(Episode 1 Rebooted) Inanna and Enheduanna: Transgender in the Beginning
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Script and Slides
Introduction
Welcome to the new and improved Valentine’s Voice, the show fueled by caffeine and curiosity! I am your host, Valentine Valcourt. This is a reboot of the show that I’ve been working on for a bit and I hope that you will enjoy at least as much. I’ll go more into the details in a bit.
Transitioning in 2019
For anyone new to the show, I am Valentine Valcourt, a 38 year old transgender woman, mother, and wife. I figure it might be helpful to know who I am and where I’m coming from, so here is a short write up of my background and transition journey.
I realized that I was transgender at the very beginning of 2019, after a couple years of dealing with a lot of pain and confusion around my gender.
Once I admitted to myself that I was a transgender woman, I knew I had a very difficult choice to make. On the one hand, I could try to keep pretending that I was a man. I had gotten pretty darn good at pretending to be a man after 32 years. To some extent this was the safe choice. I came from a very conservative family, and coming out would have a cost. I didn’t know what the cost would be, but I knew it would be significant.
On the other hand I could finally accept myself as I was. In it’s own way, this was another safe bet. I might not be accepted by others, but I would at the very least be able to accept myself and begin aligning my body with my mind. Maybe this would cure the feelings of self loathing, anxiety, and depression.
My Religious Background and Not Knowing What Being Transgender Was
As I said, I was born to a very religiously conservative family. I was home schooled for most of grade school and my science and history education were very warped by their view. My science education was dominated by topics like Creationism and Climate Change Denial. My history lessons were dominated by historical revisionists were pushing new narratives and views into history, and any history text that wasn’t written by a fellow fundamentalist wasn’t to be trusted. English classes consisted of essays about why no one should listen to anything but conservative music, and the word ‘secular’ was equated with ‘evil’. Beyond all that, my family had this unspoken rule that I have come to call the “Anything But Gay” policy. There was virtually nothing you could do that would be worse than being gay. My dad would frequently say that no matter what he was certain he’d be the last straight man on earth. There was a borderline riot at the church my dad pastored because someone rewrote the lyrics to Queen’s We Will Rock You and played it in the sanctuary. We literally had to reconsecrate the room afterwards. All because Freddie Mercury was a gay man.
I honestly didn’t know that transgender people existed until I was in my 20s, so I’m not sure what my family’s view on that would have been that. It likely would have been similar to the current views of all transgender people being pedophiles, rapists, or groomers. From personal experience, it isn’t a positive view for sure.
In my 20s I slowly deprogrammed myself. It took almost a full decade to finally feel like I could be myself and not feel like I was being whoever I was told I was allowed to be. Along the way I realized I lived under a lot of assumptions that were never really my own. Turns out I wasn’t conservative, or fundamentalist, or even Christian. I also wasn’t straight, or cisgender.
So in my early 30’s, I decided to see how deep the rabbit hole went. I began transitioning, and I accepted myself, exactly as I was, and whoever wanted to come along for the ride would be welcome. As I said earlier, I knew there would be a cost. It’s been five years and the cost turned out to be my entire biological family, which was admittedly a worst case scenario.
The benefits were beyond anything I could have imagined. I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I have created and found new family members that love me as I am, they support me, and they celebrate me. My kid is my biggest supporter, they have loved me and had my back every step of the way. I get to wake up every day and regardless of any political crap going on or daily worries I have, I have the full knowledge that I am living at a level of happiness that I never thought possible.
So doing the math, for me personally, this has absolutely been worth it.
The Political Atmosphere ‘TikTok Trend’
As I transitioned, I became aware that being transgender had become something of a cause celebre for the right wing of the political spectrum. In that sense I felt like my transition might have been a bit poorly timed. Trump’s presidency was in full culture war mode, transgender people were barred from the military, discrimination protections were rolled back, and worst of all, trans kids lost their rights state by state. One thing that was often said was that the recent surge in people coming out as transgender was a TikTok trend. Due to how I was raised, along with being something of a TikTok holdout, I was reasonably sure that I wasn’t a part of any TikTok trend. I saw the entire line of reasoning as a way to discredit and marginalize transgender people, but it did spark a really important question for me.
As A History Fan, I Wanted to See How Far Back It Went
What is the history of transgender people? I am a history nut, I’ve been studying history from various angles since my teenage years and I realized that I had no idea what place transgender people had in history. This specific episode was inspired by a slightly more specific question: How far back in history do we have evidence of transgender people? So I started looking, digging, reading, and I found out that our history is absolutely amazing. This show will detail that history, highlighting transgender, non-binary, and third gender groups and figures in history. Because there are so many stories that need to be told, and for one reason or another they tend to be left out of all of our textbooks.
Explaining The Reboot
Gap Between Episodes
For any subscribers who have watched the prior episodes, I apologize for the long break between the last episode and this one. The initial format for this show was a bit too ambitious for a one woman operation. Especially a woman who is also going back to school and being a wife and parent. The first couple new episodes will have some information that we have already covered, but will mostly contain a lot of new material to enjoy! So now we have an audio only format, with a few relevant slides. This which will allow me to record more regularly.
The New Format
Another thing I didn’t like about the prior format was that I would spend days or even weeks digging deep into sources, all to make a 15 minute video that would summarize the topic, but result in me having to leave out a lot of the most interesting bits. Above all, this new format is much more what I know and what I love. I’ve been inspired for ages by podcasters like Mike Duncan, Dan Carlin, and Dan Toler, none of whom were ever afraid to spend extra time to deliver the context that makes history so interesting. I have a podcast going anytime I’m working on chores or driving around. So, all that being said, going forward you can expect monthly episodes that will be deep dives into their topics. This is the part of history that I love, and I look forward to sharing it with you.
Walking Back Through Time/The Past is Another World
Rather than jump to the date that all of this starts, I would like to take a little walk through time. As humans, it can be difficult for our brains to understand how absolutely vast time humanity’s time on this planet has been. So we’re starting in the year 2024, in a world shaped by COVID-19. There is a pre-COVID world and a post-COVID world. Things like masks, social distancing, remote work, and remote schools have become a new norm for our entire world in just five brief years.
If we go to 2019, before COVID, we only have to look back another eighteen years to 2001 for the next major shift. Just like there is a pre and post-COVID, there is a pre and post-September 11. We went from a world where terrorist meant someone like Timothy McVeigh to one where it meant someone like Osama Bin Laden. Since then we’ve had numerous wars, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and global terrorist attacks. And we’ve only gone back 23 years.
The reason that we can point at single events that changed the world is in large part due to our global information age. The internet has made it so that a single event can influence the world in real time. During COVID schools were still able to operate with Zoom, during 9/11 we had people making calls from cellphones from the hijacked planes. Even before the internet age, we had cellphones, and before cellphones, television and telephones, even the telegraph. Information can be around the globe in seconds.
This is all a new thing, for most of humanity’s existence, information has been limited by the speed of a horse or a boat. Events were localized, with the news rarely spreading farther than the next town, county, or country over. This is important to keep in mind as we walk back. We’ll be starting with some of the earliest writing that humanity ever carved into stone, but writing was new and rare. It would be millennia before we even had the capability of knowing what was happening in far off lands with any reliability.
For most ancient sources, we are incredibly lucky if someone wrote something down, and their writing has survived until now. We’re even lucky if someone wrote something down, someone else saw it hundreds of years later, and summarized it in passing. For much of history, all the way up until the modern era for some areas, we rely on things like a society’s coinage, monuments, and graves to tell us all we will ever get to know about how a culture saw the world.
Walking Back/How Much Changes
So just for fun, let’s imagine that you somehow got magically teleported 75 years ago, 1949. To keep it simple, you stayed in the city you’re in right now. Would you be able to operate? How long do you think it would be before you committed some embarrassing social misstep.
For a lot of people, 75 years would be doable. We’re talking about being in the same country same currency, same root traditions. In my country, we would be in the beginnings of the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and McCarthyism. Obviously I would prefer to be in 2024, but I could likely get by in 1949.
Now jump back 150 years, which would be 1874, and ask yourself the same questions. This one would be a lot harder for me personally. Reconstruction Era United States, along with the country being in an economic depression, it doesn’t sound like a fun time. Obviously there would be no airplanes, or even automobiles. People tried on trains, horses, and their own two feet to move from place to place. I might live in the Southern United States, but I don’t have the first clue how to ride a horse, let alone take care of one. The culture and society would be very different. I’d probably get in trouble for wearing pants, or opening my own door.
Honestly, this is about as far back as I personally can play this game. If we double the years again to 300, we would be in 1724, and my country doesn’t even exist yet. My home would be rightly considered Cherokee land, and I wouldn’t have the first clue about social customs, how to dress, or even how to speak the language.
The point of all of this, is to realize that when we move backwards in time, there are a legion of assumptions that we have to shed. Not just about communication and culture, but also about motivations, frame of mind, cultural limitations.
This is especially important for this episode, since we are going all the way back to the beginning of human civilization, right at the edge between history and prehistory. When we are discussing Romans, Greeks, Akkadians, and Sumerians, we are talking about humans, but humans from a different time and place that we wouldn’t have the first clue how to live in.
Gender Identity in the Ancient World
In this same vein, gender identity in the ancient world was very different from our modern times. Obviously they didn’t use words like transgender and cisgender, since these terms are rooted in Latin and in the case of some of these civilizations, Latin hadn’t even been invented yet. In many cases being transgender was a sign that someone was blessed by a certain goddess and was destined to become a priestess, priestrix, or priest.
We’ll dig more into this later, but I will re-emphasize here that we are still dealing with humans that are living in a much less rigid system than the cultures of today, with some possible exceptions that we will happily be digging into in later episodes. This is just one of the issues that we have in trying to understand the terminology we find in the writings of prior civilizations.
Issues with Gender in Historiography
Bias and People of Their Time
Another is the cultural framework that these people lived in. If you were to plug the script of this episode into Google translate and translate it into another language, someone who speaks that language will get the broad idea of what I’m saying, but a lot of specifics are going to get lost. Some languages have words that we just don’t have in English. German seems to be absolutely great for that. They have words for things that it would take me two or three sentences to define in English. One example is Elefantenrennen, which literally translates to elephant racing, but refers to when one large truck tries to pass another large truck on the highway but they are going roughly the same speed.
So when translators work with languages like ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Greek, or Latin, there is a lot of work that has to be put into understanding not just the definitions of a word, but also the actual ideas that the writer was trying to convey.
Since our translators are human, no matter how hard they try to get into the head of a human from one of these cultures, they are always going to drag in their own cultural biases. Someone from Imperial England is going to interpret a sentence much differently than someone in modern day India. This isn’t really anyone’s fault, it’s just how our brains work.
Just one fun example of this is Sumerian Proverbs: Glimpses of Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. This is a collection of Sumerian proverbs translated by Edmund I. Gordon, an American author in 1959. Here is a brief example of his work:
Proverb 1.40
If his “food ” be something (sexually) defiling, one should not be overwhelmed by it.
Author’s Note:
The translation of this proverb is very uncertain. The first clause may possibly refer to some aberrant sexual act such as cunnilingus or fellatio; the translation of the second clause is only one of several possibilities.
It is fairly obvious here that Gordon is letting his own ideas of what constitutes aberrant behavior influence his translation, especially since he notes that the translation of the second clause is fairly vague. It becomes even more obvious later in his book when he begins writing about Sumerian society and is trying to fit an ancient culture into modern terminology, such as using the term Register of Deeds to describe a position. Gordon also uses some older terminology like catamite and hermaphrodite. This isn’t necessarily Gordon being anything other than a product of his time, it was very common for historians to interject their beliefs, ethics, judgment, and preferences into their work up until recently. Some would argue that is still widely the case. This passage does do well to make the point of how difficult it can be for us to get an accurate picture of the past. Despite his outdated language and obvious bias, Gordon will actually be an important source for us a little later.
Language / Eunuchs and Hermaphrodites
This does however bring me to one of my biggest pet peeves. In reading dozens of translations, histories, and sources, I have come to absolutely despise the word ‘eunuch’. We’re going to be talking about a massive number of diverse cultures and people from all over the world. The vast majority of the transgender, non-binary, and third gender people that we’re going to be discussing have all been described as eunuchs. It seems like for most of history, if someone was studying a culture and came across a group or person who didn’t fit into their idea of a man or a woman, they just called them a eunuch and moved on. So even when we can find a source that discusses a group or person who wasn’t cisgender, we have to peel back more layers and figure out how that person would have self-identified.
This is also true of the term ‘hermaphrodite’, which is another term that is often lazily applied to anyone who doesn’t appear to be cisgendered. One genuinely wonders if earlier historians thought that every fifth person was intersex.
The blame isn’t entirely on the historians though. Other cultures saw gender and sexuality much differently, with Greco-Roman culture much more concerned with who was the active partner (aka the top) during sex. Being a top was manly, no matter what gender your partner was and being a bottom was womanly in the same way.
Between the casual insertions of misogyny and bigotry of the historiography and the cultural differences around sex and gender, finding the truth can be a lot of work.
Lack of Focus
This is a great segue into our next major issue. In many cultures history was written by men, recording the acts and feats of other men. Up until recently, most historians were men, studying the acts and feats of other men. It is only in the last 50 or 60 years or so that that we have even started trying to find the contributions of women in history, and they make up 50% of humanity. Transgender people make up something like 1-3% of the population, we haven’t exactly been a priority. That is beginning to change, and it’s an exciting time to be studying history. Hopefully podcasts and shows like this one can help get the word out.
Enheduanna and Inanna/Ishtar
For the next section I have posted a couple of maps at vvalcourt.com to help with understanding the local geography, unless you’re watching on YouTube; then, hey, look, a map!
So it turns out, rather unsurprisingly, that the story of transgender history starts with the first story of humanity itself in Sumer, early in the 23rd century BCE. This was when history gained its first author who signed her name to her writing. Sumeria was located in modern day Iraq between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The area is historically called The Fertile Crescent and it was perfectly positioned to be one of the birthplaces of civilization. Due to being between the two rivers that flooded regularly the soil was extremely fertile, the rivers flow into the Arabian Sea which gives access to trade all the way east to India and south to the Arabian peninsula and the eastern coast of Africa. Following the rivers north and west, the Sumerians had access to the Mediterranean Sea and the Minoans and Egyptians. Sumeria was was made up of a series of city-states that shared the same language and culture.
City-states is one of those terms thrown around by historians that I think fails to capture what it is we are talking about. In this case, we’re talking about a time of transition for humanity. In some areas there were nomadic herders, nomadic tribes of farmers, hunter-gatherer groups, and in Egypt you had something like a nation that had managed building the pyramids a couple of hundred years before this. When we talk about a city-state in this time period, what we are talking about is a tribe that settled into a good spot, and has expanded it’s population enough to spin off other cities. These people likely wouldn’t have seen themselves as “Sumerians” but as Kissians, Urians, or Niburians.
Any western trade that wanted to go east or eastern trade that wanted to go west had to go through Sumeria, and their cities became wealthy as a result. This Sumerian culture was in place for something like a thousand years.
One important thing to remember here is that even looking all the way back to Sumerians and a time when humanity was achieving a lot of ‘firsts’, we are talking about an established culture that already saw it’s beginnings as ancient. While for us this is a beginning of sorts, we are still jumping in to the middle of the story.
The wealth of the Sumerians made them a tempting target to the Akkadian king Sargon. In the year 2334, the Akkadians conquered the Sumerian city states and became the first multi-national Empire that we know of.
Just to be clear, the map I’m showing does not necessarily show the firm boundaries of the Akkadian Empire, but it does show the political and trade influence that they had, which stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Arabian Sea.
Introducing Enheduanna
Enheduanna’s Place in History
History’s first author was named Enheduanna. She was Akkadian, and her father was Sargon of Akkad. Enheduanna was the high priestess of the goddess the moon god, Nanna. It would seem that after Sargon took over Sumeria, it was Enheduanna’s job to make sure that the Sumerians understood that their gods would be getting even more honors under the Akkadians than they did under the Sumerians and beginning the process of merging the Sumerian and Akkadian pantheons. This may not seem like a very important task, but what we have to remember is that in this time and especially in this place, the gods were not seen as benevolent beings waiting to rain down blessings. The gods were seen as fickle and holding the power of life or death over a city in any number of ways. If the gods were displeased they could send a bad harvest, or a plague, or another conqueror. It was Enheduanna’s job to quell these fears and reassure the people that good times would be had under Sargon and the Akkadians. She wrote a number hymns celebrating the power of the gods, and most importantly for our purposes, she wrote several about a goddess called Inanna among the Sumerians and Ishtar among the Akkadians.
Introducing Inanna
Inanna was one of the most powerful deities in the Sumerian belief system. In their mythology she had stolen the power over several different areas from other deities until she seems to have had responsibility over virtually everything. She reigned over sex, war, civilization, the wild places, fertility, justice, and weather. She was known to be moody and capricious, even going so far as to destroy a mountain once because it seemed to challenge her magnificence. She was associated with the planet Venus and her title was Queen of the Heavens. Here is one example of Enheduanna’s writing that has survived to the present day, though some fragments and lines were destroyed by time. It is called A Hymn to Inanna, and it is a long recitation of the powers and abilities of Inanna. I’m going to read two sections that are relevant to our subject here and I will mark the areas where we are missing words with the word ‘gap’.
A Hymn to Inanna
80-90When she had removed the great punishment from her body, she invoked blessings upon it; she caused it to be named the pilipili. She broke the spear and as if she were a man …… gave her a weapon. When she had …… punishment, it is not ……. She …… the door of the house of wisdom, she makes known its interior. Those who do not respect her suspended net do not escape …… when she suspends the meshes of her net. The man she has called by name she does not hold in esteem. Having approached the woman, she breaks the weapon and gives her a spear. The male jicgisajkec, the nisub and the female jicgi ritual officiants, after having …… punishment, moaning ……. The ecstatic, the transformed pilipili, the kurjara and the sajursaj ……. Lament and song ……. They exhaust themselves with weeping and grief, they …… laments.
In this first section, we have the introduction of the pilipili. The pilipili were referenced here and elsewhere as the ‘transformed pilipili’. They were people who were assigned female at birth, but when they joined the cult of Inanna they were transformed, given spears, served as cult warriors, and referred to as ‘females with male hearts’. It is highly likely that a pilipili born into our modern time would identify as a transgender man. Continuing on with the Hymn:
115-131To run, to escape, to quiet and to pacify are yours, Inana. To rove around, to rush, to rise up, to fall down and to …… a companion are yours, Inana. To open up roads and paths, a place of peace for the journey, a companion for the weak, are yours, Inana. To keep paths and ways in good order, to shatter earth and to make it firm are yours, Inana. To destroy, to build up, to tear out and to settle are yours, Inana. To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inana.
This is the section that really ends the argument of ‘It’s a TikTok Trend’. In the 23rd century BCE, we have the truth of the matter literally carved into rock. Enheduanna was not making up something from scratch, she was listing a number of known powers ascribed to Inanna, one of which was the power to turn men into women and women into men. Just as with anything from a predominantly oral tradition when it is finally written down, this has likely been a tradition going on for a very long time in Sumerian culture. Transgender people have been around as least as long as Homo sapiens has been around.
The Followers of Inanna by Category
Now that we know that Inanna had various types of transgender priests, priestesses, and priestrix, let’s check them out individually and in detail.
Gala/Assinnu/Kalu
First up is the gala. At least the Sumerians called them gala, the Akkadians called them Assinnu or Kalu. When we are talking about the gala, assinnu, or kalu, we’re talking about a group that existed in various cultures for thousands of years. While we have a few snapshots from various authors, it is important to remember this was a human culture, constantly evolving and changing. The gala were said to have been created for Inanna to sing ‘heart-soothing laments’ for her. The gala were priestesses who had been assigned male at birth and once joining the cult of Inanna had become women for all intents and purposes. One really interesting way that this manifested itself was in language. Among their other roles, the gala priestesses were funeral singers, and they sang in a special dialect called Eme-sal that was only taught to women. They dressed as women, and in one of their rituals for Inanna they would do some kind of celebratory competition with jumping ropes and colored cords. They are the type that we have the most information about and seem to have been highly important in Sumerian society. While they started as primarily funeral singers, they expanded to form a large and important bureaucracy both in Inanna’s temple called Eanna and in the cultures they lived in.
From the Erra Epic Poem:
- They turned out the [kurgarrû] and [assinnu] (at) Eanna,52
- Whose manhood Ishtar changed to womanhood to strike awe into the people,
- The wielders of daggers and razors, vintner’s shears and flint knives,
- Who take part in abominable acts for the entertainment of Ishtar
Kurgarru
This quote is perfect to take us to our next group, the Kurgarru. The Kurgarru were likely something of a third gender but masculine figure and served to represent the warlike aspects of Inanna. This likely involved blood rites of some kind along with a warlike dance during Inanna’s celebrations. We know a lot less about them, but they often appear side by side with the gala/assinnu in the writings that we have.
Pilipili
The pilipili we have already mentioned once. They were people who were assigned female at birth but were made men by Inanna when she gave them spears. One thing that makes this even more telling is we know from other writings that possession of a weapon in any form was something left only for men. The spears weren’t just a possible phallic reference, they were themselves a sign that these people were to be seen and treated as men.
How The Followers Were Viewed by Society
The gala are the only part of Inanna’s followers that we have a lot of evidence of interacting with society. Part of this seems to be because at least one writer found them insufferable, and the other part seems to be that the other roles faded away over time.
Sacred Sex
It is here that we will go ahead and tackle one of the controversies around today’s topic, which is sacred prostitution. On the one hand, we have Herodotus, a Greek historian who is often called both The Father of History and The Father of Lies due to his works outlining much of the history he was able to learn about. He was writing in the mid-5th century BCE, roughly 100 years before Alexander the Great would march east and conquer the area. I’m going to quote him a bit here, but it is important to note that Herodotus calls equates the Babylonian Ishtar with the Greek Aphrodite.
The foulest Babylonian custom is that which compels every woman of the land once in her life to sit in the temple of Aphrodite and have intercourse with some stranger. Many women who are rich and proud and disdain to consort with the rest, drive to the temple in covered carriages drawn by teams, and there stand with a great retinue of attendants. But most sit down in the sacred plot of Aphrodite, with crowns of cord on their heads; there is a great multitude of women coming and going; passages marked by line run every way through the crowd, by which the stranger men pass and make their choice. When a woman has once taken her place there she goes not away to her home before some stranger has cast money into her lap and had intercourse with her outside the temple…
On the other side of the topic we have someone like Stephanie Budin who wrote a book called The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in 2008. In her book she attempts to explain away every single ancient source that mentions sacred prostitution with varying results.
The issue that I think we run into trying to deny that any kind of sacred prostitution happened is that we have numerous descriptions of Inanna’s followers in extremely sexually explicit ways such as a priestess of Inanna being described like this:
“her bottom is shining, her hips are lapis luzuli, when her backside descends from above, to spread feelings of love, to reduce inhibitions of love, arousal extends from above like (from) a wall.”
If you’re wondering about the ‘her hips are lapis lazuli’ line there, it is a reference to Inanna, who is often described as loving lapis lazuli in the texts.
We also have a text that explicitly speaks of sacred prostitution here:
“Do not marry a harimtu, whose husbands are legion. A harlot dedicated to a god. The courtesan whose favors are many. In your troubles, she will not support you.”
So, best guess, there was some sacred prostitution going on. I doubt it was to the extent that Herodotus was talking about, but it probably happened. Above all, it is important to remember that Inanna was a sex goddess amongst other roles and many writings addressing her depict this fairly graphically. I will note that there were a lot of much more explicit texts that I left out of this, but you are welcome to look up how kinky Inanna and her followers got.
Arrogance
I think that part of the issue we have when people are trying to disprove the existence of sacred prostitution is that we are coming from a society where there can be a lot of shame that comes with sex work.
This can be shown in the 2017 book Ishtar, by Louise M. Pryke, who is leaning heavily on the work of Stephanie Budin when she says this in introducing the topic of sacred prostitution:
This historiographic problem has obscured the goddess’ image, and created serious obstacles to scholarly efforts to explore her significance in the ancient world.
This doesn’t seem to have been the case in the Mesopotamian societies of Sumer and Akkad. We do have examples of Sumerian society criticizing gala priestesses, but never for sex work. Instead we see in Gordon’s proverbs that the gala were often criticized for being self important or for attributing even the smallest things to an act of Inanna. I’m going to quote a couple of these proverbs, but before I do I will note that Gordon uses male pronouns and the Akkadian term ‘kalu’ instead of the Sumerian term ‘gala’ but we are talking about the same class of individual:
As the saying goes : If the kalû – priest slips as he is sitting down, (he will immediately say): ‘ It is a visitation from my mistress Inanna; far be it from me that I rise! ‘ “
And another proverb states:
“As the saying goes: If the grain boat of the kalû – priest sinks for him, he will stand on dry land, saying): ‘O Enki! In what you are robbing me of, may you take pleasure!”
So some people thought that they were pretentious, but they were a valued part of the Sumerian and Akkadian societies.
Inanna Becomes Ishtar
As I mentioned before, the Akkadians called Inanna Ishtar, and it was as Ishtar that she would continue into the cultures that followed the Akkadians. Also as Ishtar, her cult would morph and change over time. We stop hearing about the pilipili and the kurgarru. The priestesses of Ishtar are referred to mainly as the assinnu and occasionally still as the kalu. Akkadian society also seems to have settled on the assinnu as being more of a third gender.
The Rise and Spread of Ishtar
The Akkadian Empire fell after a couple hundred years and Mesopotamia likely reverted to a group of city-states in the absence of any overriding authority. Around the 14th century BCE the Assyrians began a series of conquests that ended with them establishing dominance over modern day Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and parts of Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. They give much of the credit for their victories to Ishtar, who they quickly adopted. She actually rose to such prominence that she took over the role of primary deity in their pantheon, toppling the prior chief god, Assur.
The Assyrians were known to be a brutal and unforgiving empire, and much of the art that has survived to our time depicts the slaughter and destruction that they inflicted upon the cities that they conquered. It was due to this brutality that they managed to make a great number of enemies. As long as the Assyrians themselves were united, it never seems to matter, their military was absolutely dominant. Towards the end of their empire, which lasted around 700 years, the Assyrians fell into a civil war over the issue of succession.
It is under the Assyrians that we get a glimpse of Ishtar from an outside culture, when the ancient Israelite prophet Nahum wrote of the fall of the Assyrian capital of Ninevah in the 7th century BCE.
Nahum 3:4 Amplified Bible (AMP) All because of the many acts of prostitution of [Nineveh] the prostitute, The charming and well-favored one, the mistress of sorceries, Who betrays nations by her acts of prostitution (idolatry) And families by her sorceries.
Here Nahum is speaking of Nineveh as a follower of Ishtar, who he obviously did not hold in high regard. The Israelites had a much more rigid idea of gender and sex and saw the downfall of the Assyrians as the result of their morally bankruptcy, rather than the end of result of a regime that attempted to rule by fear.
The Fall of Ishtar
We’ll discuss the spread of goddesses who were based on Ishtar over the next few episodes, not only because they were both numerous and historically significant, but also because the majority of these goddesses retained the tradition of their temples being full of transgender and third gender priestesses and priestrix.
To finish this episode though, we will finish the history of Ishtar and her followers.
The fall of the Assyrians was just one step on the rise of the Persian Empire, which was just staggeringly huge. It spread from parts of Greece in the West to parts of India in the East, and from Egypt in the South to parts of present day Russia and Kazakhstan in the North. This first version of the Persian Empire is called the Achaemenid Empire, and it was the biggest Empire the world had ever seen.
The Achaemenids were very religiously tolerant, so while Ishtar wasn’t considered their head goddess, her temple and priestesses were still supported and she continued to be widely worshiped through Mesopotamia.
Under the Achaemenids, Ishtar bumped into the first of the series of monotheistic religions that would result in her downfall. This first one was Zoroastrianism, a version of the traditional Persian religion that focused entirely on what had been the creator god in the pantheon. It didn’t take long for the new religion to become the religion of the ruling class, which took even more of the wind out of Ishtar’s sails.
In 331 BCE, Alexander the Great conquered Persia and died less than a decade later, having created on of the largest and shortest lived empires in history. Immediately after his death his generals began claiming bit of his empire for themselves, with the General Seleucus Nicator claiming Persia for himself and creating the Seleucid Dynasty in 311 BCE.
The Seleucids were Macedonians by birth and Greek in their culture and religion. This was the twilight of Ishtar’s organized religion. One of the many goddesses that Ishtar had inspired had become much more important in the current culture, and the funding for her temples slowly tapered off.
None of this is to say that Ishtar just disappeared. Her worship continued as a folk religion in Mesopotamia and Arabia even after the majority of the population had turned to Christianity and Islam.
I was able to find evidence for at least a version of the cult of Ishtar existing into the tenth century C.E. in the documents of an Arab Muslim Scholar named Ibn al-Nadim. He describes a feast where women weep for Tammuz, Ishtar’s husband.
Tammuz (July) In the middle of the month there is the Feast of al-Buqat, that is, of the weeping women. It is the Ta-uz, a feast celebrated for the god Ta-uz. The women weep for him because his master slew him by grinding his bones under a millstone and winnowing them in the wind. So the women eat nothing ground by a millstone, but rather moistened wheat, chick-peas (himmas), dates, raisins, and similar things.
In the original story Tammuz is sent to the underworld in place of Ishtar for six months of every year in punishment for not mourning her while she was missing, understandably a lot has changed in the culture over the last thousand years.
So the cult of Inanna and Ishtar lasted from sometime before the 24th century BCE to either 1st century BCE or sometime around the 10th century CE depending on how you’re counting. Something like 2400 or 3400 years, which is just beyond astounding. I live in a country that hasn’t even existed for 250 years, I’m not even sure I can wrap my brain around that kind of time frame. Even more astoundingly, while the power of Ishtar was significant for large amounts of history, it was her sisters and daughters, the goddesses influenced by her and inspired by her, that are her true legacy. They would spread and evolve throughout the world, and the transgender gala would spread with them.
Thank you so much for watching, and I hope that you enjoyed the new format as much as I enjoyed producing it. I look forward to seeing you all next month, as we follow a branch of the transgender gala as they move West as the galli of Cybele.
Sources
https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section4/tr4073.htm
Edmund I. Gordon – Sumerian Proverbs_ Glimpses of Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia-University of Pennsylvania Press (2017)
Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature — Leick, Dr Gwendolyn%3bLeick, Gwendolyn — 2013
Ehalt Assumptions About the Assinnu Corrected Format Kelsie Ehalt
Stephanie Budin, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008
• Warner, Marina (2016) [1976]. Alone of All Her Sex: The myth and cult of the Virgin Mary. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. p. 210. ISBN 978-0-19-963994-6.
“Ishtar” by Pryke, Louise M.;
The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature
The Notches Project
Temple/Sacred Prostitution in Ancient Mesopotamia Revisited; Morris Silver
