#michalowski

[ars-polonia]

Piotr Michałowski, Oddział Krakusów (Contingent "Krakusi" / Contingent from Kraków)

b. 1855, oil on canvas

[illustratus]

Napoleon on Horseback by Piotr Michalowski

[yamayuandadu]

Nonconformity, ambiguity, fluidity and misinterpretation: on the gender of Inanna (and a few others)

This article wasn’t really planned far in advance. It started as a response to a question I got a few weeks ago:

However, as I kept working on it, it became clear a simple ask response won’t do - the topic is just too extensive to cover this way. It became clear it has to be turned into an article comprehensively discussing all major aspects of the perception of Inanna’s gender, both in antiquity and in modern scholarship. In the process I’ve also incorporated what was originally meant as a pride month special back in 2023 (but never got off the ground) into it, as well as some quick notes on a 2024 pride month special that never came to be in its intended form, as I realized I would just be repeating what I already wrote on wikipedia.

To which degree can we speak of genuine fluidity or ambiguity of Inanna’s gender, and to which of gender non-conforming behavior? Which aspects of Inanna’s character these phenomena may or may not be related to? What is overestimated and what underestimated? What did Neo-Assyrian kings have in common with medieval European purveyors of Malleus Maleficarum?  Is a beard always a type of facial hair? Why should you be wary of any source which calls gala “priests of Inanna”? 

Answers to all of these questions - and much, much more (the whole piece is over 19k words long) - await under the cut.

Zeus is basically Tyr: on names and cognates

The meaning of a theonym - the proper name of a deity - can provide quite a lot of information about its bearer. Therefore, I felt obliged to start this article with inquiries pertaining to Inanna’s name - or rather names. I will not repeat how the two names - Inanna and Ishtar - came to be used interchangeably; this was covered on this blog enough times, most recently here. Through the article, I will consistently refer to the main discussed deity as Inanna for the ease of reading, but I’d appreciate it if you read the linked explanation for the name situation before moving forward with this one.

Sumerian had no grammatical gender, and nouns were divided broadly into two categories, “humans, deities and adjacent abstract terms” and “everything else” (Ilona Zsolnay, Analyzing Constructs: A Selection of Perils, Pitfalls, and Progressions in Interrogating Ancient Near Eastern Gender, p. 462; Piotr Michalowski, On Language, Gender, Sex, and Style in the Sumerian Language, p. 211). This doesn’t mean deities (let alone humans) were perceived as genderless, though. Furthermore, the lack of grammatical masculine or feminine gender did not mean that specific words could not be coded as masculine or feminine (Analyzing Constructs…, p. 471; one of my favorite examples are the two etymologically unrelated words for female and male friends, respectively malag and guli).

While occasionally doubts are expressed regarding the meaning of Inanna’s name, most authors today accept that it can be interpreted as derived from the genitive construct nin-an-ak - “lady of heaven” (Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The Pantheon of Uruk During the Neo-Babylonian Period, p. 104). The title nin is effectively gender neutral (Julia M. Asher-Greve, Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Goddesses in Context: On Divine Powers, Roles, Relationships and Gender in Mesopotamian Textual and Visual Sources, p. 6) - it occurs in names of male deities (Ningirsu, Ninurta, Ninazu, Ninagal, Nindara, Ningublaga...), female ones (Ninisina, Ninkarrak, Ninlil, Nineigara, Ninmug…), deities whose gender shifted or varied from place to place or from period to period (Ninsikila, Ninshubur, Ninsianna…) and deities whose gender cannot be established due to scarcity of evidence (mostly Early Dynastic oddities whose names cannot even be properly transcribed). However, we can be sure that Inanna’s name was regarded as feminine based on its Emesal form, Gašananna (Timothy D. Leonard, Ištar in Ḫatti: The Disambiguation of Šavoška and Associated Deities in Hittite Scribal Practice, p. 36).

The matter is a bit more complex when it comes to the Akkadian name Ishtar. In contrast with Sumerian, Akkadian, which belongs to the eastern branch of the family of Semitic languages, had two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, though the gender of nouns wasn’t necessarily reflected in verbal forms, suffixes and so on (Analyzing Constructs…, p. 472-473). In contrast with the name Inanna, the etymology of the Akkadian moniker is less clear. The root has been identified, ˤṯtr, but its meaning is a subject of a heated debate (Aren M. Wilson-Wright, Athtart. The Transmission and Transformation of a Goddess in the Late Bronze Age, p. 22-23; the book is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, which can be read here). Based on evidence from the languages from the Ethiopian branch of the Semitic family, which offer (distant) cognates, Wilson-Wright suggests it might have originally been an ordinary feminine (but not marked with an expected suffix) noun meaning “star” which then developed into a theonym in multiple languages (Athtart…, p. 21) She tentatively suggests that it might have referred to a specific celestial body (perhaps Venus) due to the existence of a more generic term for “star” in most Semitic languages, which must have developed very early (p. 24). Thus the emergence of Ishtar would essentially parallel the emergence of Shamash, whose name is in origin the ordinary noun for the sun (p. 25). This seems like an elegant solution, but as pointed out by other researchers some of the arguments employed might be shaky, so it’s best to remain cautious about quoting Wilson-Wright’s conclusions as fact, even if they are more sound than some of the older, largely forgotten, proposals (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 40-41).

In addition to uncertainties pertaining to the meaning of the root ˤṯtr, it’s also unclear why the name Ishtar starts with an i in Akkadian, considering cognate names of deities from other cultures fairly consistently start with an a. The early Akkadian form Eštar isn’t a mystery - it reflects a broader pattern of phonetic shifts in this language, and as such requires no separate inquiry, but the subsequent shift from e to i is almost unparalleled. Wilson-Wright suggests that it might have been the result of contamination with Inanna, which seems quite compelling to me given that by the second millennium BCE the names had already been interchangeable for centuries (Athtart…, p. 18).

As for grammatical gender, in Akkadian (as well as in the only other language from the East Semitic branch, Eblaite), the theonym Ishtar lacks a feminine suffix but consistently functions as grammatically feminine nonetheless. I got a somewhat confusing ask recently, which I assume was the result of misinterpretation of this information as applying to the gender of the bearer of the name as opposed to just grammatical gender of the name itself:

Occasional confusion might stem from the fact that in the languages from the West Semitic family (like ex. Ugaritic or Phoenician) there’s no universal pattern - in some of them the situation looks like in Akkadian, in some cognates without the feminine suffix refer to a male deity, furthermore goddesses with names which are cognate but have a feminine suffix (-t; ex. Ugaritic Ashtart) added are attested (Athtart…, p. 16). 

In Akkadian a form with a -t suffix (ištart) doesn’t appear as a theonym, only as the generic word, “goddess” - and it seems to have a distinct etymology, with the -t as a leftover from plural ištarātu (Athtart…, p. 18). The oldest instances of a derivative of the theonym Ishtar being used as an ordinary noun, dated to the Old Babylonian period (c. 1800 BCE), spell it as ištarum, without such a suffix (Goddess in Context…, p. 80). As a side note, it’s worth pointing out that both obsolete vintage translations and dubious sources, chiefly online, are essentially unaware of the existence of any version of this noun, which leads to propagation of incorrect claims about equation of deities (Goddesses in Context…, p. 82).

It has been argued that a further form with the -t suffix, “Ishtarat”, might appear in Early Dynastic texts from Mari, but this might actually be a misreading. This has been originally suggested by Manfred Krebernik all the way back in 1984. He concluded the name seems to actually be ba-sùr-ra-at (Baśśurat; something like “announcer of good news”; Zur Lesung einiger frühdynastischer Inschriften aus Mari, p. 165). Other researchers recently resurrected this proposal (Gianni Marchesi and Nicolo Marchetti, Royal Statuary of Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, p. 228; accepted by Dominique Charpin in a review of their work as well). I feel it’s important to point out that nothing really suggested that the alleged “Ishtarat” had much to do with Ishtar (or Ashtart, for that matter) in the first place. The closest thing to any theological information in the two brief inscriptions she appears in is that she is listed alongside the personified river ordeal, Id, in one of them. Marchesi and Marchetti suggest they form a couple (Royal Statuary…, p. 228); in absence of other evidence I feel caution is necessary. I’m generally wary of asserting deities who appear together once in an oath, greeting or dedicatory formula are necessarily a couple when there is no supplementary evidence. Steve A. Wiggins illustrated this issue well when he rhetorically asked if we should treat Christian saints the same way, which would lead to quite thrilling conclusions in cases like the numerous churches named jointly after St. Andrew and St. George and so on (A Reassessment of Asherah With Further Considerations of the Goddess, p. 101).

Even without Ishtarat, the Mariote evidence remains quite significant for the current topic, though. There’s a handful of third millennium attestations of a deity sometimes referred to as “male Ishtar” (logographically INANNA.NITA; there’s no ambiguity thanks to the second logogram) in modern publications - mostly from Mari. The problem is that this is most likely a forerunner of Ugaritic Attar, as opposed to a male form of the deity of Uruk/Zabalam/Akkad/you get the idea (Mark S. Smith, The God Athtar in the Ancient Near East and His Place in KTU 1.6 I, esp. p. 629; note that the deity with the epithet Sarbat is, as far as I know, generally identified as female though). 

Ultimately there is no strong evidence for Attar being associated with Inanna (his Mesopotamian counterpart in the trilingual list from Ugarit is Lugal-Marada) or even with Ashtart (Smith tentatively proposes the two were associated - The God Athtar.., p. 631 - but more recently in ‛Athtart in Late Bronze Age Syrian Texts he ruled it out, p. 36-37) so he’s not relevant at all to this topic. Cognate name =/= related deity, least you want to argue Zeus is actually Tyr; the similarly firmly male South Arabian ˤAṯtar is even less relevant (Athtart. The Transmission and Transformation…, p. 13). Smith goes as far as speculating the male cognates might have been a secondary development, which would render them even more irrelevant to this discussion (‛Athtart in Late…, p. 35).

There are also three Old Akkadian names which might refer to a masculine deity based on the form of the other element (Eštar-damqa, “E. is good”, Eštar-muti “E. is my husband”, and Eštar-pāliq, “E. is a harp”), but they’re an outlier and according to Wilson-Wright might be irrelevant for the discussion of the gender of Ishtar and instead refer to a deity with a cognate name from outside Mesopotamia (Athtart. The Transmission and Transformation…, p. 22). 

There’s also a possible isolated piece of evidence for a masculine deity with a cognate name in Ebla. Eblaite texts fairly consistently indicate that Inanna’s local counterpart Ašdar was a female deity. In addition to the equivalence between them attested in a lexical list, her main epithet, Labutu (“lioness”) indicates she was a feminine figure. However, Alfonso Archi argues that in a single case the name seems to indicate a god, as they are followed by an otherwise unattested “spouse” (DAM-sù), Datinu (Išḫara and Aštar at Ebla: Some Definitions, p. 16). The logic behind this is unclear to me and no subsequent publications offer any explanations so far. It might be worth noting that the Eblaite pantheon seemingly was able to accommodate two sun deities, one male and one female, so perhaps this is a similar situation.

It should also be noted that the femininity of Ishtar despite the lack of a feminine suffix in her name is not entirely unparalleled - in addition to Ebla, in areas like the Middle Euphrates deities with cognate names without the -t suffix might not necessarily be masculine, even when they start with a- and not i- like in Akkadian. In some cases the matter cannot be solved at all - there is no evidence regarding the gender of Aštar of the Stars (aš-tar MUL) from Emar, for instance. Meanwhile Aštar of Ḫaši and Aštar-ṣarbat (“poplar Aštar”) from the same site are evidently feminine (Athtart. The Transmission and Transformation…, p. 106). At least in the last case that’s because the name actually goes back to the Akkadian form, though (p. 85).

To sum up: despite some minor uncertainties pertaining to the Akkadian name, there’s no strong reason to suspect that any greater degree of ambiguity is built into either Inanna or Ishtar - at least as far as the names alone go. The latter was even seen as sufficiently feminine coded to serve as the basis for a generic designation of goddesses. 

Obviously, there is more to a deity than just the sum of the meanings of their names. For this reason, to properly evaluate what was up with Inanna’s gender it will be necessary to look into her three main roles: these of a war deity, personification of Venus and love deity.

Masculinity, heroism and maledictory genderbening: the warlike Inanna

An Old Babylonian plaque depicting armed Inanna (wikimedia commons)

Martial first, marital second?

War and other related affairs will be the first sphere of Inanna’s activity I’ll look into, since it feels like it’s the one least acknowledged online and in various questionable publications. Ilona Zsolnay points out that this even extends to serious scholarship to a degree, and that as a result her military side is arguably understudied (Ištar, Goddess of War, Pacifier of Kings: An Analysis of Ištar’s Martial Role in the Maledictory Sections of the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions, p. 389). The oldest direct evidence for the warlike role of Inanna are Early Dynastic theophoric names such as Inanna-ursag, “Inanna is a warrior”. Further examples are provided by a variety of both Sumerian and Akkadian sources from across the second half of the third millennium BCE. This means it’s actually slightly older than the first evidence for an association with love and eroticism, which can only be dated with certainty to the Old Akkadian period when it is directly mentioned for the first time, specifically in love incantations (Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Inanna and Ishtar in the Babylonian World, p. 336).

Deities associated with combat were anything but uncommon in Mesopotamia. There was no singular war god - Ninurta, Nergal, Zababa, Ilaba, Tishpak and an entire host of other figures, some recognized all across the region, some limited to one specific area or even just a single city, shared a warlike disposition. Naturally, the details could vary - Ninurta was essentially an avenger restoring order disturbed by supernatural threats, Nergal was a war god because he was associated with just about anything pertaining to inflicting death, and so on. 

All the examples I’ve listed are male, but similar roles are also attested for multiple goddesses, not just Inanna. Those include closely related deities like Annunitum or Belet-ekallim, most of her foreign counterparts, the astral deity Ninisanna (more on this figure later), but also firmly independent examples like Ninisina and the Middle Euphrates slash Ugaritic Anat (Ilona Zsolnay, Do Divine Structures of Gender Mirror Mortal Structures of Gender?, p. 114).

The god list An = Anum preserves a whole series of epithets affirming Inanna’s warlike character - Ninugnim, “lady of the army”; Ninšenšena, “lady of battle”; Ninmea, “lady of combat”; Ninintena, “lady of warriorhood” (tablet IV, lines 20-23; Wilfred G. Lambert and Ryan D. Winters, An = Anum and Related Lists, p.162). It is also well represented in literary texts. She is a “destroyer of lands” (kurgulgul) in Ninmesharra, for instance (Markham J. Geller, The Free Library Inanna Prism Reconsidered, p. 93).

At least some of the terms employed to describe Inanna in other literary compositions were strongly masculine-coded, if not outright masculine. The poem Agušaya characterizes her as possessing “manliness” (zikrūtu) and “heroism” (eṭlūtu; this word can also refer to youthful masculinity, see Analyzing Constructs…, p. 471) and calls her a “hero” (qurādu). Another example, a hymn dated to the reign of Third Dynasty of Ur or First Dynasty of Isin opens with an incredibly memorable line - “O returning manly hero, Inanna the lady (...)” (or, to follow Thorkild Jacobsen’s older translation, which involves some gap filling - “O you Amazon, queen—from days of yore, paladin, hero, soldier”; The Free Library… p. 93). 

A little bit of context is necessary here: while “heroism” might seem neutral to at least some modern readers, in ancient Mesopotamia it was seen as a masculine trait (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 392-393). It’s worth noting that eṭlūtum, which you’ve seen translated as “heroism” above can be translated in other context as  “youthful masculinity” (Analyzing Constructs…, p. 471). On the other hand, while zikrūtu is derived from zikāru, “male”, it might refer both straightforwardly to masculinity and more abstractly to heroism (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 397).

However, the same hymn which calls Inanna a “manly hero” refers to her with a variety of feminine titles like nugig. There’s even an Emesal gašan (“lady”) in there, you really can’t get much more feminine than that (The Free Library… p.  89). On top of that, about a half of the composition is a fairly standard Dumuzi romance routine (The Free Library… p. 90-91; more on what that entails later, for now it will suffice to say that not gender nonconformity). 

This is a recurring pattern, arguably - Agušaya, where masculine traits are attributed to Inanna over and over again, still firmly refers to her as a feminine figure (“daughter”, “goddess”, “queen”, “princess”, “mistress”, “lioness” and so on; Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: an Anthology of Akkadian Literature, p. 160 and passim). In other words, the assignment of a clearly masculine sphere of activity and titles related to it doesn’t really mean Inanna is not presented as feminine in the same compositions.

How to explain this phenomenon? In Mesopotamian thought both femininity and masculinity were understood as me, ie. divinely ordained principles regulating the functioning of the cosmos. In modern terms, these labels as they were used in literary texts arguably had more to do with gender and gender roles than strictly speaking with biological sex (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 391-392). Ilona Zsolnay on this basis concludes that Inanna, while demonstrably regarded as a feminine figure, took on a masculine role in military context (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 401). This is hardly an uncommon view in scholarship (The Free Library…, p. 93; On Language…, p. 243). 

In other words, it can be argued that when the lyrical voice in Agušaya declares that “there is a certain hero, she is unique” (i-ba-aš-ši iš-ta-ta qú-ra-du; Before the Muses…, p. 98) the unique quality is, essentially, that Inanna fulfills a strongly masculine coded role - that of a “hero”, understood as a youthful, aggressive masculine figure - despite being female.

It should be noted that the ideal image of a person characterized by youthful masculinity went beyond just warfare, or abstract heroic adventures, though. The Song of the Hoe indicates that willingness to perform manual work in the fields was yet another aspect of it (Ilona Zsolnay, Gender and Sexuality: Ancient Near East, p. 277). This, as far as I know, was never attributed to Inanna.

Furthermore, the sort of youthful, aggressive masculinity we’re talking about here was regarded as something fleeting and temporary for the most part (at least when it came to humans; deities are obviously a very different story), and a very different image of male gender roles emerges from texts such as Instruction of Shuruppak, which extol a peaceful, reserved demeanor and the ability to provide for one’s family as masculine virtues instead (Gender and Sexuality…, p. 277-278). It might be worth pointing out that Sumerian outright uses two different terms to designate “youthful” (namguruš) and “senior” (namabba) masculinity (Gender and Sexuality…, p. 275); the general term for masculinity, namnitah, is incredibly rare in comparison  (Gender and Sexuality…, p. 276-277).

It needs to be pointed out that a further Sumerian term sometimes translated as “manliness” -  šul, which occurs for example in the hymn mentioned above - might actually be gender neutral; in addition to being used to describe mortal young men and Inanna, it was also applied as an epithet to the goddess Bau, who demonstrably was not regarded as a masculine figure; she didn’t even share Inanna’s warlike character (Analyzing Constructs…, p. 471). Perhaps the original nuance simply escapes us - could it be that šul was not strictly speaking masculinity, but some more abstract quality which was simply more commonly associated with men?

In any case, it’s hard to argue that Inanna really encompasses the entire concept of masculinity as the Mesopotamians understood it. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that she was portrayed as responsible for - and enthusiastically engaged in - spheres of activity which were seen as firmly masculine, and could accordingly be described with terms associated with them. Therefore, it would be more than suitable to describe her as gender nonconforming - at least when she was specifically portrayed as warlike. 

Perhaps Dennis Pardee was onto something when he completely sincerely described Anat, who despite being firmly a female figure similarly engaged in masculine pursuits (not only war, but also hunting) as a “tomboy goddess” (Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, p. 274). 

These observations only remain firmly correct as long as we assume that gender roles are a concept fully applicable to deities, of course - I’ll explore in more detail later whether this was necessarily true.

Royal curses and legal loopholes

A different side of Inanna as a war deity which nonetheless still has a lot to do with the topic of this article comes to the fore in curse formulas from royal inscriptions. Their contents are not quite as straightforward as imploring her to personally intervene on the battlefield. Rather, she was supposed to make the enemy unable to partake in warfare properly (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 390). Investigating how this process was imagined will shed additional light on how the Mesopotamians viewed masculinity, and especially the intersection between masculinity and military affairs.

The formulas under discussion start to appear in the second half of the second millennium BCE, with the earliest example identified in an inscription of the Middle Assyrian king Tukultī-Ninurta I (Gina Konstantopoulos, My Men Have Become Women, and My Women Men: Gender, Identity, and Cursing in Mesopotamia, p. 363).  He implored the goddess to punish his enemies by turning them into women (zikrūssu sinnisāniš) - or rather, by turning their masculinity into femininity, or at the very least some sort of non-masculine quality. The first option was the conventional translation for a while, but sinništu would be used instead of the much more uncommon sinnišānu if it was that straightforward. Interpreting it as “femininity” would parallel the use of zikrūti, “masculinity”, in place of zikaru, “man”. 

There are two further possible alternatives, which I find less plausible myself, but which nonetheless need to be discussed. One is that sinnišānu designated a specific class of women. Furthermore, there is also some evidence - lexical list entry from ḪAR.GUD, to be specific -  that sinnisānu might have been a synonym of assinnu, a type of undeniably AMAB, but possibly gender nonconforming, cultic performer (in older literature erroneously translated as “eunuch” despite lack of evidence; the second most beloved vintage baseless translation for any cultic terms after “sacred prostitute”, an invention of Herodotus), in which case the curse would involve something like “changing his masculinity in the manner of a sinnisānu” (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 394-396). However, Zsolnay herself subsequently published a detailed study of the assinnu, The Misconstrued Role of the assinnu in Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy, which casts her earlier proposal into doubt, as the perception of the assinnu as a figure lacking conventional masculinity might be erroneous. I’ll return to this point later. For now, it will suffice to say that on grammatical grounds and due to parallels in other similar maledictions, “masculinity into femininity” seems to be the most straightforward to me in this case.

The “genderbending” tends to be mentioned alongside the destruction of one’s weapons (My Men Have…, p. 363). This is not accidental - martial prowess, “heroism” and even the ability to bear weapons were quintessential masculine qualities; a man deprived of his masculinity would inevitably be unable to possess them. The masculine coding of weaponry was so strong that an erection could be metaphorically compared to drawing a bow (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 395).

Zsolnay points out the reversal of gender in curses is also coupled with other reversals: Inanna is also supposed to “establish” (liškun) the defeat (abikti) of the target of the curses - a future king who fails to uphold his duties - which constitutes a reversal of an idiom common in royal inscriptions celebrating victory (abikti iškun). The potential monarch will also be unable to face the enemy as a result of her intervention - yet again a reversal of a mainstay of royal declarations. The majesty and heroism of a king were supposed to scare enemies, who would inevitably prostrate themselves when faced by him on the battlefield (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 396-397). 

It is safe to say the goal of invoking Inanna in the discussed formulas was to render the target powerless. (Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 396; My Men Have…, p. 366). Furthermore, they evoke a fear widespread in cuneiform sources, that of the loss of potency, which sometimes took forms akin to Koro syndrome or the infamous penis theft passages from Malleus Maleficarum (My Men Have…, p. 367). It is worth noting that male impotence could specifically be described as being “like a woman” (kīma sinništi/GIM SAL; Ištar, Goddess of War…, p. 395).

Gina Konstantopoulos argues that references to Inanna “genderbening” others occur in a different context in a variety of literary texts, for example in the Epic of Erra, where they’re only meant to highlight the extent of her supernatural ability. She also suggests that more general references to swapping left and right sides around, for example in Enki and the World Order, are further examples, as they “echo(...) the language of birth incantations” which ritually assigned the gender role to a child (My Men Have…, p. 368). She also sees the passage from the Epic of Gilgamesh describing the fates of various individuals who crossed her path and ended up transformed into animals as a result as a more distant parallel of the curse formulas (My Men Have…, p. 369). However, it needs to be pointed out this sort of shapeshifting is almost unparalleled in Mesopotamian literature (Frans Wiggermann, Hybrid creatures A. Philological. In Mesopotamia, p. 237), and none of the few examples involve a change of gender. The fact that the "genderbending" passages generally reflect a fear of loss of agency (especially on the battlefield) or potency, and by extension of independence tied to masculine gender roles, explains why they virtually never describe the opposite scenario, a mortal woman being placed in a masculine role through supernatural means as punishment (My Men Have…, p. 370). It might be worth pointing out that a long sequence of seemingly contradictory duties involving reversals is also ascribed to Inanna in a particularly complex Old Babylonian hymn (Michael P. Streck, Nathan Wasserman, The Man is Like a Woman, the Maiden is a Young Man. A new edition of Ištar-Louvre (Tab. I-II), p. 2-3). It also contains a rare case of bestowing masculine qualities upon women: “the man is like a woman, the maiden is like a young man” (zikrum sinništeš ardatu eṭel; The Man is Like…, p. 5). However, the context is not identical to the “genderbening” curses. The text is agreed to describe a performance during a specific festival. Other passages explicitly refer to crossdressing and rituals themed around reversal (šubalkutma šipru, "behavior is turned upside down"; The Man is Like…, p. 6). Furthermore, grammatical forms of verbs do not indicate a full reversal of gender (The Man is Like…, p. 31). Overall, I agree with Timothy D. Leonard’s cautious remark that in this context only religiously motivated temporary reversal of gender roles occurs, and we cannot use the passage to make far reaching conclusions about the participants’ identity (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 298).

It’s important to bear in mind that a performance involving crossdressing won’t necessarily involve people who are otherwise gender nonconforming, and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the sexuality of the performer. While I typically avoid bringing up parallels from other cultures and time periods as evidence, I feel like this is illustrated quite well by the case of shirabyōshi, a type of female performer popular in Japan roughly from the second half of the Heian period to the late Kamakura period.

A 20th century depiction of a shirabyōshi (wikimedia commons)

They performed essentially in male formal wear, and with swords at their waists; their performance was outright called a “male dance” (Roberta Strippoli, Dancer, Nun, Ghost, Goddess. The Legend of Giō and Hotoke in Japanese Literature, Theater, Visual Arts, and Cultural Heritage, p. 28). Genpei jōsuiki nonetheless states that famous shirabyōshi were essentially the Japanese answer to the most famous historical Chinese beauties like Wang Zhaojun or Yang Guifei (Dancer, Nun…, p. 27-28). In other words, while the shirabyōshi crossdressed, they were simultaneously held to be paragons of femininity.

Putting crossdressing aside, it’s worth noting women taking masculine roles are additionally attested in legal context in ancient Mesopotamia, though only in an incredibly specific scenario. A man who lacked male heirs could essentially legally declare his daughter a son, so that she would be able to have the privileges as a man would with regards to inheritance. For example, in a text from Emar a certain mr. Aḫu-ṭāb formally made his daughter Alnašuwa his heir due to having no other descendants, and explained that as a result she will have to be “both male and female” (NITA ù MUNUS) - effectively both a son and a daughter - to keep the process legitimate. Once Alnašuwa got married, her newfound status as a son of her father was legally transferred to her husband, though. Evidently no supernatural powers were involved at any stage, only an uncommon, but fully legitimate, legal procedure (My Men Have…, p. 370-372). It should be noted that when male by proxy, Alnašuwa was explicitly not expected to perform any military roles - her father only placed such an exception on potential grandsons (My Men Have…, p. 370). Therefore, the temporary masculine role she was granted was arguably not the same as the sort of masculinity curses were supposed to take away, or the sort Inanna could claim for herself to a degree.

Luminous beards and genderfluid planets: the astral Inanna (and her peers)

A standard Mesopotamian depiction of the planet Venus (Dilbat) on a late Kassite boundary stone (wikimedia commons)

Male in the morning, female in the evening (or the other way round)?

While the inquiry into Inanna’s military aspect revealed a fair amount of evidence for gender nonconformity, it would be disingenuous on my part to end the article on just that. A slightly different phenomenon is documented with regards to her astral side - or perhaps with regards to the astral side of multiple deities, to be more precise.

To begin with, in Mesopotamian astrology Venus (Dilbat) was one of the two astral bodies which were described as possessing two genders, the other being Mercury (Erica Reiner, Astral Magic in Babylonia, p. 6; interestingly, it doesn’t seem any deity associated with Mercury acquired this characteristic unless you want to count a possible late case from outside Mesopotamia). The primary sources indicate that this reflected the fact Venus is both the morning star and the evening star, though there was no agreement between ancient astronomers which one of them was feminine and which masculine (Ulla Koch-Westenholz, Mesopotamian Astrology. An Introduction to Babylonian and Assyrian Celestial Divination, p. 40). We even have a case of a single astrologer, a certain Nabû-ahhe-eriba, alternating between both options in his personal letters (p. 126). It needs to be pointed out that while some interest in stars and planets might already be attested in Early Dynastic sources, its scope was evidently quite limited and astrology didn’t develop yet (Mesopotamian Astrology…, p. 32). No astrological texts predate the Old Babylonian period, and most of the early ones are preoccupied with the moon (p. 36-37), though the earliest evidence for astrological interest in Venus are roughly contemporary with them (p. 40). Astronomical observations of this planet were certainly already conducted for divinatory purposes during the reign of Ammisaduqa, and by the seventh century BCE experts were well familiar with its cycle and made predictions on this basis (p. 126).

Inanna’s association with Venus predates the dawn of astrology by well over a millennium. It likely goes back all the way up to the Uruk period - if not earlier, but that sort of speculation is moot because you can’t talk about Mesopotamian theology with no textual sources, and these are fundamentally not something available before the advent of writing. The earliest evidence are archaic administrative texts which separately record offerings for Inanna hud, “Inanna the morning” and Inanna sig, “Inanna the evening” (Inanna and Ishtar…, p. 334-335). However, it is impossible to tell if this was already reflected in any sort of ambiguity or fluidity of gender. It also needs to be noted the archaic text records two more epithets, Inanna NUN, possibly “princely Inanna” (p. 334; this is actually the single oldest one) and Inanna KUR, possibly a forerunner of later title ninkurkurra, “lady of the lands” (p. 335). Therefore, Inanna was arguably already more than just a deity associated with Venus.

It’s up for debate to which degree an astral body was seen as identical with the corresponding deity in later periods (Spencer J. Allen, The Splintered Divine. A Study of Ištar, Baal, and Yahweh Divine Names and Divine Multiplicity in the Ancient Near East, p. 41-42). There is evidence that Inanna and the planet Venus could be viewed as separate, similarly to how the moon observed in the sky could be treated as distinct from the moon god Sin (p. 40). The most commonly cited piece of evidence is that astrological texts fairly consistently employ the name Dilbat to refer to the planet instead of Inanna’s name or one of the logograms used to represent it, like the numeral 15 (p. 42).

Regardless of these concerns, one specific tidbit pertaining to astrological comments on Venus is held as particularly important for possible ambiguity or fluidity of Inanna’s gender, and even lead to arguments that masculine depictions might be out there: the planet can be described as bearded (Astral Magic…, p. 6). Omens attesting this are most notably listed in the compendium Iqqur īpuš (Erica Reiner, David Pingree, Babylonian Planetary Omens vol. 3, p. 10-11). it should be noted that the planet is referred to only as Dilbat in this context (see ex. Babylonian Planetary…, p. 105 for an example). I’m only aware of two texts where this feature is transferred to the corresponding deity: the syncretic hymn to Nanaya and Ashurbanipal’s hymn to Ishtar of Nineveh. Is the beard really a beard, though? Not necessarily, as it turns out.

The passage from the hymn of Ashurbanipal has been recently discussed by Takayoshi M. Oshima and Alison Acker Gruseke (She Walks in Beauty: an Iconographic Study of the Goddess in a Nimbus, p. 62-63). They point out that ultimately there are no certain iconographic representations of bearded Ishtar. There are a few proposed ones on cylinder seals but this is a minority position relying on doubtful exegesis of every strand of hair in sight; no example has anything resembling the “classic” Mesopotamian beard. I’ll return to this problem in a bit.

In any case, the authors of the aforementioned paper argue the key to interpreting the passage is the fact that the reference to the beard (or rather beards in the plural) occurs in an enumeration of strictly astral, luminous characteristics, like being “clothed in brilliance” (namrīrī ḫalāpu). Furthermore, they identify a parallel in the Great Hymn to Shamash: the rays of the sun are described as “beards” (ziqnāt), and occur in parallel with “splendor” (šalummatu) and “lights” (namrīrū). Therefore, they assume the “beard” might be a metaphorical term for a ray of light, rather than facial hair. This would match actually attested depictions - in the first millennium BCE, especially in Assyria, images of a goddess surrounded by rays of light or a large halo of sorts are very common.

A goddess surrounded by a halo on a Neo-Assyrian seal (wikimedia commons)

Perhaps most importantly, this interpretation is also confirmed by the astronomical texts which kickstarted the discussion. The phrase ziqna zaqānu, “to have a beard”, is explained multiple times as reflection of an unusual luminosity when applied to Venus. The authors additionally argue that it is possible the use of the term “beard” was originally tied to the triangular portions of the emblems of Inanna and her twin (which indeed represent the luminosity of Venus and the sun) to explain why a plurality of “beards” is relatively common in the discussed descriptions (p. 64).

As I said before, the second example is a hymn to Nanaya. It’s easily one of my favorite works of Mesopotamian literature, and a few years ago it kickstarted my interest in its “protagonist”, but tragically most of it is completely irrelevant to this article. The gist of it is fairly simple: the entire composition is written in first person, and in each strophe Nanaya claims the prerogatives of another deity before reasserting herself: “still I am Nanaya” (Goddesses in Context…, p. 116-117). The “borrowed” attributes vary from abstract cosmic powers to breast size. The deities they are linked with range from the most major members of the pantheon (Inanna, Gula, Ishara, Bau…) through spouses of major deities (Shala, Damkina…) to obscure oddities (Manzat, the personified rainbow); there’s even one who’s otherwise entirely unknown, Šuluḫḫītum (for a full table see Erica Reiner’s A Sumero-Akkadian Hymn of Nanâ, p. 232).

As expected, the strophe relevant to the current topic is the one focused on Inanna, in which Nanaya proudly exclaims “I have a beard (ziqna zaqānu) in Babylon”, in between claiming to have “heavy breasts in Daduni” (Reiner notes this is not actually an attested attribute of Inanna, and suggests the line might be a pun on the name of the city mentioned in it, Daduni, and the word dādu) and appropriating Inanna’s family tree for herself (A Sumero-Akkadian…, p. 233).

A possible late depiction of Nanaya (wikimedia commons)

It needs to be stressed that Nanaya’s gender shows no signs of ambiguity anywhere; quite the opposite, she was the “quintessence of womanhood“ (Olga Drewnowska-Rymarz, Mesopotamian Goddess Nanāja, p. 156). I would argue the most notable case of something along the lines of gender nonconformity in a source focused on her occurs in the sole known example of a love poem starring her and her sparsely attested Old Babylonian spouse Muati. 

Muati is asked to intercede with Nanaya on behalf of a petitioner (Before the Muses…, p. 160), which usually was the role performed of the wife of a major male deity (or by Ninshubur in Inanna’s case; Goddesses in Context…, p. 273). Sadly, despite recently surveying most publications mentioning Muati I haven’t found any substantial discussion of this unique passage, and I’m not aware of any parallels involving other couples where the wife was a more important deity than the husband (like Ninisina and Pabilsag).

A further issue for the beard passage is that Nanaya had no connection to Venus to speak of -  she could be described as luminous, but she was only compared to the sun, the moon, and unspecified stars (Mesopotamian Goddess Nanāja, p. 153-155).

Given that the hymn most likely dates to the early first millennium BCE (Goddesses in Context…, p. 116), yet another problem for the older interpretation is that the city of Babylon at this point in time is probably the single worst place for seeking any sort of gender ambiguity when it comes to Inanna.

After the end of the Kassite period, Babylon became the epicenter of Marduk-centric theological ventures which famously culminated in the composition of Enuma Elish. What is less well known is that as a part of the same process, attempts were made to essentially fuse Bēlet-Bābili (“lady of Babylon”) - the main (but not only) local form of Inanna, regarded as distinct from Inanna of Uruk (the “default” Inanna) - with Zarpanitu (The Pantheon…, p. 75-76). Zarpanitu was effectively the definition of an indistinct spouse of another deity - there’s not much to say about her character other than that she was Marduk’s wife (Goddesses in Context…, p. 92-93). Accordingly, it is hard to imagine that the contemporary “lady of Babylon” would be portrayed as bearded.

During the reign of Nabu-shuma-ishkun in the eighth century BCE an attempt to extend the new dogma to Inanna of Uruk was made, though this was evidently considered too much for contemporary audiences. Multiple sources display varying degrees of opposition to replacement of Inanna in the Eanna by a goddess who didn’t belong there, presumably either Zarpanitu or at the very least Bēlet-Bābili after “Zarpanituification” so severe she no longer bore a sufficient resemblance to her Urukuean colleague (The Pantheon…, p. 76-77). Inanna of Uruk was restored during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, who curiously affirmed that her temple was temporarily turned into the sanctuary of an “inappropriate goddess” (The Pantheon…, p. 131). However, the Marduk-centric ventures left a lasting negative impression in Uruk nonetheless, and in the long run lead to quite extreme reactions, culminating in the establishment of an active cult of Anu for the first time, but that’s another story (I might consider covering it in detail if there’s interest).

To go back to the hymn to Nanaya one last time, it’s interesting to note that a single copy seems to substitute ziqna zaqānu for zik-ra-[...], possibly a leftover of zikrāku, “manly”. Takayoshi M. Oshima and Alison Acker Gruseke presume this is only a scribal mistake, since this heavily damaged exemplar is rife with typos in general (She Walks…, p. 63), though I’m curious if perhaps a reference to the military character of Inanna herself or Annunitum was meant. This would line up with evidence from Babylon to a certain degree, since through the first millennium BCE Annunitum was worshiped there in her own temple (Goddesses in Context…, p. 105-106). However, in the light of what is known about this unique variant, it’s best to assume that it is indeed a typo and the hymn simply refers to luminosity. 

While no textual sources earlier (or later, for that matter) than the two hymns discussed above attribute a beard to Inanna (Zainab Bahrani, Women of Babylon. Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia, p. 182), the most commonly cited example of a seal with a supposedly bearded depiction is considerably earlier (Ur III, so roughly 2100 BCE, long before any references to “bearded Venus”). It comes from the Umma area judging from the name and title of its owner, a certain Lu-Igalima, a lumaḫ priest of Ninibgal (“lady of the [temple] Ibgal”, ie. Inanna’s temple in Umma). However, Julia M. Asher-Greve  points out that the beard is likely to be a strand of hair, since contemporary parallels supporting this interpretation are available, for example a seal of a priest of Inanna from Nippur, Lugalengardu. Furthermore, she notes that the seal cutter was seemingly inexperienced, since the detail is all around dodgy, for example Inanna’s foot seems to be merged with the head of the lion she stands on (Goddesses in Context…, p. 208). Looking at the two images side by side, I think this is a compelling argument, since the beard doesn’t really look like, well, a typical Mesopotamian beard, while the hairdo on the Nippur seal is indeed similar:

Both images are screencaps from Goddesses in Context, p. 403; reproduced here for educational purposes only.

While I think the beard-critical arguments are sound, this is not the only possible kind of depiction of Inanna argued to reflect the fluidity of gender attributed to the planet Venus.

Paul-Alain Beaulieu notes that an inscription of Nebuchadnezzar with a dedication to Inanna of Uruk she might be called both the lamassu, ie. “protective goddess”, of Uruk and šēdu, ie. “protective genius”, of Eanna; the latter is an invariably masculine term. However, it is not entirely clear if the lamassu and šēdu invoked here are both really a partially masculine Ishtar, since there’s a degree of ambiguity involved in the concept of protective deity or deities of a temple - while there’s evidence for outright identification with the main deity of a given house of worship, they could also be separate, though closely related, and Beaulieu ultimately remains uncertain which option is more plausible here (The Pantheon…, p. 137-138). He also points out that there’s some late evidence for apotropaic figures with two faces, male and female, which were supposed to represent a šēdu+lamassu pair, but rules out the possibility that these have anything to do with Ishtar, since two faces are virtually never her attribute (The Pantheon…, p. 137).  There is a single possible exception from this rule, but it’s an outlier so puzzling it’s hard to count it. A single Neo-Assyrian text from Nineveh (KAR 307) describes Ishtar of Nineveh (there is a reason why I abstain from using the name Inanna here, as you’ll see later) as four-eyed, which Beaulieu suggests might mean the deity had a male face and a female face. The same source also states that Ishtar of Nineveh is Tiamat and has “upper parts of Bel” and “lower parts of Ninlil”, though (The Pantheon…, p. 137), so it’s probably best not to think of it too much - Tiamat is demonstrably not a figure of much importance in general, let alone in the context of Inanna-centric considerations.

The same text has been interpreted differently by Wilfred G. Lambert. He concludes that it’s ultimately probably an esoteric Enuma Elish commentary and that it might have been cobbled together by a scribe from snippers of unrelated, contradictory sources (Babylonian Creation Myths, p. 245). If correct, this would disprove Beaulieu’s proposal, since the four eyes would simply reflect the description of Marduk (Bel) in EE (tablet I, line 55: “Four were his eyes, four his ears”). I lean towards Lambert’s interpretation myself; the reference to Tiamat is the strongest argument, outside EE and derived commentaries she was basically a non-entity. I’ll go back to the topic of Ishtar of Nineveh later, though - there is a slim possibility that two faces might really be meant, though this would take us further away from Inanna, all the way up to ancient Anatolia.

As a final curiosity it’s worth pointing out that while this is entirely unrelated to the discussed matter, KAR 307 is also the same text which (in)famously states Tiamat has the form of a dromedary. As odd as that sounds, it’s much easier to explain when you realize that the Akkadian term for this animal, when broken down to individual logograms, could be interpreted as “donkey of the sea” - and Tiamat’s name was derived from the ordinary Akkadian word “sea” (Babylonian Creation…, p. 246).

The Red Lady of Heaven, my king

While both the bearded and two faced Inannas are likely to be mirages, this doesn’t mean the dual gender of Venus was not reflected in the world of gods. The result was a bit more complex than the existence of a male Inanna, though.

In addition to being Inanna’s astral attribute, Venus simultaneously could be personified under the name Ninsianna. Ninsianna could be treated as a title of Inanna - this is attested for example in a hymn from the reign of Iddin-Dagan of Isin  - but unless explicitly stated, should be treated as a separate deity. This is evident especially in sources from Larsa, where the two were worshiped entirely separately from each other (Goddesses in Context…, p. 92).

Ninsianna’s name can be literally translated as “red lady of heaven” (Goddesses in Context…, p. 86), though as I already explained earlier, nin is actually gender neutral - “red lord of heaven” is theoretically equally valid. And, as a matter of fact, it is necessary to employ the latter translation in some cases - an inscription of Rim-Sin I refers to Ninsianna with the firmly masculine title lugal, “king” (Wolfgang Heimpel, Ninsiana, p. 488). 

It seems safe to say that in Ninsianna’s case we’re essentially dealing with a deity who truly was like Venus. Timothy D. Leonard stresses that while frequently employed in past scholarship, the labels “hermaphroditic” and “androgynous” do not describe the phenomenon accurately. What the sources actually present is a deity who switches between a male form and a female one (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 226). In other words, if we are to apply a contemporary label, it seems optimal to say Ninsianna was perceived as genderfluid.

Interestingly, though, it seems that Ninsianna’s gender varied by location as well (Goddesses in Context…, p. 92). The worship of feminine Ninsianna is attested for example in Nippur (Goddesses in Context…, p. 101) and Uruk (Goddesses in Context…, p. 126), masculine - in Sippar-Amnanum, Girsu and Ur (Ninsiana, p. 488-489). No study I went through speculated what the reasons behind this situation might have been. Was Ninsianna’s gender locally viewed as less flexible than the discussed theological texts indicate? Were specific sanctuaries dedicated only to a specific aspect of this deity - only the “morning” Ninsianna or “evening” Ninsianna? For the time being these questions must remain unanswered in most cases. 

There’s a single case where the preference for feminine Ninsianna was probably influenced by an unparalleled haphazard theological innovation, though - in Isin in the early second millennium BCE the local dynasty lost control over Uruk, and as a result access to royal legitimacy granted symbolically by Inanna. To remedy that, the tutelary goddess of their capital was furnished with similar qualifications through a leap of logic relying on one hand on the close association between Inanna and Ninsianna, and on the other on the phonetic (but not etymological) similarity between the names of Ninisina and Ninsianna (Goddesses in Context…, p. 86). As far as I know, this did not influence the perception of Ninisina’s gender in any shape or form, though.

An interesting extension of the phenomenon of Ninsianna’s gender is this deity’s association with an even more enigmatic figure, Kabta. Only two things can be established about Kabta with certainty: that they were an astral deity, and that they were associated in some way with Ninsianna; even their gender is uncertain (Wilfred G. Lambert, Kabta, p. 284).

It might be worth pointing out that as a result Kabta and Ninsianna seem to constitute the first case of a Mesopotamian deity of variable (Ninsianna) or uncertain (Kabta) gender being referred to with a neutral pronoun in an Assyriological publication - Ryan D. Winters’ commentary on their entries in a variety of god lists employs a singular they (An = Anum…, p. 34):

Wilfred G. Lambert argued that the two were spouses (Kabta, p. 284). More recently the same point has been made by Winters based on Kabta’s placement after Ninsianna in An = Anum, and directly before Dumuzi in an Old Babylonian forerunner of this list (An = Anum…, p. 22). However, I feel obliged to point out that An = Anum, which fairly consistently identifies spouses as such, does not actually specify the nature of the connection between the two. Once the enumeration of Ninsianna’s names finishes, the list simply switches to Kabta’s (An = Anum…, p. 170). 

In another god list, which is rather uncreatively referred to as “shorter An = Anum” due to sharing the first line with its more famous “relative” but lacking its sheer scope, names of Kabta are listed among designations for Inanna’s astral forms, which would have interesting implications for the nature of the supposed relationship between them and Ninsianna (An = Anum…, p. 34). Furthermore, as noted by Jeremiah Peterson, both of them, as well as Kabta’s alternate name Maḫdianna and a further astral deity, Timua, are also glossed as Ištar kakkabi - in this case according to him likely a generic moniker “goddess of the star” as opposed to “Ishtar of the star” - in a variety of lexical lists (God Lists from Old Babylonian Nippur, p. 58). 

In the light of the somewhat confusing evidence summarized above, further inquiries into both Kabta’s character and the nature of the connection between them and Ninsianna are definitely necessary. Assuming that they were spouses, how did theologians who adhered to this view deal with them also being treated as two manifestations of one being instead (I suppose you could easily put a romantic spin on that, to be fair)? Did Kabta’s gender change alongside Ninsianna’s, or perhaps following a different scheme, or was this a characteristic they lacked? Unless new sources emerge, this sadly must remain the domain of speculation.

Ninsianna’s fluid gender also has to be taken into account while discussing one further deity, Pinikir. The discovery of a fragmentary god list in Emar made it possible to establish the latter was regarded as the Hurrian equivalent of the former (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 224; note that there seems to be a typo here, the list is identified as An = Anum but it’s actually the Weidner god list). This deity similarly was understood as a personification of Venus (Piotr Taracha, Religions of Second Millennium Anatolia, p. 99) and was in a certain capacity associated with Inanna - however, as it will become evident pretty quickly these weren’t the only analogies with Ninsianna.

Despite appearing in Emar in Hurrian context, Pinikir actually originated to the east of Mesopotamia, in Elam (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 223). Her name cannot yet be fully explained due to imperfect understanding of Elamite, but it is clear that the suffix -kir is feminine and means “goddess” (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 237; cf. the not particularly creatively named Kiririsha, “great goddess”). Sources from Anatolia recognize Pinikir as an Elamite deity, though direct transfer from one end of the “cuneiform world” to the other is unlikely (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 236). Most likely, Hurrians received Pinikir through Mesopotamian intermediaries in the late third or early second millennium BCE, and later introduced this deity further west (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 237). We know Mesopotamians were aware of her thanks to the god list Anšar = Anum, where the name occurs among what may or may not be an enumeration of deities regarded as Inanna’s foreign counterparts (An = Anum…, p. 36). For the time being it is not possible to track this process directly, though - it’s all educated guesswork.

While as far as I am aware none of the few Elamite sources dealing with Pinikir provide much theological information about her, and none hint at her gender being anything but feminine, Hurro-Hittite texts from Anatolia indicate that at least in this context, like Ninsianna in Mesopotamia, she came to be seen as a genderfluid deity, sometimes counted among gods, sometimes among goddesses (Gary Beckman, The Goddess Pirinkir and her Ritual from Ḫattuša (CTH 644), p. 25). Firmly feminine Pinikir occurs in a ritual text (KUB 34.102) which refers to her in Hurrian as Allai-Pinikir, “lady Pinikir”; interestingly this is the only case where she is provided with an epithet in any Anatolian source (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 211). However, there are examples of ritual texts where Pinikir is listed among male deities (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 229). He is also depicted in the procession of gods in the famous Yazilikaya sanctuary in a rather striking attire:

I know, I know, the state of preservation leaves much to be desired (wikimedia commons) This isn’t just any masculine clothing - the outfit is only shared with two other figures depicted in this sanctuary, the sun god Shimige and the Hittite king (The Goddess Pirinkir…, p. 25-26):

Shimige (left; wikimedia commons) and the king (right; also wikimedia commons)

Piotr Taracha argues that it reflects the attire worn by the Hittite king when he fulfilled his religious duties (Religions of…, p. 89); Pinikir’s isn’t identical - it’s only knee length, like the more standard masculine garments - but the skullcap is pretty clearly the same. He is also winged, which is a trait only shared with the moon god and one more figure (more on them in a bit), and likely reflects celestial associations (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 211). All the same traits are also preserved on a small figurine of Pinikir from the collection of the MET:

A much better preserved masculine Pinikir (MET)

It’s therefore probably safe to say that the male form had a fairly consistent iconography, which furthermore was patterned on what probably was an archetypal image of masculinity to Hurro-Hittite audiences. The king, whose appearance is reflected in Pinikir’s iconography, was, after all, supposed to be not just any man, but rather the foremost example of idealized masculinity (Mary R. Bachvarova, Wisdom of Former Days: The Manly Hittite King and Foolish Kumarbi, Father of the Gods, p. 83-84).

Since we started this section with beards, we may as well end with them - I feel obliged to point out that no matter how clearly described as masculine, neither Ninsianna nor Pinikir were ever described (let alone depicted) as bearded. 

It is difficult for me to estimate to which degree the information about the genderfluidity of Ninsianna and Pinikir can be used to elucidate in which way the association with Venus influenced the perception of Inanna’s gender. However, it seems safe to say the focus on secondary physical characteristics made some authors miss the forest for the trees. I’ll leave it as an open question whether Inanna could be interpreted similarly to her even more Venusian peers, but I’m fairly sure that a metaphorical beard is unlikely to have anything to do with the answer.

Excursus: “the masculinity and femininity of Shaushka”, or when an Ishtar is not Ishtar

Bringing up the masculine Pinikir, and the matter of possible genderfluidity of deities in Mesopotamia and nearby areas, makes it necessary to also discuss Shaushka. The two of them appear mere two lines apart in Anšar = Anum  (An = Anum…, p. 36), though they were not closely associated with each other - rather, they were both deities associated with Inanna who happened to belong to the same cultural milieu.

Mx. Worldwide: the transmission of Shaushka across the cuneiform world

Shaushka was originally the tutelary deity of Nineveh, but the attestations span almost the entire “cuneiform world” - from Nineveh in the north to Lagash in the south, from Hattusa in the west, through Ugarit and various inland Syrian cities all the way up to Arrapha in the east. There are simply too many of them to cover everything here.

The oldest known reference to Shaushka (which doubles as the first reference to the city of Nineveh) occurs in a text from the Ur III period. It’s not very thrilling - it’s only an administrative text mentioning the offering of a sheep made on behalf of the king of the Ur III state (Gary Beckman, Ištar of Nineveh Reconsidered, p. 1). The earliest sources render the name as Shausha; the infix -k- which only starts to appear consistently later on is presumed to be an honorific, or less plausibly a diminutive (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 55-56). Either way, it is agreed it can be translated simply as “the great one” (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 56) - a pretty apt description of its bearer.

Ur III attestations of Shaushka are sparse otherwise: a textile offering in Umma (possibly a garment for a statue), a handful of theophoric names like Ur-Shausha and Geme-Shausha in Lagash, and that’s basically it (Tonia Sharlach, Foreign Influences on the Religion of the Ur III Court, p. 106). Still, it’s probably safe to say it’s one of the examples of a broader pattern of interest in Hurrian religion evident in the courtly documents from this period, and in the appointment of a number of Hurrian diviners to relatively prestigious positions. Whether such experts might have influenced the introduction of Shaushka and other Hurrian deities who entered lower Mesopotamia roughly at the same time (for example Allani from Zimudar or Shuwala from Mardaman) remains an open question (Foreign Influences…, p. 111-114).

A degree of equivalence between Shaushka and Inanna was already recognized in the early second millennium BCE, as evidenced by a tablet from the northern site of Shusharra dated to the reign of Shamshi-Adad which records an offering made to “Ishtar of Nineveh” (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 58). However, it might have happened as early as half a millennium earlier, during the Sargonic period - Gary Beckman suggests the identification between the two might have initially occurred simply due to the importance assigned to Inanna by rulers of the Akkadian Empire (Ištar of Nineveh…, p. 2). 

Furthermore, a number of later Mesopotamian lexical lists label Shaushka as “Ishtar of Subartu” - a common designation for the core Hurrian areas (Ištar of Nineveh…, p. 2). Meanwhile, Hurrians and cultures influenced by them used the name Ishtar as a logogram to represent Shaushka (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 46). Furthermore, they placed Shaushka in Uruk in an adaptation of the Epic of Gilgamesh (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 125). One is forced to wonder if perhaps from the Hurrian interpreter’s perspective Inanna was some sort of foreign Shaushka ersatz, not the other way around.

Despite Shaushka’s origin in the Hurrien milieu of northernmost part of Mesopotamia, the bulk of attestations actually come from Hittite Anatolia (Ištar of Nineveh…, p. 2). Kizzuwatna, a kingdom in southeastern Anatolia, was the middleman in this transmission (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 95). The earliest evidence for Hittite reception of Shaushka is an oracle text from either the late fifteenth or early fourteenth century BCE (Ištar in Ḫatti, p. 84). However, save for the capital, Hattusa, no major cities were ever identified as cult centers of this deity, and they were seemingly worshiped largely within the southern and eastern periphery of the Hittite empire (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 94). Most of the ritual texts Shaushka appears in accordingly appear to have Kizzuwatnean, or at least broadly Hurrian, background (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 87).

Is non-astral genderfluidity possible, or what’s up with Shaushka’s gender?

Probably the most fascinating aspect of Shaushka’s character is the apparent coexistence of a female and a male form of this deity. The best known example of this phenomenon are the Yazilikaya reliefs, where a masculine form, with unique attributes including a robe leaving one leg exposed and wings, marches with the gods (with the handmaidens Ninatta and Kulitta - more on them later - in tow) while a caption accompanying a damaged relief indicates a feminine one was originally depicted in the procession of identically depicted goddesses (The Splintered Divine…, p. 75).

Masculine Shaushka (right) accompanied by Ninatta and Kulitta (wikimedia commons)

A restoration of the procession of goddesses, including feminine Shaushka (wikimedia commons)

A number of epithets applied to Shaushka were similarly explicitly feminine, for instance Hurrian “lady of Nineveh” (allai Ninuwawa) and Hittite “woman of that which is repeatedly spoken” (taršikantaš MUNUS-aš), implicity something like “woman of incantations” (Ištar of Nineveh…, p. 5); magic was apparently understood as a particular competence of this deity (Ištar of Nineveh…, p. 6). There is even a singular case of an incantation being explicitly attributed to Shaushka (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 98). 

Literary texts, chiefly myths from the so-called Kumarbi cycle, generally portray Shaushka as feminine too, and more as a love deity (to be precise, as something along the lines of a heroic equivalent of a femme fatale) rather than as a warlike one (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 85). Mary R. Bachvarova tentatively suggests that a reference to possibly masculine Shaushka might be present in the first of its parts, Song of Going Forth (also known as Song of Kumarbi), which mentions a deity of uncertain gender designated by the logogram KA.ZAL, “powerful”, which she argues has the same meaning as Shaushka’s name (Wisdom of Former…; p. 95 for the text itself, p. 106 for commentary). However, I’m not aware of any subsequent studies adopting this view.

Regardless of the contents of the literary texts available to us presently, Shaushka is explicitly counted among male deities in CTH 712. The enumeration in this ritual text also includes the “femininity and masculinity” of this deity. The male form of Pinikir is there too, though without a separate entry dedicated to any of his attributes or characteristics (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 219). Another example might be less direct: two descriptions of depictions of Shaushka use the terms “helmeted” (kurutawant), which referred to headwear worn by gods, as opposed to “veiled” (ḫupitawant), which referred to the typical headwear of goddesses. This lines up with the relief of masculine Shaushka from Yazilikaya (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 300).

A detail I haven’t seen brought up in any discussion of Shaushka’s gender which I personally think might be relevant to this topic is that their name occurs as a theophoric element both in feminine and masculine Hurrian theophoric names, which is otherwise entirely unheard of. Hurrians evidently were more rigid than Mesopotamians when it comes to theophoric elements in given names, as goddesses occur only in names of women and gods in names of men (Gernot Wilhelm, Name, Namengebung D. Bei den Hurritern, p. 125). 

Interestingly, Hittite sources pertaining to Shaushka offer a parallel to the “genderbending” curse formulas as well (My Men Have…, p. 363-364; note they are actually slightly earlier than the Assyrian examples). In a few cases, including a prayer and military oaths, this deity is implored to deprive foreign adversaries of the Hittite empire of their masculinity and courage, to take away their weapons, and to make them dress like women (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 90).

How did this aspect of Shaushka’s character develop? I’d assume that in contrast with Ninsianna and Pinikir, the influence of astronomical ideas about Venus can probably be ruled out. Beckman stresses that at least in Anatolian context Shaushka was evidently not an astral deity (Ištar of Nineveh…, p. 7). Timothy D. Leonard argues that the wings, which only the male form possesses, likely reflect a celestial role, but he doesn’t explore the point further (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 211). However, he notes that only Pinikir is explicitly identified with Venus in Hurro-Hittite sources, and presumably fulfilled the role of personification of this astral body alone (p. 225). 

Leonard argues that it cannot be established with certainty whether Shaushka  was perceived as capable of taking both male and female forms, as existing simultaneously as a male and female deity (with two bodies, presumably), or if they should be regarded as androgynous. However, he notes that there is no evidence for the recognition of any sort of nonbinary identity in known Hittite sources - so at least implicitly, he assumes the gender of both of the forms would need to be binary (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 298). 

It needs to be noted that the validity of applying the label “androgynous” to Shaushka has already been questioned all the way back in 1980(!) - in the first detailed study of Shaushka’s character and cult ever published, Ilse Wegner argued that in both visual arts and literary texts they are presented either as feminine or masculine, but never is their gender ambiguous (Gestalt und Kult der Ištar-Šawuška in Kleinasien, p. 47). Frans Wiggermann argues that KAR 307, which I already discussed and which describes a single figure with both masculine and feminine traits, might be related to depictions of Shaushka (Mischwesen A…, p. 237; thus I suppose the text would deal with an Ishtar, not with Inanna slash Ishtar herself) but this would quit obviously at best constitute a late exception which could be attributed to very vague familiarity with the deity. 

In addition to the options discussed by Leonard, a further interpretation present in scholarship is possibility is that Shaushka might have been seen primarily as a goddess, but performed a male role in specific context, to be precise when portrayed as a warlike deity (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 301) - in other words, that we are dealing with a similar phenomenon as in the case of Inanna. For instance, Wegner assumed Shaushka was essentially female, and the masculine portrayals merely reflect adoption of masculine-coded character traits and attributes as opposed to actual transformation into a male figure (p. 47-48). Gary Beckman similarly suggests that Shaushka was a goddess, and that the male form, which he likewise considers to be a military aspect, was interpreted as crossdressing, as opposed to an actual shift in gender (Shawushka, p. 1). Leonard accepts the possibility that the male form might reflect the fact that warfare was seen as an exclusively masculine pursuit in Anatolia, though since there are multiple sources where goddesses whose gender never shifted in any way appear on the battlefield he stresses it’s not impossible such gender norms did not necessarily apply to deities (Ištar in Ḫatti, p. 299-300).

Out of all the possible interpretations I personally find the possibility that Shaushka was imagined to shift between a male and a female deity to be the most convincing - in other words, that they were viewed as genderfluid, similarly to Ninsianna, though almost definitely for different, presently impossible to determine, reasons. However, since the matter is far from settled, I opted to generally use neutral forms across this section of the article - I hope this doesn’t make it too confusing. Can any of the information pertaining to Shaushka be applied to Inanna as well? I don’t really think so. For starters, no source goes out of its way to depict a feminine and a masculine form of Inanna in the same location, so I would argue that it is significant this is something attested for her counterpart - a sign that the latter’s masculine identity was more pronounced. Note that this is only my personal impression, though, and it might not fully hold to academic scrutiny, not to mention that the emergence of new sources might invalidate it.

Beyond Inanna: Shaushka’s other connections

While I focused on the connection between Shaushka and Inanna, it’s necessary to point out that the former was more than just a “foreign counterpart”. As a deity worshiped for well over a millennium, they amassed their own complex network of deities - often completely distinct from Inanna. For instance, it’s hard to find a parallel to Shaushka’s position as the sibling (and, in myths, main ally) of the head of the Hurrian pantheon, Teshub (not least because he represented a somewhat different model of a head god than Mesopotamian Enlil and Anu). However, to do this matter justice I’d basically need a separate article. Due to the scope of this treatment of Shaushka, I will limit myself only to a small number of figures they were associated with - either because they have something to do with their gender, or because they are additionally in one way or another connected to Inanna.

In Hittite context, Shaushka came to be closely associated with an Anatolian deity, Anzili (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 112). Since the latter’s character is poorly known (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 113), the reasoning behind the equivalence between them is opaque (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 119). Timothy D. Leonard tentatively proposes that Anzili’s name might be grammatically masculine and that it originally designated a god who later came to be seen as a goddess (as reflected in available sources), or that similarly as in the case of Shaushka both a male and a female form could be attributed to them (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 117). 

Untangling this problem is complicated further by the fact that Anzili’s name is used simply as a Hittite translation of Shaushka in both ritual and literary texts in which the deity of Nineveh is undeniably meant, down to being explicitly referred to with titles pertaining to this city - where Anzili obviously wasn’t actually worshiped (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p.120-121). Through the association with Shaushka, Anzili’s name even got to be used to translate the name of their Mesopotamian counterpart a few times - the Hittite translation of King of Battle, the most famous epic about Sargon of Akkad, refers to his divine backer as… “Anzili of Akkad” (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 125). Ultimately the translation was not entirely consistent, though, and texts written in Hittite where Shaushka’s name is nonetheless rendered phonetically, leaving no possibility that it was translated as Anzili, are also known (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 126).

Next to Inanna and Anzili, the deities probably the most commonly associated with Shaushka were their handmaidens Ninatta and Kulitta (Ištar of Nineveh…, p. 6). They could be portrayed as divine musicians (Gestalt und Kult…, p. 78), but also as warlike deities (John MacGinnis, The Gods of Arbail, p. 109). Ilse Wegner went as far as suggesting the phrase “right weapon of Shaushka” was an apposition of the pair, though that’s obviously speculative (Gestalt und Kult…, p. 79). 

Further information about their role is provided in a hymn to Shaushka (CTH 717). They are grouped in it with two other handmaidens, Šintal-irti (“seven-tongues”) and Ḫamra-zunna. The four of them are supposed to look after households which Shaushka views favorably, so that their inhabitants can live in harmony. Meanwhile, four other handmaidens, Ali, Ḫalzari, Taruwi and Šinanda-dukarni, are entrusted with making people in households which Shaushka resents quarrel with each other (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 120-122). It has been argued that this reflects the two aspects of Shaushka’s character - as a love deity in the case of the first four handmaidens, and as a warlike one in the case of the second group (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 123) - but I am skeptical if this can be easily reconciled with the fact Ninatta and Kulitta appear with them no matter which side of them is in the spotlight. 

Ninatta and Kulitta also represent probably the strongest case of Shaushka leaving a mark on their Mesopotamian counterpart. In the Neo-Assyrian period, they appear as members of the entourage of the latter not only in Nineveh, but also in Arbela and Assur under “Akkadianized” forms of their names, Ninittu and Kulittu (The Gods of Arbail, p. 109)

While Inanna had an extensive court - something that for mysterious reasons is not acknowledged online or even in publications aimed at general audiences (to use a recent example - even an a-list example like Nanaya comes up less times in Louise Pryke’s Ishtar than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who, as far as I am aware, is not attested in any cuneiform texts) - I’m not aware of any instance of Ninatta and Kulitta being explicitly identified as counterparts of any of its members, though. Perhaps the fact that some of the cities in which they are attested were originally Hurrian has something to do with it - they weren’t introduced there as new additions, it was the Mesopotamian goddess who was superimposed over their original superior (The Gods of Arbail, p. 112).

Madonna-whore complex and beyond: (the modern reception of) Inanna as a love deity

After the brief detour focused on Shaushka, it is time to go back to Inanna - specifically to the most major aspect of her character I largely left out before, her association with love and all that entails.

As I already said, the oldest available texts affirming this was one of her prerogatives are younger than these linking her with war, let alone these hinting at her astral role. Regardless of when this aspect of her character first developed, it took until the Ur III period for it to take the center stage (Inanna and Ishtar…, p. 338). Simultaneously, it is by far the most well known today, to the point you often get the impression people barely know there’s more to her. Tonia M. Sharlach notes that even in scholarship there is discussion over whether this aspect of her character isn’t perhaps overestimated to a degree (An Ox of One’s Own. Royal Wives and Religion at the Court of the Third Dynasty of Ur, p. 268). 

At least when it comes to the spread of this misconception online, one is tempted to ask to which degree pretending this is the only thing about Inanna that matters amounts to the need to present her as some sort of demo version of Aphrodite, with limited, if any, concern for Mesopotamia.

None of these phenomena is why I kept it for last, though - even if I do agree that viewing Inanna simply as a “love goddess” is misguided at best. My decision simply reflects the fact that the relevant sources portray Inanna probably at her least gender nonconforming . As argued by Bendt Alster, in some cases in love poetry it would essentially be possible to substitute her and Dumuzi for an average young human couple without the need to make any adjustments (Sumerian Love Songs, p. 78).  Ultimately, these works reflect fairly normative ideas of courtship, romance and sex, though with a clear female focus (Frans Wiggermann, Sexuality A. In Mesopotamia, p. 412). The portrayal of love and eroticism in them has been described as “playful”, in contrast with the more blunt genres like potency incantations, or even with portrayal of sex in myths like Enki and Ninhursag (Jerrold S. Cooper, Gendered Sexuality in Sumerian Love Poetry, p. 92-94). Many of them are honestly an enjoyable read, as long as you are willing to engage with heavy use of assorted metaphors in descriptions of sex (date syrup, lettuce and agricultural activities are particularly abundant). Here is a fairly representative example:

The Song of the Lettuce (ETCSL)

There isn’t really much to say beyond that - they’re a fascinating topic in their own right, but they are largely irrelevant for the matter this article investigates.

Frans Wiggermann, an author whose work I generally value highly, made the peculiar argument that erotic poetry in which Inanna is the more active side and her goal is sexual gratification might reflect attribution of masculine traits to her and proceeded to argue every depiction of sex where the woman tops is ought to be related to this phenomenon (Sexuality A…, p. 417-418). He simultaneously raises an interesting point that these representations of Inanna might have been supposed to justify sex without the aim of reproduction. It is unclear to me how it would “allow minorities a place under the sun”, though (p. 418), as the sex scenes in relevant compositions are invariably straight.

While I am unsure about some aspects of Wiggermann’s argument, I should stress that I think it was made in good faith. Sadly this can’t be said about much of the other scholarship pertaining to Inanna and sexuality, and especially the intersection of the topic of sexuality and gender.  This matter has been investigated in depth by Zainab Bahrani in the early 2000s already. She argues that publications which overestimate the ambiguity of Inanna’s gender (which typically employ hardly applicable labels like “hermaphrodite”; she singles out Rivkah Harris’ Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and a Coincidence of Opposites and Brigitte Groenberg’s Die sumerisch-akkadische Inanna/Ištar: Hermaphroditos? as relatively recent examples), in particular while emphasizing her erotic character, are essentially a leftover a fear of nefarious seductresses common in popular culture of fin-de-siècle Europe, for example in symbolist paintings (Women of Babylon…, p. 146).

Jen Delville's The Idol of Perversity, a fairly standard example of the sort of symbolist painting Bahrani meant, a representation of the fear of "unquenched bestial desires of a woman" (wikimedia commons)

I think it’s also a valid point that traits like assertiveness or a quick temper could very well be assigned to a femme fatale, and are not necessarily an indication of any ambiguity of gender (Women of Babylon…, p. 144), though I don’t think every aspect of Inanna’s characters needs to be subsumed under the erotic, and recent publications focused on her military role and its intersection with gender are much more nuanced, as you could see for yourself earlier.

Bahrani also highlights that publications she criticizes - both historical and modern - treat transsexuality, crossdressing and various adjacent phenomena and (male) homosexuality as basically one and the same (Women of Babylon…, p. 145; I will come back to this). However, I feel she falls into this trap herself to a small degree when it comes to women, as she appears to link the dubious Inanna scholarship  overestimating the ambiguity of her gender and the phenomenon of various femme fatale figures being portrayed as bisexual for voyeuristic purposes, and to Orientalist art at the very least implying lesbian activities (Women of Babylon…, p. 146). I am not aware of any actual publication dealing with Inanna or relevant phenomena (of any quality) which would go into this direction, though.

I also disagree with treating Inanna as unique compared to other goddesses just because she is not primarily portrayed as a wife or mother (Women of Babylon…, p. 149) - the median Mesopotamian goddess was a personification of a profession or the interests of a city or both, arguably; major members of the pantheon like Nanshe, Nisaba, Ninmug, Nungal or numerous medicine goddesses were hardly defined by either of these two roles, even if they could be, indeed, portrayed as wives or mothers in a capacity Inanna was not.

Most importantly, I disagree with invoking Freud and his disciples (positively, for clarity) to bolster arguments (Women of Babylon…, p. 153-154).

Still, I do think the core concerns raised by Bahrani are more than sound. The next section will sadly make that painfully clear.

Sexualization of lamenting

The validity of some of Bahrani’s criticism is pretty evident just based on the survey of past literature on the matter of the assinnu (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 83-84), a type of religious specialist or performer who you already met earlier in the subsection of this article dedicated to military curses. It would appear that the authors most keen on far reaching speculations about their gender identity and sexuality are probably some of the least qualified to deal with this matter, and lo and lo and behold, typically blur together being gay, nonbinary and any form of gender nonconformity. 

Furthermore, even though texts from Mari explicitly link the assinnu with Annunitu (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 94) - the single most straightforwardly warlike Inanna-ish deity of them all, whose very name, “the skirmisher”, refers to combat - a peculiar obsession with rendering their role into something innately sexual (or rather lascivious) just because of their association with Inanna, appears to be a distinct trend. It  intersects with the former issue; after all, it is known that anything but being a cis straight person who is a paragon of gender conformity is innately inappropriately (or even “abnormally”, as one of the past evaluations cited by Zsolnay critically put it) sexual.

For what it’s worth, there is some evidence that the assinnu were men who - at least in certain situations - crossdressed and played lyres (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 86). In an Old Babylonian hymn I’ve already mentioned, this is said to take place during a festival which also involved female performers who for this occasion dressed up in a masculine way and carried weapons, who are not described with any specific technical term (The Man is Like…, p. 6). Given the context of this mention, I feel the jury's out on whether this was universal, or merely a specific local festival, especially in the light of other evidence for the activities of the assinnu, though. The participation in a celebration which involved crossdressing could explain why late lexical lists - first examples only come from the Neo-Assyrian period, some 1000 years after the Mariote and Old Babylonian attestations - sometimes offer UR.SAL as the logographic writing of assinnu. This combination of signs can be interpreted in different ways - some probably can be ruled out since they refer to female animals (canines and big cats), not to people; this led to the common interpretation as “feminine man” or “woman-man” based on other sign values. Zsolnay disagrees with it, and tentatively proposes something like “servant of women” (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 85)., though this might be an overabundance of skepticism.

However, Zsolnay’s position might not be entirely unwarranted. She correctly points out lexical lists are not necessarily reliable when it comes to synonyms of technical terms, such as religious titles (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 86). Furthermore, the assinnu seemingly were famous for performing a song titled “Battle is my game, warfare is my game” (mēlilī qablu mēlilī tāḫāzu; presumably purposely a nod to terms often  used to describe Inanna’s warlike characteristics). They also danced the “whirl dance” (gūštu) - which likely also had belligerent connotations, and which quite importantly is the main topic of the poem Agušaya, which entirely focuses on Inanna as a warlike deity (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 93).  Yet more important is the fact that UR.SAL is not the only combination of logograms which could be used to render the term assinnu. The other option, SAG.UR.SAĜ, literally means “foremost hero” - in other words, it does appears to point at some sort of “warlike” or, to be more precise, “heroic” role  (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 85). Zsolnay accordingly concludes that the ordinary role of the assinnu was most likely that of an exaggerated “heroic strongman” performing war dances, and that with time an association between these specialists and festivals associated with the military aspect of Inanna (and similar deities like Annunitum) developed due to obvious similarities (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 98).

Nonetheless, just due to the association with Inanna combined with possibly vaguely gender nonconforming behavior (I will not attempt to evaluate whether it was a staple of their activities or only one of the celebrations they took part with), they came to be described in questionable scholarship as “temple prostitutes” (not an actually attested insitution, though it is evident we are dealing with a multi level conflation of crossdressing, being gay or trans, and sex work based on quotes from previous studies provided) whose very existence simultaneously must have terrified the general populace (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 85). 

I feel obliged to point out in a footnote Zsolnay states that after finishing her article she was informed by a reviewer similar conclusions about assinnu have been independently reached by Julia Assante in Bad Girls and Kinky Boys? The Modern Prostituting of Ishtar, Her Clergy and Her Cults. Sadly, while I am quite sympathetic to the latter author’s valiant struggle against the myth of “sacred prostitution” and related problems, her methodology is much more flawed than Zsolnay’s, and at times it feels like she herself falls into some of the pitfalls she correctly points out in other studies. I also feel obliged to warn you that for reasons uncertain to me, Assante at some point in the 2010s abandoned academic work and became a medium. Therefore, I would engage with her publications cautiously, to put it very lightly.

There’s at least one point Assante raises which warrants further consideration, though (even if she phrases it very differently than I would). She notes it is peculiar that any individuals whose gender might have been perceived as non-normative or ambiguous, or whose gender is unclear, are automatically presumed to be AMAB, and the possibility that women might have been gender non-conforming, or that people whose gender identity might have differed from Mesopotamian norms were AFAB, is not considered seriously. As an example, she points out that a passage according to which an enigmatic cultic official, the pilipili, received a weapon “as if she were male” sparked little, if any discussion (Bad Girls…, p. 36). This is definitely agreeable, and if nothing else a good start for further inquiries, considering no detailed studies of the pilipili alone have been conducted, as far as I am aware.

It might be worth noting that in the satirical Old Babylonian literary text The Old Man and the Young Girl the second of the eponymous character tricks her way into temporarily reversing gender norms through a royal court verdict, which prompts her to encourage other women to “behave like the pilipili” to celebrate her victory (Jana Matuszak, A Complete Reconstruction, New Edition and Interpretation of the Sumerian Morality Tale ‘The Old Man and the Young Girl’, p.192-193). While more evidence would be necessary to make a genuinely strong case, the possibility that the pilipili were women perceived as gender non-conforming does seem compelling to me on this basis - so, I suppose, credit to Assante in that regard, even if her treatment of the matter leaves a bit to be desired. It’s worth noting a similar proposal about the identity of the pilipili has recently been advanced by Sophus Helle based on the same passage Assante cited (Enheduana. The Complete Poems of the World's First Author, p. 158).

On a further related note, as a pure curiosity it’s worth mentioning that a single lexical list, Malku, lists the feminine form of assinnu - assinnatum - who never sparked the sort of discussion her counterpart did. It should be noted that this label is explained in this context as a synonym of ugbabtum, a fairly widespread type of priestesses (attestations are spread virtually everywhere from Terqa to Susa) involved in the cults of various deities (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 86). As far as I am aware, this is an isolated example, so for the time being it’s impossible to determine if assinnatum ever designated a distinct class of performers or cultic personnel or if it was a scribal invention. I’ll refrain from any speculation about whether it might have anything to do with the women who appear alongside assinnu in the Old Babylonian hymn discussed earlier.

To go back to the assinnu themselves one last time, a further thing to note is that sometimes far reaching dubious conclusions are drawn based not even on information pertaining to these performers themselves, but rather the gala and an enigmatic class of cultic officials presumably involved in mourning, the kurgarrû. However, while the latter two occur together quite often in literary texts (recall that the two clay beings in Inanna’s Descent bear the names Kurgarra - an obvious variant of kurgarrû - and Galatura, ie. “little gala”; however, note as well that gala also commonly occur alongside ašipu), there is very little evidence for any actual close association between them and assinnu - they only occur side by side in a single literary text, the lament Uru-Amirabi (The Misconstructed Role…, p. 91).

The gala (Akkadian kalû; not to be confused with galla, either literally a “gendarme” or town guard, or a type of demon fulfilling an analogous role in the underworld) themselves warrant some further discussion, as they are probably the most egregious example of the phenomenon discussed in this section of the article.

The primary role of the gala was performing various types of hymns, prayers and laments in emesal, a dialect of Sumerian (Paul Delnero, How To Do Things With Tears. Ritual Lamenting in Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 41). Through the third and second millennia BCE, gala most commonly occur alongside temple singers (nāru), for reasons which should be self explanatory, while in the first millennium BCE - alongside āšipu, a type of exorcist, which reflected the involvement of both groups in scholarship (Uri Gabbay, The kalû Priest and kalûtu Literature in Assyria, p. 116).

The gender identity of the gala is a subject of much debate. It might have been unique to them (in other words, they were nonbinary, with gala being both a professional designation and gender identity) or alternatively they might have been men who engaged in broadly speaking gender nonconforming behavior (How To Do…, p. 109). I am not going to attempt to convince you one option or the other is more plausible, I personally don’t think the matter will ever be possible to fully settle unless texts written by gala themselves going in depth into how they perceived themselves ever emerge. Obviously, we also have to take into account what exactly being a gala entailed varied between time periods and locations.

The only thing that can be said for sure is that the gala were not regarded as women. This seems to be an entirely online misconception, though one with an enormous reach - a post making similar claims garnered some 40k notes on this site recently. Said post also stated that they underwent “gender affirming surgery”; it needs to be noted that the status of the gala - or any other type of clergy - was in fact not attributed to any medical procedure (and I don’t think Magnus Hirschfeld, who pioneered gender affirming surgery and deserves more credit than he gets for it, lived in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia…). Obviously, this is not a denial of the possibility the gala weren’t cis (to put in in modern terms) - but it seems beyond credulous to both claim their identity depended on a medical procedure alone, and to project a fairly recent accomplishment for which a genuinely heroic maverick should be credited into incredibly distant past. I don’t think we need a trans version of “ancient matriarchy” mirages, personally.

However, ultimately the main misconception about gala is that they were “priests of Inanna” - and various mortifying hot takes emerge specifically from that. Especially online, more or less haphazard attempts are made to prove that, despite the plentiful evidence for what being a gala entailed, their role - and the roles of any even just tangentially related religious personnel - was innately sexual, since it was tied to Inanna (we have such choice tidbits as “males who engage in transgendered or prostitute behavior”, courtesy of Patrick Taylor, The Gala and the Gallos, p. 176; unclear to me how these labels are in any shape or form interchangeable). 

To put it bluntly: it seems like to some the fact the gala might have been, broadly speaking, lgbt (or just gender non-conforming) is in itself something sexual, much like the possibly gender nonconforming performance of the assinnu. 

What differentiates this view of the gala from similar faulty opinions about the assinnu is that I think at least online the intent often isn’t malicious - it is not wrong to hope someone in the past was similar (as I understand, the underlying assumption behind many misguided post is that the gala were trans women). However, sadly the underlying motivation of the authors whose takes end up laundered to teenagers online this way is ultimately an example of the same phenomenon which, in a more extreme form, leads to various suspicious groups calling for removal of the tamest possible literature for teenagers from libraries because a gay or trans character appears.

A further problem is that while the assinnu indeed occur chiefly in association with Inanna, the gala were not innately associated with her (and especially not with her sexual side) - referring to them as “priests of Inanna” is a misconception at best, and outright malevolent at worst (in bad faith cases, the logic follows what Bahrani described pretty closely). They were actually present in the cults of numerous deities, most of whom were paragons of gender conformity and had no sexual aspect to speak of - in other words, whatever the identity of the gala was, it was disconnected from the identity of the deity they performed for. Every single major temple dedicated to a city deity had a “chief gala” among its staff. Such an official oversaw the activities of other gala employed by it, but also took part in day to day economic activities of the temple, like managing prebends (How To Do…, p. 110). To go through all of the available evidence would take too much space, so I will only list a handful of particularly notable examples.

There was a “chief gala” among the staff of Ninurta’s main temple Eshumesha in Nippur, as attested in a list of provisions where this official appears next to a “chief singer” (Wolfgang Heimpel, Balang Gods, p. 583). In Old Babylonian Kish another “chief gala” was the second most important religious official in service of Zababa, with only the temple administrator ranking higher (Walther Sallaberger, Zababa, p. 165). A further “chief gala” resided in the temple of Sin in Harran, as attested in sources from the Neo-Assyrian period; the holders of this office were tasked with sending astronomical reports to the kings of Assyria (Steven W. Holloway, Aššur is king! Aššur is king! Religion in the exercise of power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, p. 409). A “chief gala”, as well as a number of regular gala, were also part of the staff of the temple of Nanshe in NINA (reading uncertain; Tell Zurghul) in the Early Dynastic state of Lagash (Gebhard J. Selz, Untersuchungen zur Götterwelt des altsumerischen Stadtstaates von Lagaš, p. 205-206).

It’s important to note that the arts of the gala and the knowledge transferred among members of this profession - kalûtu - were associated with Ea, not with Inanna; the closest parallel are, once again, the arts of the āšipu (The kalû Priest…, p. 116). However, it would be disingenuous to call them “clergy of Ea” - I’m just highlighting they had no specific connection with Inanna. Stressing the lack of any unique degree of connection between her and the gala is not supposed to be an argument against inquiries into their gender identity, either - though I do advise to be cautious which authors are consulted. 

Maternal obsessions: do deities even follow gender roles?

While I dedicated a lot of space to warnings about questionable motivation behind some arguments pertaining to the gender of Inanna and especially clergy with varying degrees of association with her, it needs to be stressed that there’s a need to be cautious about the exact opposite attitudes too sometimes. While skepticism is generally a virtue in scholarship, it is hard to deny that some of the opposition to inquiries into Inanna’s gender and related matters also has highly questionable motivations behind it. 

For instance, my reservations towards Julia Assante’s article discussed earlier come from the fact that at least some of her criticism is rooted not in valid reasoning, but in what appears to be a degree of homophobia -  for instance, part of her opposition to interpreting cultic officials like the assinnu or gala as gay men (for which the evidence is indeed hardly sufficient - we have evidence for crossdressing in one case, and for either gender nonconformity or a unique gender identity in the other) stems from her conviction that this is an example of “abnormal male sexuality” (Bad Girls…, p. 37). 

Interestingly this is a selective case of homophobia, though, since she simultaneously voices a perfectly valid complaint that earlier scholarship has “not allowed discussion on lesbianism other than to dismiss it” (p. 36; it needs to be noted that in contrast with gay men, direct evidence for lesbians is lacking altogether in cuneiform - see Sexuality A…,  p. 414 for reference to a MLM love incantation and absence of a WLW equivalent - but you’d at least expect some serious inquiry into Ninshubur’s portrayal in literary texts by now). Some examples are even more blunt. For instance, Wolfhang Heimpel, after concluding that references to “bearded” Inanna reflect the perception of the planet Venus as opposed to the deity (which is not too dissimilar from the interpretation I highlighted as plausible earlier) reassures the reader that Inanna was therefore not an “androgynous monster” (A Catalog of Near Eastern Venus Deities, p. 15) - I am somewhat puzzled what exactly would be “monstrous” about facial hair. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that in contrast with the newer study of the same passages which I discussed in detail and have no objections to, it’s not the weakness of the evidence that bothers the author, but the slightest possibility of androgyny.

Not everyone is so direct, though. There are also more insidious cases - and these invariably focus on Inanna herself, as opposed to any religious officials. What I’m talking about are sources which refer to Inanna as a “mother” or “fertility” goddess or some nondescript “divine feminine” entity entirely detached from historical context. As a result Inanna is essentially forced into an incredibly rigid feminine role she never actually fulfilled. I won’t dwell upon the abstract maternal obsession itself much here. I already wrote a separate article a few years ago about its impact, exemplified by the recent portrayal of Inanna as a grotesque pregnancy monster in a certain videogame (this is not an exaggeration) and I think that was enough. It will suffice to say that these visions belong not in Mesopotamia at the dawn of recorded history, but rather in the most feverish depths of Victorian imagination (I won’t explore this topic here; Cynthia Eller’s publications are a good start if you are interested, though). Interestingly, simultaneously sources of this sort basically never investigate Mesopotamian texts which actually focus on motherhood - which is a shame, because compositions such as Ninisina A are filled with genuine warmth. However, they don’t deal with some sort of overwhelming Frazerian ur-mother reduced to bare biological essentials.

To go back to the main topic of this section, the  true crown jewel of the discussed subgenre of Inanna literature has to be this paragraph courtesy of Tzvi Abusch (Ishtar in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, p. 453):

One is tempted to ask why Abusch argues Inanna is “incomplete” or exhibits “psychic wounds” due to her character not revolving around being a wife or mother. How about her roles as a war deity, love deity, personified astral body or representation of political interest of one city or another? Roles which are, quite obviously, fully realized? As a war deity, she was believed to assist kings, deprive their enemies of the ability to fight, and to confront various supernatural adversaries like rebellious mountains; as a love deity, she was invoked through love incantations and acted as the archetypal lover in erotic poetry; as Venus, she shone in the sky. 

Should we also question why, for example Tishpak’s roles as a husband and father are not fully realized considering he primarily plays the role of a warrior and divine sovereign of Eshnunna (the human ruler was merely acting as a governor on his behalf, a fairly unique situation otherwise only attested for two other gods)? Very few male gods actually match the image of masculinity presented in Instruction of Shuruppak as an ideal to strive for - just as very few goddesses fit the image of the ideal wife preserved in proverbs.

This is not the first time this comes up in this article, but while the world of gods, and the character of its individual inhabitants, obviously arose in specific historical context, it was not a perfect mirror of the world of humans and its mores  (Do Divine Structures …, p. 105-106). Ilona Zsolnay outright argues that even if some (but not all) of the Mesopotamian deities were at least in part characterized based on normative patterns of behavior tied to them - there are, after all, deities defined at least to a degree by, for example, fatherhood (like Enlil) or marital status (like Aya) - ultimately they were not bound by the same gender norms as humans. Furthermore, religious and political factors, as well as natural phenomena deities could be linked with, influenced their character considerably more (Do Divine Structures …, p. 116).

Granted, it should be noted that Abush is basically writing about an Inanna he made up. As you’ve seen earlier, the first attestations of Inanna already sound fairly similar to her most famous portrayals from later periods. However, he instead argues that the original Inanna lost to time was one of “primitive earth of mother goddesses” and that from the fourth millennium BCE onwards (coincidentally when the first actual attestations of Inanna emerge thanks to the advent of writing) Mesopotamians simply couldn’t grasp her true character (Ishtar, p. 454). The need to portray Inanna as she actually was imagined as some sort of aberration, coupled with a desire to uncover an “original” version which just so happens to conform to an incredibly rigid vision of femininity is quite something. Rarely do you see someone basically recreating the Madonna-whore complex so literally.

Absent parents, ever present children

While as I said I won’t engage in depth with the peculiar obsession with making Inanna into a maternal figure evident in Abusch’s treatment of her, I do feel obliged to cover a related phenomenon: the obsessive focus on the quite rare cases where some minor deities are identified as her children. This is a particularly big problem online, though vintage scholarship and publications aimed at general audiences (even very recent ones) are equally, if not more, guilty of it. 

The nominal assignment of largely irrelevant deities as children to Inanna was ultimately inconsequential, and in particular it had nothing to do with her erotic role - or with Dumuzi, for that matter, as he is never identified as their father (Inanna and Ishtar…, p. 339). Pregnancy, childbirth and maternity are not topics dealt with in compositions focused on the two of them (Gendered Sexuality…, p. 95). 

Only three deities have ever been described as Inanna’s children in primary sources: Shara, Lulal and Nanaya. In every single case caveats apply.

Shara’s connection to Inanna was geographically limited. It wasn’t a pan-Mesopotamian convention to regard them as related, but rather a local tradition restricted to Zabalam (Goddesses in Context…, p. 202). Julia M. Asher-Greve suggests that it might have originally been little more than a way to give Inanna access to the epithet ama, literally “mother” (but metaphorically, as a divine epithet, something like “venerable woman”; Jeremy Black, Songs of the Goddess Aruru, p. 48), which was however primarily used not to indicate motherhood but rather a position of authority in the pantheon (Goddesses in Context…, p. 140).

It’s also important to note that Inanna of Zabalam didn’t really start as (an) Inanna, since the earliest literary text she appears in, the Early Dynastic Zame Hymns from Abu Salabikh, refers to her with the enigmatic name Nin-UM. Joan Goodnick Westenholz assumed that Nin-UM was the original name of the goddess of Zabalam, with the name Inanna (and many of Inanna’s traits) effectively imposed upon her due to the theological and political influence of nearby Uruk (Goddesses in Context…, p. 42-43). Whether this was the case or not, the two are treated as functionally separate deities in god lists (Goddesses in Context…, p. 79-80). 

While this is far from certain, Douglas Frayne proposed that this phenomenon might also be the motif of conflict between Inanna and Gilgamesh, first attested in the standalone poem Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven from the Ur III period, and fully developed in the considerably later standard edition of the Epic of Gilgamesh (which might reflect what Paul-Alain Beaulieu described as “anti-Ištar sentiment”; The Pantheon..., p. 108). He assumes that it reflected hostilities between Uruk and Zabalam, with the antagonist actually being Inanna of Zabalam and not Inanna of Uruk (The Struggle for Hegemony in "Early Dynastic II" Sumer, p. 63-64). In any case, the connection with Shara cannot be taken out of context and applied where it is not explicitly mentioned.

The other most frequently cited case, that of Lulal, is even weaker than Shara’s. He is addressed as Inanna’s son exactly once, in a fragmentary hymn published in the 1960s (Anna Glen, Jeremiah Peterson, The Lulal širgida Composition CBS 12590 (HAV 5, pl. 7, VIII), p. 169) - so he has an equally firm claim to being her son as the personified Styx has to being Persephone’s mother. In Inanna’s Descent, the composition most often “enriched” today with forcible assertions of familial bonds between Inanna and miscellaneous side characters, the connection between them is merely “close, but unspecified” (Wilfred G. Lambert, Lulal/Lātarāk, p. 163). Anna Glen and Jeremiah Peterson assume he is an attendant, not a family member, and point out elsewhere (Inanna D, line 32) he is portrayed only as a minor warrior god acting on her behalf (The Lulal širgida…, p. 169). An annotated edition of the Weidner god list equates Lulal with Sin (Klaus Wagensonner, CCP 6.7.A - Weidner’s God List A) which, as it will become clear very soon, creates some issues for claims of widespread acceptance of his status as Inanna’s son.

The third deity sporadically addressed as Inanna’s child was Nanaya. In contrast with both Shara and Lulal, she was actually a major figure in her own right, and her connection with Inanna is attested in various cities and time periods. Ironically enough I don’t think I’ve ever seen her described as her daughter online, though. I suspect the explanation is fairly straightforward: she doesn’t appear in the “canon” of shoddy vintage translations of a small handful of texts on which the online image of Inanna often seems to be built.

However, the fact Nanaya had a firm connection to Inanna doesn’t mean undue importance should be assigned to the cases where they are presented specifically as mother and daughter. Only three sources actually refer to them this way: an inscription of king Lipit-Ishtar, a first millennium recension of an older balag song, and a unique oath formula. Olga Drewnowska-Rymarz assumes the relation described in them might very well be metaphorical (Mesopotamian Goddess Nanāja, p. 30).It would not be hard to find parallels proving this is a distinct possibility: Ninshubur was demonstrably not Inanna’s mother, and yet she addresses her as such as a sign of respect in at least one composition. Ninshubur herself has no known parentage, and yet refers to every high ranking god as “father” in Inanna’s Descent. The examples of using terms of kinship as an indication of respect or closeness are numerous.

Furthermore, multiple genealogies could be assigned to Nanaya. In laments, she is consistently the daughter of Urash, the tutelary god of Dilbat, for instance (Mesopotamian Goddess Nanāja, p. 31). Obviously, the fact that Nanaya could also be at least partially identified with Inanna (though this is a late phenomenon; Goddesses in Context…, p. 131) poses some problems for viewing them as child and parent. In most cases it’s probably best to agree with the description of the relationship between the two as “definite, but unspecified” (Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Nanaya: Lady of Mystery, p. 68). 

On a side note which is not directly related to the main topic of this article, it is quite peculiar that preoccupation with Inanna existing as a part of a family never seems to extend to highlighting her connection with her parents. Ironically, the family connections people downplay online are the ones which actually mattered the most theologically.

The tradition making Nanna (Sin) and Ningal Inanna’s parents was by far the most widespread one, and it is reflected in various genres of texts across history (Aino Hätinen, The Moon God Sin in Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Times, p. 309-310; Goddesses in Context…, p. 230; The Pantheon…, p. 111; even Abusch’s Ishtar, p. 452). References to this connection are frequent in literary texts, even ones which don’t focus on Inanna, let alone on her family ties. For instance, Ka Hulu-a, which isn’t even a composition dealing with deities on the most part, casually refers to Inanna as “wise daughter of Sin” (dumu galzu Suenna; Jana Matuszak, Don’t Insult Inana! Divine Retribution for Offense against Common Decency in the Light of New Textual Sources, p. 361). 

The connection between Inanna and her parents was so strong it could be transferred to other deities by proxy. Both Shaushka (Marie-Claude Trémouille, Šauška, Šawuška A. Philologisch, p. 102) and Pinikir (The Goddess Pirinkir…, p. 27) - not to mention an entire host of major and minor Mesopotamian goddesses, ranging from Annunitum (The Moon God…, p. 313), though Belet-ekallim (Ištar in Ḫatti…, p. 160) to Nanaya (The Moon God…, p. 312) - could be addressed as the moon god’s offspring (or, at the very least, as the offspring of a moon god since at least in Shaushka’s case the name is in all due likeness used as a logogram).

Perhaps even more importantly, the connection between Inanna and her father was also responsible for her well attested association with the number 15, best reflected in the use of this numeral to represent her name from the Old Babylonian period onwards. Since Sin’s number was 30 (a reflection of the number of days in the lunar month), a half of that was deemed a suitable number to represent his daughter by ancient theologians (Wolfgang Röllig, Götterzahlen, p. 499).

Conclusions

I was initially reluctant to cover the topic of the gender of Inanna and related deities in depth, I’m frankly not sure why. It is not my intent to boast, but much of my online activity has consistently revolved around assyriology since 2020 (technically it has been my interest for much longer, but my methodology required refining). I wrote 200+ wiki articles about Mesopotamian deities, including multiple which specifically required dealing with the matter of gender; in contrast with the overwhelming majority of hobbyists I keep up with academic publications.

To go back to the question which originally inspired this article, I don’t think it’s possible to give a straightforward answer. I’d say at least some of the current mainstream Assyriological scholarship (by which I mean roughly from the mid to late 1980s to now) offers a fairly accurate evaluation of what can be said about Inanna’s gender, and about the gender of related figures - Ninsianna, Shaushka, Pinikir etc.; I hope spotlighting sources which can be described this way through the article makes this clear enough. Some specific details are definitely overemphasized (the eerie quest for a beard is the prime example but I’d be lying if I said Wiggermann’s puzzling views on femdom didn’t make me laugh). What is definitely overestimated is to what degree the supposed ambiguity of Inanna’s gender was tied to her sexual aspects. The general lack of any such characteristics among deities even more firmly associated with sexuality than Inanna was - I highlighted it in the case of Nanaya, but it holds equally (if not more) true for Ishara, Gazbaba, Kanisurra, Bizilla, the list goes on - also doesn’t seem to ever be highlighted. While obviously each of them was a deity with own unique character and not just a carbon copy of Inanna (for example, Ishara was associated with weddings in a capacity no other love goddess was, while Nanaya persistently appears in texts dealing with unrequited love or rejection), convergence of traits was a fairly common phenomenon in Mesopotamian religion. For example, numerous couples consisting of a medicine goddess and a war god emerged over the course of the late third and second millennia BCE - so surely it would eventually reemerge in one of these cases?

A further problem is of course the questionable scholarship based on these misconceptions which focuses less on Inanna herself and more on clergy associated with her, or even just vaguely adjacent to her. While a lot has changed since the early 2000s, let alone the 1980s, it is still arguably a major weakness of assyriology as a discipline that often gender, sexual orientation and presentation are often treated as entirely overlapping phenomena. There are numerous authors who write about relevant matters thoughtfully, but this is hardly the rule; especially when assyriology intersects with Bible studies or classics, the problem remains strong (meanwhile, in depth studies of, say, transmission of laments will often be quite cautious; it’s also not as easy as just blaming the age of some researchers and calling it a day).

However, there are also matters related to the gender of Inanna and related deities which definitely receive too little attention. To which degree what we know about Ninsianna can be applied to Inanna? Why the planet Mercury, despite also being regarded as switching between two genders, seemingly never came to be personified the same way as Venus? Why Shaushka and especially Pinikir appear in firmly masculine attire, while Inanna basically never does? All of these questions require further in depth inquiries. Much as I can’t give an unambiguous response to the initial question, I honestly don’t think it’s possible to give a straightforward answer on the matter of Inanna’s gender in the first place. Obviously, it’s impossible to disagree that fundamentally she was primarily a feminine figure. However, it’s also important to remember she essentially took a masculine role in the military context. I still stand by my joke chart from a few months ago:

While as I demonstrated things get much more murky when it comes to outright ambiguity or fluidity of gender, I would not rule it out entirely either, at least in an astral context - though I also doubt it’s fair to speak of anything directly comparable to the cases of Ninsianna, Pinikir or Shaushka. 

Perhaps in the end we have to simply accept how Inanna’s character is summarized in an Old Babylonian composition I brought up much earlier:

[crookedfivefingers]

Doctor Who | Wetworld by Mark Michalowski

[lookmomitsmytmblr]

Hello fellow Ten/Donna peeps. As I know our people are starving, I have come to offer some crumbs from the novel "Shining Darkness" by Mark Michalowski.

1: (twinkly glare is such a good description of her oh my goodness)

2: The Doctor wishing (his) Ginger Goddess was there to protect him (he is definitely the damsel in this relationship)

3: Donna just loving herself because wholesome (and she's right on all counts. Queen.)

4: Donna THROWING HERSELF into his arms and burying her head in his chest. And then punching him. (And him obviously enjoying the hug, which makes him smile despite being sad in this scene)

5: Donna thinking about her and the Doctor just missing each other in a way that sounds a lot like they are a married couple (they are)

6: This needs no explanation (actually it does. The man has a crush.)

7: This never specifies that she took her head off his shoulder. For all we know she put her head on his shoulder and inhaled deeply and had a heartfelt conversation with him and. I'm so normal about them.

Okay that's all bye.

[dw-ebook-preservation-society]

Completed, well-formatted EPUBs for the

Eighth Doctor Adventures

Mega folder

(Latest update: July 31 2024)

00 - Doctor Who: The TV Movie - Gary Russell (blazingdynamo)

01 - The Eight Doctors - Terrance Dicks (blazingdynamo)

02 - Vampire Science - Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman (blazingdynamo)

03 - Body Snatchers - Mark Morris (blazingdynamo)

04 - Genocide - Paul Leonard (blazingdynamo)

05 - War of the Daleks - John Peel (blazingdynamo)

06 - Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles (blazingdynamo)

07 - Kursaal - Peter Anghelides (blazingdynamo)

08 - Option Lock - Justin Richards (blazingdynamo)

09 - Longest Day - Michael Collier (blazingdynamo)

10 - Legacy of the Daleks - John Peel (blazingdynamo)

11 - Dreamstone Moon - Paul Leonard (blazingdynamo)

12 - Seeing I - Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman (blazingdynamo)

13 - Placebo Effect - Gary Russell (blazingdynamo)

14 - Vanderdeken's Children - Christopher Bulls (blazingdynamo)

15 - The Scarlet Empress - Paul Magrs (blazingdynamo)

16 - The Janus Conjunction - Trevor Baxendale (blazingdynamo)

17 - Beltempest - Jim Mortimore (blazingdynamo)

18 - The Face Eater - Simon Messingham (blazingdynamo)

19 - The Taint - Michael Coller (blazingdynamo)

20 - Demontage - Justin Richards (blazingdynamo)

21 - Revolution Man - Paul Leonard (blazingdynamo)

22 - Dominion - Nick Walters (blazingdynamo)

23 - Unnatural History - Johnathan Blum & Kate Orman (featheredgalaxy)

24 - Autumn Mist - David A. McIntee (blazingdynamo)

46 - Year of Intelligent Tigers - Kate Orman (featheredgalaxy)

52 - Mad Dogs and Englishmen - Paul Magrs (featheredgalaxy)

53 - Hope - Mark Clapham (blazingdynamo)

66 - Emotional Chemistry - Simon A. Forward (blazingdynamo)

67 - Sometime Never - Justin Richards (featheredgalaxy)

68 - Halflife - Mark Michalowski (featheredgalaxy)

69 - The Tomorrow Window - Jonathan Morris (featheredgalaxy)

70 - To Sleep of Reason - Martin Day (featheredgalaxy)

71 - The Dreadstone Memorial - Trevor Baxendale (featheredgalaxy)

72 - To the Slaughter - Stephen Cole (featheredgalaxy)

73 - The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin (featheredgalaxy)

[eightdoctor]

there really is something about halflife. god fuck. there really is something. about halflife the book halflife by mark michalowski

[threeeyedharemp3]

if anybody has a epub or pdf of 'shining darkness' by mark michalowski (dr who book) that they could link that would be brilliant thanks <3

[noelbobby]

Here we have a man named Michael Michalowski. He's trans. Michael likes carbonated lemonade, but he rarely gets it as he's not from somewhere that it's common and readily available. Sexuality statement time, Michael is heterosexual.

[theartofcoverart]

Pharaoh Sanders, Pharaoh released 1965 on ESP-Disk. Design by David Michalowski.

[theeighthdoctoradventures]

What is Tumblr’s EDA Ranking?

the EDA ranking tournament you’ve not been waiting for! this is not an elimination bracket! this is to determine a ranking of 1st to 73rd place.

ROUND FIVE: POLL THREE

The Sleep of Reason by Martin Day

vs…

Halflife by Mark Michalowski

- this is just for fun! all pairings were randomly generated by a ranking website

- you can leave propaganda in replies and reblogs

- no books will be eliminated

- this is absolutely not a perfect way of ranking, i can't be bothered to think any harder about this

[ars-polonia]

Piotr Michałowski,

Somosierra / Szarża w wąwozie Somosierra (Battle of Somosierra)

ca.1837, oil on canvas

[intriguingpeoplebyangelafloyd]

ASHLEY KIRILOW

29 April 1987

Ashley Kirilow was a 23-year old Canadian woman who was desperate for attention. In 2008 there was a lump discovered in her breast, the biopsy showed that it was benign.

She was working as a receptionist when she told her co-workers that she had been diagnosed with cancer. She then told friends, family members and the public that she had cancer and donly had months to live.

Kirilow shaved her head and eyebrows. She even starved herself to convince people of her illness. She raised more than $21,000 in funds for cancer sufferers. She set up her own charity called ‘Change for the Cure’ on Facebook. She appeared at benefit concerts and visited children in hospitals. She accepted a vacation at Disneyworld from a charity for those who are at risk of dying. Skateboard personality, Rob Dyer, organised the trip for her. There was a fundraiser for her at the bar, Club 54 which collected thousands of dollars for her in 2009.

Kirilow told her donors that both her parents were dead and sometimes she would tell people that her parents were both drug addicts who had disowned her (these stories weren’t true).

She was arrested in 2010 for fraud. When she was outed she said, ‘I know what I did was wrong but I was trying to get noticed.’ Her father stated that he became more suspicious of his daughter’s cancer claims, especially when she wouldn’t supply details or evidence of her treatment.

Kirilow pled guilty and was charged with several counts of fraud. She also pled guilty to defrauding Donna Michalowski, a woman who raised thousands of dollars for her. Those close to Kirilow were hurt and angry by her deception and refused to post bail for her, she also received death threats. Her dad was so upset that he refused to pay her bail because she lied to him and others too many times. In 2011, bail was paid and she was given temporary conditional release and was later sentenced to 10 months house arrest and afterwards community service.

She breached her bail conditions numerous times.

#ashleykirilow#ashleyannekirilow#annekirilow

[yamayuandadu]

Pride Month special 2025: shifts in gender, shifts in character. A Mesopotamian deity triple feature

The following article, in addition to being a pride month special, is also the third installment of a series which started with Nonconformity, ambiguity, fluidity and misinterpretation: on the gender of Inanna (and a few others) and continued in Ninshubur(s), Ilabrat, Papsukkal and the gala: another inquiry into ambiguity and fluidity of gender of Mesopotamian deities. This time instead of looking at the gender of a specific deity or category of deities I’ll instead discuss three remarkable cases in which a deity’s gender shifted: a mourning goddess turned fire god; a second, originally female, Dumuzi (feat. two unique passages which are as close to non-subtextual Inanna f/f as we can get for now - caveats apply); and a divine clerk in the service of Inanna who went from god to goddess without any other apparent changes.

Note that while I previously said this will be the final installment of the series, I have since realized at least one more will be necessary - stay tuned for further updates.

For now, more under the cut, as usual.

From mourning mother to “the handsome one”: Lisin (and Ninsikila)

Lisin already appears in the Zame Hymns from Abu Salabikh (c. 2500 BCE), one of the oldest religious texts presently known. She is the last of the deities listed, and her corresponding cult center is ĜEŠ.GI (reading uncertain), possibly to be identified as Abu Salabikh itself (Manfred Krebernik, Jan J. W. Lisman, The Sumerian Zame Hymns from Tell Abū Ṣalābīḫ With an Appendix on the Early Dynastic Colophons, p. 14). The hymn is fairly formulaic, and doesn’t say much about Lisin beyond her connection with ĜEŠ.GI. She is referred to with the title ama, literally “mother”, though it is unlikely that it should be taken literally. Instead it most likely functions as an indicator of her role as the tutelary goddess of the corresponding city  (The Sumerian Zame Hymns…, 46). 

A lament focused on Lisin (Lisin A; as you can see here it’s part of the ECSL system, but isn’t actually accessible online), written in first person from her perspective, portrays her mourning the death of an unnamed son, for which she blames her own mother, Ninhursag. She states that this event made her lonely, and that she has no friends or neighbors. The description of mourning itself is fairly formulaic, with all the expected mentions of tearing  her own hair, performing lacerations, et cetera. While multiple copies are known, they are imperfectly preserved, and not much can be said about it beyond that (Christopher Metcalf, Sumerian Literary Texts in the Schøyen Collection, p. 52-56). 

Lisin’s importance declined by the Old Babylonian period (c. 1800 BCE), if not earlier (Piotr Michalowski, Lisin in RlA vol. 7, p. 33). However, that was not the end of this deity’s history. At an uncertain point after the decline, the name was rediscovered by compilers of god lists. They correctly noticed that Lisin had a spouse, Ninsikila, but that was about it - not even the gender of those two deities was evident to them. Since Lisin typically comes first in older sources, up to the Old Babylonian period (Lisin…, p 32), the new generations of theologians concluded that the former must have been male and the latter female, effectively switching their genders around, as attested for example in An = Anum (Julia M. Asher-Greve, Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Goddesses in Context: On Divine Powers, Roles, Relationships and Gender in Mesopotamian Textual and Visual Sources, p. 103). To be entirely fair to them - in Old Babylonian sources listing couples together, such as the Nippur god list, the husbands pretty much always precede the wives (Goddesses in Context…, p. 80). It was a decent guess to make based on evidence available to them.

The cylinders of Gudea (wikimedia commons)

A second factor might have been the phonetic similarity between the name of Ninsikila and that of a goddess from Dilmun (Bahrain) at some point introduced to Mesopotamia (Lisin…, p. 32). Despite actually being named Meskilak, the latter could even be referred to as Ninsikila in Mesopotamian sources, as already documented in the long composition preserved on the cylinders of Gudea (Manfred Krebernik, Meskilak, Mesikila, Ninsikila in RlA vol. 8, p. 94). Lisin also developed a distinct new role as a fire deity in apotropaic magic, though it’s not certain if that first happened after the change of gender or before (Markham J. Geller, Healing Magic and Evil Demons. Canonical Udug-hul Incantations, p. 310; Michalowski favors a late date; Lisin…, p. 33). Through dubious linguistic exegesis relying on alternate sign values and homonymy - a favorite pastime of priests and other similar experts in the first millennium BCE - Lisin's name was provided with a new etymology, too. Both cuneiform signs forming it also had readings pertaining to fire (or at least were homonyms of signs which did), so as attested in an esoteric explanatory text (BM 47463) it came to be explained as “he who burns with fire”, “the burning one” or “he who burns an offering”. A further “translation” which arose as a result of similar inquiries was “the handsome one”, relying on the use of a homonym of the sign SI from Lisin’s name being a logographic representation of Akkadian banû (Alasdair Livingstone, Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Works of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars, p. 60-61).

A Kassite period depiction of Nanaya on a kudurru (wikimedia commons) One final step in Lisin’s career was the incorporation into the court of Nanaya in Borsippa in the late first millennium BCE (Rocío Da Riva, Gianluca Galetti, Two Temple Rituals from Babylon, p. 192). In a single case, the two of them alone occur in a ritual (Two Temple Rituals…, p. 220). In another, Lisin is just one of many courtiers listed (Two Temple Rituals…, p. 192; Usur-amassu, who will be discussed later, shows up too).

Sadly, as far as I am aware no sources shed any additional light on how exactly the connection between Lisin and Nanaya was conceptualized. It was possible to establish how it most likely developed, though. Nanaya’s temple in Borsippa - the Euršaba (“house, oracle of the heart”) - shared its ceremonial name with a temple of Lisin (Two Temple Rituals…, p. 203). While Lisin’s original Euršaba was located in Umma, a city which didn’t even exist anymore by the first millennium BCE, it continued to be referenced in laments and, most important, has an entry in the Canonical Temple List (Andrew R. George, House Most High. The Temples of Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 157). We know that in late periods theological lists could be essentially strip mined for deities to integrate into a city’s pantheon, as well documented in Seleucid Uruk (Julia Krul, The Revival of the Anu Cult and the Nocturnal Fire Ceremony at Late Babylonian Uruk, p. 261). It’s easy to imagine something similar happened in Borsippa as well. The original temple would doubtlessly be long forgotten by the late first millennium BCE, so a priest stumbling upon a reference to Lisin being worshiped there and concluding the local namesake temple is meant instead strikes me as entirely believable.

To be entirely fair, I think there’s a second possibility, though it doesn’t necessarily contradict that proposed by Rocío Da Riva and Gianluca Galetti. One of the rituals pertaining to Lisin’s new role in the Euršaba mentions a cultic installation dedicated to Nabu (Two Temple Rituals…, p. 193). Elsewhere, in astronomical texts, a star named after Lisin (Antares) is associated with Nabu and Borsippa, despite the origin of the name (Hermann Hunger, Lisi(n), RlA vol. 7, p. 32). Zachary Rubin argues that Lisin might accordingly be a stand-in for Nabu in a colophon from Borsippa which lists him together with Nanaya (The Scribal God Nabû in Ancient Assyrian Religion and Ideology, p. 70). However, the cult of Nanaya in Euršaba had no strong connection to Nabu to speak of overall (Goddesses in Context…, p. 282), and as far as I know that is the only house of worship in the city Lisin was introduced to.

From a modern perspective, the gradual shift from a dime a dozen mourning goddess to a one of a kind god certainly might feel almost like trans coding. Ultimately it’s pretty much entirely accidental, though - it’s doubtful anyone involved in Lisin’s theological transformations was aware of the full history of this deity.

(The other) "Dumuzi, she herself": Dumuzi-abzu

Tell al-Hiba, the ruins of Lagash, in 2016 (wikimedia commons) In the third millennium BCE, roughly at the same time when Lisin enjoyed a position of relative prominence in the Zame Hymns, the local pantheon of the state of Lagash included the goddess Dumuzi-abzu. This name can be translated as “good child of the abzu” (Gebhard J. Selz, Untersuchungen zur Götterwelt des altsumerischen Stadtstaates von Lagaš, p. 114). Something that needs to be addressed right off the bat is that the abzu is extremely unlikely to be personified in this case, and it’s virtually impossible Dumuzi-abzu is literally supposed to be the child of the literary character people usually think of today when they hear this term. Prior to the compilation of the Enuma Elish in the late second millennium BCE, which famously pairs Abzu and Tiamat as a theogonic couple, abzu was rarely, if ever, regarded as a deity as opposed to a location (Wilfred G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths, p. 217-218). In a number of sources from between the Early Dynastic and Old Babylonian periods it isn’t even consistently a designation of the watery subterranean domain of Enki/Ea, and might instead be described as mountainous (like in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta or the hymn Ishme-Dagan D). A variety of sources, including the Temple Hymns attributed to Enheduanna, use it as a poetic term for sanctuaries, making it potentially quite vague depending on context (The Sumerian Zame Hymns…, p. 95). What exactly does it entail in this specific case? Hard to tell, though there were many sanctuaries referred to with the term abzu in Lagash in the third millennium BCE, with Dumuzi-abzu possibly originating in one of them. Furthermore, interpreting the name as “good child of the sanctuary” would be a sensible parallel to fellow Lagashite deity Dumuzi-gu'ena, “good child of the throne room” (Akiko Tsujita, Dumuziabzu. A Goddess and a God, p. 8-9).

Dumuzi-abzu was the tutelary goddess of Kinunir (or Kinirsha), a lost city located somewhere in the proximity of Lagash (Goddesses in Context…, p. 61). We know very little about her character otherwise, though it can be safely assumed that she was closely associated with Nanshe and her daughter Nin-MAR.KI (Untersuchungen zur Götterwelt…, p. 116). Offering lists group her with the likes of Nindara, Ninshubur, Hendursaga and other figures of similarly moderate importance in this part of Mesopotamia (Untersuchungen zur Götterwelt…, p. 115).

At least in Lagash, Dumuzi-abzu’s name could be shortened just to Dumuzi (Untersuchungen zur Götterwelt…, p. 114). Manfred Krebernik actually proposed that every single reference to a deity named Dumuzi in Early Dynastic texts - not just from this one state, but also from sites like Tell Fara - pertains to her, and not to Inanna’s spouse, who at the time would be primarily known as Amaushumgalanna (Manfred Krebernik, Drachenmutter und Himmelsrebe? Zur Frühgeschichte Dumuzis und seiner Familie, p. 163-164). This might be too radical of an approach, though (Gebhard J. Selz, Dumuzi(d)s Wiederkehr, p. 215), and it has been suggested that even in Lagash at least in theophoric names Dumuzi might be, well, Dumuzi (Untersuchungen zur Götterwelt…, p. 116). 

As of 2024, it remains uncertain when Dumuzi became the default name of Inanna’s spouse, though first unambiguous examples are available from the Sargonic period, and it can be established with certainty that it was used fully interchangeably with Amaushumgalanna by the Old Babylonian period (Jana Matuszak, Hanan Abd Alhamza Alessawe, A Sargonic Exercise Tablet Listing “Places of Inanna” and Personal Names, p. 37). This doesn’t really change the fact that Dumuzi himself “did not belong to the leading deities in any period of Mesopotamian history” and his inflated modern importance owes a lot to the Golden Bough and similar disreputable sources (Bendt Alster, Tammuz(/Dumuzi) in RlA vol. 13, p. 433-434). This is not the time and place for further exploration of this topic, though.

Dumuzi-abzu was eventually seemingly largely subsumed into Dumuzi, but that only happened after her decline as an actively worshiped deity after the Ur III period, which in turn was a result of the area of the former state of Lagash losing its importance (Dumuziabzu…, p. 11-12). The god list An = Anum from the Kassite period identifies Dumuzi-abzu as a male deity, and as one of the sons of Enki, with no reference to any associations with Kinunir, Lagash, or deities from its pantheon. This is presumably a result of a reinterpretation of the abzu in the name as Enki’s dwelling. The shift in gender meanwhile reflected confusion with Dumuzi (Dumuziabzu…, p. 10-12). Andrew R. George suggests that Dumuzi-abzu came to be understood as a title designating the regular Dumuzi during his annual stay in the underworld, based on a broader pattern of confusion between the abzu (in this context explicitly the domain of Enki/Ea, ie. a mythical subterranean sea) and the land of the dead (The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, p. 861). The apparent conflation of Dumuzi and Dumuzi-abzu resulted in at least one further curiosity relevant to this article. There is a unique love poem which addresses Inanna’s lover, who is left nameless through most of the composition, as Dumuzi-abzu, as opposed to simply Dumuzi. Sumerian has no grammatical gender, so technically it would not be impossible to translate the relevant passage as if the traditional female Dumuzi-abzu was the target of Inanna’s affection, though obviously this is not exactly a plausible interpretation (Bendt Alster, Sumerian Love Songs, p. 143).

Modern replica of a typical Mesopotamian lyre on display in the Iraq Museum (wikimedia commons); in all due likeness Ninigizibara was envisioned with, or as, a similar instrument Surprisingly, Dumuzi-abzu isn’t the only usually feminine figure who got to replace Dumuzi in the role of Inanna’s spouse in an unusual composition. A single late copy of the lament Uru’amma’irabi (BM 38593) casts Ninigizibara as Inanna’s husband (Wolfgang Heimpel, Balang-Gods, p. 588). Usually this deity was described as a goddess, a harp (or lyre) player and a courtier of Inanna (Goddesses in Context…, p. 115). The unique copy is self-contradictory though, since on one hand an Akkadian gloss interprets Ninigizibara as masculine, on the other the passage itself refers to the deity as a “lady” (gašan), as opposed to “lord” (Balang-Gods, p. 588).

Son turned daughter: Usur-amassu

In contrast with Lisin and Dumuzi-abzu, who both became somewhat malleable simply because they were no longer worshiped, the final major case I’ll discuss is a deity who started as a largely irrelevant figure, but arose to a position of prominence only after their gender changed.

A god named Usur-amassu (“obey his command”, possibly implicitly “obey Adad’s command” given the two are defined as father and son in An = Anum) is first documented in the Old Babylonian period; in other words, roughly when the careers of Lisin and Dumuzi-abzu were already in shambles. As is often the case with minor deities, the earliest evidence are theophoric names, one example being Usur-awassu-gamil. However, it’s worth noting the name was itself a given name in the first place, with prominent bearers including a king of Eshnunna (Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The Pantheon of Uruk During the Neo-Babylonian Period, p. 229)

Uruk in the late first millennium BCE (artefacts-berlin.de; reproduced here for educational purposes only, in accordance with the terms of use)

Usur-amassu at some point came to be worshiped in Uruk. The oldest source attesting to this is a short text commemorating the dedication of a field by Kaššu-bēl-zēri, who served as a governor of the Sealand. Sadly nothing about the text makes precise dating possible; however, the element Kaššu is fairly rare in personal names, and was only in the vogue for a couple of decades, roughly between 1008 BCE and 955 BCE (The Pantheon of Uruk…, p. 225-226). However, in this city Usur-amassu was regarded as a goddess, not a god. This is surprising, as the name is grammatically masculine - and the person “asked” to obey is supposed to be the bearer (The Pantheon of Uruk…, p. 229).

It should be noted this is hardly the only case where the grammatical gender of a name doesn’t match the gender of a deity, though. As I discussed in the article about Inanna and gender linked in the lead, the name Ishtar is grammatically masculine despite not only functioning as a feminine theonym but even being the source of one of the two generic words for goddess in Akkadian. Looking further, the husband of Nungal, the goddess of prisons, bore the feminine name Birtum (“fetters”; Antoine Cavigneaux, Manfred Krebernik, Nungal in RlA vol. 9, p. 617; I doubt that we are dealing with a Bronze Age equivalent of a he/him lesbian, though I think it would be a fun way to provide this generally irrelevant deity with more personality). There is also the entire phenomenon of nin names, though it is likely that despite being conventionally translated as “lady”, “mistress” etc. this term was initially gender neutral (Goddesses in Context…, p. 6).

To be entirely fair, we do have clear instances of Usur-amassu’s name being partially modified after the shift in gender - the spelling Usur-amassa occurs in Kaššu-bēl-zēri’s dedication and in Neo-Assyrian sources, and while in the Neo-Babylonian period Usur-amassu predominates, this reflects a change in the feminine possessive pronominal suffix in Akkadian, and thus keeps the name equally feminine. The first element was never adjusted, though, and the expected Usri-amassu (or Usri-amassa) is nowhere to be found (The Pantheon of Uruk…, p. 228-229).

In at least one case, Usur-amassu’s gender was indicated by the use of a double determinative -  the standard dingir (“deity”), which prefaced theonyms, was combined with innin (The Pantheon of Uruk…, p. 228), a variant of Inanna’s name which could also function as a generic term for goddesses, at least in Uruk (The Pantheon of Uruk…, p. 122).

It might be worth noting that a somewhat similar practice is documented in Old Babylonian Mari, where dingir could be combined with nin for similar purposes. In a single case this created a minor conundrum for researchers, as one of the deities designated this way (to be fair, only in a single source) is Lagamal (“no mercy”; ironically known well from the personal name Lagamal-gamil, “Lagamal is merciful”), who is otherwise firmly a god. Possibly two unrelated deities with the same name arose in two different cities (Gianni Marchesi, Nicolò Marchetti, A Babylonian Official at Tilmen Höyük in the Time of King Sumu-la-el of Babylon, p. 5)

Paul-Alain Beaulieu assumes that the shift in Usur-amassu’s gender had something to do with her introduction to Uruk and subsequent incorporation into the court of Inanna, and that accordingly the name came to be understood as “obey her (ie. Inanna’s) command)”, though he doesn’t pursue this point further (The Pantheon of Uruk…, p. 229).

One might be tempted to wonder if perhaps the situation has something to do with Inanna’s oft cited association with change of gender (or at least of gender roles). I personally find this implausible. As I already discussed in the first article from this cycle, in sources which were contemporary with Usur-amassu’s arrival in Uruk this ability tends to be invoked in a highly specific, negative context. “May she change him from a man to a woman” and similar formulas appear as a penalty for oathbreakers in royal inscriptions and treaties, as first attested during the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I. The aforementioned formulas constitute a threat of the loss of a very specific sort of performative masculinity associated with "heroism" or martial valor. More broadly the threat of a change of gender also reflects the fear of a loss of autonomy, something generally tied to masculinity in everyday life in ancient Mesopotamia (Gina Konstantopoulos, My Men Have Become Women, and My Women Men: Gender, Identity, and Cursing in Mesopotamia; Ilona Zsolnay “Goddess of War, Pacifier of Kings”: An Analysis of Ištar’s Martial Role in the Maledictory Sections of the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions).

This is not really a good parallel to Usur-amassu's mysterious "transition". Perhaps most importantly, every single reference to it has humans be affected by the reversal, not gods. There is also no evidence that Usur-amassu was perceived negatively - in contrast with anyone who would hypothetically break a royal oath. Furthermore, nothing really indicates that her role changed alongside her gender. In An = Anum and the incantation series Šurpu the male version is grouped with his brother Misharu (“justice”) and Ishartu (“righteousness”); the sources pertaining to the feminine version from Uruk similarly portray her as a deity of justice, “who renders judgment for the land”, essentially a divine judiciary clerk (The Pantheon of Uruk…, p. 229). In contrast with martial valor, as far as deities go this role is pretty clearly not really tied to masculinity - or femininity, for that matter (for an overview of judiciary deities and their perception see Manfred Krebernik, Richtergott(heiten) in RlA vol. 11). The change of gender also seemingly didn’t impact Usur-amassu’s preexisting connections, as an inscription from Uruk dated to the reign of Nabonassar explicitly refers to her as a daughter (bukrat) of Adad (The Pantheon of Uruk…, p. 228).

It’s unclear how Usur-amassu was introduced to the local pantheon of Uruk, but evidently she won over the inhabitants of Uruk pretty quickly. In the Neo-Assyrian period she was one of the deities representing the city during coronations of Assyrian rulers (The Pantheon of Uruk…, p. 227). In the following Neo-Babylonian period she was one of the five main deities of the city, next to Inanna/Ishtar, Nanaya, Urkayitu (“the Urukean”, an epithet of Inanna turned into a personification of the city) and Bēltu-ša-Rēš (The Pantheon of Uruk…, p. 179). Thanks to Usur-amassu’s reasonably prominent position in the pantheon of Uruk, she is well represented in the Eanna archives, which document assorted paraphernalia prepared for statues representing her (The Pantheon of Uruk…, p. 230-244). As a curiosity I feel obliged to point out that in one case a necklace belonging to Usur-amassu was loaned for a festival of Dumuzi (The Pantheon of Uruk…, p. 335-336). Alas, this evident prominence is not really reflected in publications aimed at general audiences, let alone in popculture. Last attestations of Usur-amassu come from the period of Seleucid rule over Mesopotamia. She retained a degree of importance in Uruk, as expected (The Pantheon of Uruk…, p. 227). The Eanna actually didn’t exist anymore, but like other deities associated with it she was simply moved to the freshly built Irigal instead (The Revival…, p. 90). Regardless of whether the shift in her gender had anything to do with the primary denizen of both temples, evidently their association was close enough to keep Usur-amassu afloat for the final few centuries of the city’s history.

Postscriptum

This article was initially intended as a pride month special in… 2023? Possibly earlier? I ended up abandoning its original form for a time, and eventually cannibalized its two most major sections, dealing with Shaushka, Ninsianna and Pinikir, for the recent article about Inanna, deities associated with her, and gender. I couldn’t just discard the rest, though, and now you can finally read it all. Much of the information is already on wikipedia through my long term efforts, but now it’s also accessible here, with some extra speculation as a bonus. While this is ostensibly a pride month special, technically none of the sources discussed are really focused on lgbt matters, unless you squint really hard at the two unusual passages I brought up in Dumuzi-abzu’s section. However, I still think the topic of deity gender changes is interesting - if nothing else, it shows that gender was no less malleable than any other aspect of a deity’s character under the rain circumstances. And the process cannot always be neatly explained.

Furthermore, nothing really prevents one from trying to rationalize the changes as a reflection of the respective deities’ identities in a work of fiction featuring them. It’s important to remember that Mesopotamian gods were reinterpreted to meet the needs of new audiences many times, with contemporary institutions, social phenomena or geopolitical developments projected back into the mythical past, especially in literary works (attributing downfall of legendary rulers to insufficient devotion to Marduk is particularly funny, seeing how late his rise to prominence was). Trying to condense Lisin’s puzzling history into something coherent and making him a trans man in the process would thus, arguably, be just a modern example of a similar phenomenon. As long as you don’t alter the content of the actual historical sources, this sort of playful engagement with the material seems more than fine.

[new-years-digital-dash]

State-corporate crime is a concept in criminology for crimes that result from the relationship between the policies of the state and the policies and practices of commercial corporations. The term was coined by Kramer and Michalowski (1990), and redefined by Aulette and Michalowski (1993). These definitions were intended to include all "socially injurious acts" and not merely those that are defined by the local criminal jurisdiction as crime. This is not universally accepted as a valid definition so a less contentious version has been adopted here. As an academic classification, it is distinguished from:

corporate crime, which studies deviance within the context of a corporation and by a corporation, or individuals representing the corporation;

political crime, which is crime directed at the state; and

state crime or "state-organised crime", which studies crimes committed by government organisations (Chambliss: 1989).

One of the assertions made by those involved in this work is that a focus on the actual relationship between the state and corporations dependent on the state for their profitability can expose a more complete range of criminal activity than might be provided by independent analyses of solely corporate or state-organised crimes.

Crime mapping is used by analysts in law enforcement agencies to map, visualize, and analyze crime incident patterns. It is a key component of crime analysis and the CompStat policing strategy. Mapping crime, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), allows crime analysts to identify crime hot spots, along with other trends and patterns.

ADAM TIDJANI

[loveartformyself]

Napoleon on the Horseback

Piotr Michalowski