of war. The latter trait was emphasized especially by the Assyrians, a markedly warlike people. She presided over sexual love as well as over pure love, but she was in the first place a divinity of fertility and of childbirth, both among humans and among animals, and also throughout all nature. She was the divinity of mercenary love, and she was regarded as the prostitute among the gods, she who had not even set a limit to the love of humans and even of animals. Since she was the most conspicuous female divinity of the pantheon, she absorbed into herself the figures of almost all the other goddesses, so that in the Assyrian period her name became a synonym for goddess. She was, on the other hand, the divinity of war, who conferred victory upon her people, for whom she fought and vanquished enemies. As a warrior goddess, she was depicted fully armed, in the Assyrian period with a halo formed of stars. I. was an important figure of the Mesopotamian myths, in the first place of the one called The Descent of I. to the Underworld.
Bibliography
Giuseppe Furlani