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Updated: June 26, 2025
This would not necessarily make Ishtar of Nineveh the oldest of the three, but accounts for the higher rank that was accorded to her, as against the other two. Tiele suggests that Arbela became the seat of a school of prophets in the service of Ishtar.
Popular belief makes her responsible for decay and death, since life and fertility appear to be in her hand. Gilgamesh, as a popular hero, is brought into association by popular traditions with Ishtar, as he is brought into relationships with Eabani and Ukhat. A factor in this association was the necessity of accounting for Gilgamesh's death.
For him, Ramman is the god of battle who in companionship with Ishtar abets the king in his great undertakings. He addresses Ramman as the great lord of heaven, the lord of subterranean waters and of rain, whose curse is invoked against the one who sets aside the decrees of Nebuchadnezzar or who defaces the monument the king sets up.
Ishtar, a goddess of war and of love, was worshiped also under the name Beltis, the Greek Mylitta. This deity embodied the generative principle, the spring of fertility, whose beneficent agency was seen in the abundant harvest. She was clothed with sensual attributes, and propitiated with unchaste rites.
Evidently, the distinction between Ishtar as the daughter of Anu and as the daughter of Sin is not an important one, the term daughter in both cases being a metaphor to express a relationship both of physical nature and of a political character.
During a period equally long or brief the girls of the city had loosed their girdles for Ishtar and yielded themselves to anyone, stranger or neighbour, that asked. In the service of the goddess their brothers occasionally feigned that they too were girls. Meanwhile, from the summit of a seven-floored pyramid, mortals contemplated the divine.
It seems not to have existed in Egypt. The consecrated maidens described in the Code of Hammurabi appear to have been chaste and respected; the relation between these and the harlots of the early Ishtar cult is not clear. +1065+. The origin of temple prostitution is not clear. The old idea that sexual union was defiling may have originated or strengthened the demand for chastity.
A hymn addressed to Ishtar of Nineveh by Ashurnasirbal, a king of Assyria, is of this character. It begins by an adoration of the goddess, who is addressed as
On Plate XXXI. we have in figure 4 a representation of the goddess Ishtar, the bride of the Sun-God. Over her we see the phallic symbol of the radiate Sun and Crescent moon in conjunction. On Plate XXXII. we see in figure 23 the Svastika cross under a tree, in a representation of a scarab from Ialysos.
This was, as the case may be, either Ishtar or the pale 'reflection' associated with Ashur as his consort. Now this Belit, as the wife of Ashur, absorbs the qualities that distinguish Belit, the wife of Bel-Marduk.
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