Inanna's Descent to the Netherworld

Inanna, goddess of love, war, and the morning and evening star, decides to descend to the netherworld ruled by her sister Ereshkigal, ostensibly to attend a funeral rite but really, the poem implies, to extend her dominion into the land of the dead. She passes through seven gates, stripped of a piece of her royal regalia at each one, until she arrives naked and powerless before Ereshkigal's court of judges, the Anunna, who fix on her the look of death and hang her corpse on a hook. Her minister Ninshubur, following instructions given before the descent, appeals to the gods for rescue; only the trickster god Enki responds, fashioning two sexless creatures from the dirt under his fingernails to slip into the netherworld unnoticed and revive Inanna with the food and water of life. But underworld law demands a substitute corpse to take her place, and Inanna, escorted back by a squad of merciless demons (galla), rejects one mourning attendant after another until she finds her husband Dumuzi enthroned in splendor rather than grieving her death. Enraged, she gives him over to the demons; his sister Geshtinanna intervenes, and the two are made to split the year between them, each spending half in the netherworld so the other can live. The myth supplies the etiology behind Mesopotamia's seasonal cult of Dumuzi and Inanna, in which Dumuzi's disappearance and return mark the death and revival of vegetation, and it stands as the direct Sumerian source, adapted rather than invented, for the later Akkadian poem the Descent of Ishtar.