Perhaps the most famous goddess from Mesopotamia – and one of the most well–known ancient goddesses tout court – is the deity that was known in Sumerian as Inanna and in Akkadian as Ištar. This goddess of love and war was widely popular in daily religious life, material culture, and mythology. And she appeared to have influenced belief systems around ancient west-Asia and the Aegean.¹ As such, many aspects of this goddess were worshiped separately and other gods were thought to be related to her or were identified with her. It is therefore not being overly skeptical that some scholars wonder whether another Mesopotamian love goddess, Nanāya, is merely an aspect of her more famous counterpart. Specifically, because Nanāya was sometimes presented as being her daughter! So, let us today find out whether Nanāya was actually an independent deity with her own cult or merely a representation of a more famous goddess that many today would still recognize.²

One interesting aspect of our search for Nanāya, who was primarily a goddess who was entrusted with specifically romantic love, is that her worship not only spread around ancient west-Asia and the Mediterranean, but that it in addition took a long time for her to actually be forgotten.³ We find evidence of the goddess’s sway in places as far apart as Egypt and central-Asia, and she sticks around until far into our Common Era.⁴ The longevity of Nanāya and variety of times and places, when and where people incorporated her into their religious beliefs and practices, makes the question of her origins all the more salient – and this blog interesting to a very wide public indeed!

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Inanna, Ištar, and Nanāya

An important aspect of Mesopotamian religion, that is the religious practices, beliefs, and adjacent material culture during antiquity in what is now Iraq and parts of Syria, was syncretism. Most relevant for us is the fact that during the third millennium BCE, Akkadian speaking peoples incorporated Sumerian gods and goddesses into their own pantheon.⁵ And this included equating the Sumerian goddess Inanna with the goddess Ištar. (In order to avoid confusion – predominantly my own – I will from now on refer to this goddess by the cumbersome moniker Inanna/Ištar.) Though, like with the origins of Nanāya, the relationship between the Sumerian goddess Inanna and the Akkadian goddess Ištar is also disputed. Some salient facts, on which most agree, are that the name Ištar derives from a male god of war and that the goddess was so famous that her name became a byword for female deities.⁶ So influential was Inanna/Ištar, that it has been suggested that a number of local goddesses was also taken together in the divine person of this goddess.⁷ These facts, that the very term Ištar was used to denote other goddesses and that she incorporated within her many deities, make it so difficult to establish whether the goddess we are curious about, Nanāya, was indeed an independent deity.

That the goddess of love and war that was Inanna/Ištar was intimately connected to the goddess Nanāya, who was (as we already saw) also in the love business, cannot be denied. For example, Nanāya was worshiped in a kind of trinity together with her daughter – who was known in Sumerian as Kanisura and in Akkadian as Uṣur-Amassa – and her more famous counterpart in the ancient Mesopotamian cities of Uruk and Kiš during the first half of the second millennium BCE. And there are scholars who argue that the name Nanāya can be translated as ‘little Inanna’ and that the use thereof stresses the loving side of Inanna/Ištar.⁸ Later in Mesopotamian history, there is also more data, primarily textual, that indicates that Nanāya became widely viewed as more of an aspect of Inanna/Ištar – though not all scholars agree on this count.⁹ On the other hand, her later endurance as an independent goddess attests to the fact that, despite some contraindications in our texts from the first millennium BCE, Nanāya started out as an independent deity and did stay that way on some level.¹⁰

And our evidence does corroborate, I think, that Nanāya was independent of her more famous counterpart in Mesopotamia during at least parts of antiquity. Even if she was later more and more identified with Inanna/Ištar – and that is still a big if. With her first appearance in our record, on a god list from the end of the third millennium BCE, she debuts independently from Inanna/Ištar. What’s more, here and in other places Nanāya is associated with another goddess, Bizela, who is herself an independent deity that served as a courtier to important Mesopotamian goddesses.¹¹ And not only was she part of the aforementioned trinity with Inanna/Ištar in Uruk and Kiš, but she was also the patron deity – or queen – of other cities.¹² And towards and during the first millennium BCE, the cult statue of Nanāya, who was in this context also known as Tašmētu, is thought to have been ritually married with the cult statue of the god Nabû.¹³ An occasion that had its own place on calendars that have survived to our time.¹⁴ Naturally, not all mentions of Nanāya are created equal: when Inanna/Ištar is conspicuously absent in a religious text and Nanāya occupies her usual spot, I get nervous.¹⁵ But under certain circumstances – when she accompanies Nabû, for example – we can be reasonably sure that Nanāya is referenced as her own person. Even if that person is delightfully divine.

Proper Divine Parenting

Now that we have established that Nanāya can be considered an independent goddess, even back in ancient Mesopotamia, let us look at a text which features her without ever mentioning Inanna/Ištar. In many well-known myths, the gods are not the best of parents; both to their divine and to their mortal offspring. Many of you will now inadvertently dwell on the antics of Zeus, head of the ancient Greek pantheon and paragon of questionable parenting.¹⁶ As such, I wanted to share with you an Akkadian hymn to the goddess Nanāya wherein her father Anum reassures her in a touching scene. This is love, of course, but not the love that we discussed heretofore. Because there are many kinds of love and some seldom feature as the subject of romantic comedies or as the responsibility of the goddesses whom we met today – including parental love, with which this hymne is concerned. I cite the two, in my opinion, most affecting verses:¹⁷

l. 17   i-ku-ul-la-tu i-la-tim [ra]-bu-um [A]-nu-um
l. 18   a-li-du-uš [u₂]-ul-li [r]e-e-šu-uš
l. 19   et-tum [mu]-uš-ta-ar-ḫa-at u₃ ka-na-at
l. 20   i-ši-im-ši na-aš-ma-ḫi [ka]-da-ša ul-ṣa-am

l. 21   [ṣu₂]–ḫi-iš si-qa₂-ar¹⁸ ḫu-da-tim
l. 22   i-ta-wu-u₂ an-ša-aš u₂–ša-an-ma-ar li-ib-bu-uš
l. 23   be-le-e-ti [š]a da-ad-mi ab-ra-ti-ši-in
l. 24   pa-al-sa₃-a-ši-[i]m¹⁹ ki ^DUTU ni-šu nu-ri-iš-ki

l. 17   Anum the great, from among all goddesses,
l. 18   her begetter, has raised her head.
l. 19   She, the unique one, is magnificent and honoured.
l. 20   He decreed for her exuberance […] (and) rejoicing.

l. 21   Laughingly, a word of joy
l. 22   he said to her, making her heart radiant:
l. 23   “You rule over the world’s inhabitants!
l. 24   The people look upon you(!), upon your light, as (at) the sun’s!“

The joy of the god Anum and the reciprocation by Nanāya warms my own proverbial heart. And it is an interesting exploration which sidesteps her core responsibilities as a goddess. That the goddess of romantic love, which is today mostly interpreted as the physical aspects thereof, is touched by an entire other kind of love.²⁰ Our goddess, like many of us human beings, did contain multitudes.

Conclusion: Long-Living Nanāya

Despite her disputed origins, the mortal attention for the goddess Nanāya proved both widespread and long lasting. As Joan Goodnick Westenholz argues, there is a case to be made that this deity was the greatest goddess of ancient Mesopotamia, greater even than well-known supernatural ladies like Inanna/Ištar.²¹ Because beyond ancient Mesopotamia, she was venerated by the likes of the Romans and Greeks. And her presence in the various Persian empires brought her to the attention of early Islamic writers. What’s more, Nanāya is even mentioned in the freakin’ Bible, whereas Inanna/Ištar is only referenced obliquely.²² Whatever syncretisms may have happened in the latter part of the history of ancient Mesopotamia, the goddess Nanāya was not partial to be swallowed up by some other deity.

It is interesting, overlooking the intellectual journey we took today, how our understanding of the past is often inadvertently focused on merely certain aspects. Last week we already saw how only a certain iteration of the Mesopotamian city had managed to enter the popular consciousness of the 21^st century and today we found out that the position of that region’s most famous goddess was not as all-encompassing as pop-culture portrayals would unintentionally lead you to believe. It is, as I like to state without any self-interest, part of the added value of reading blogs such as these – we can see the past in more colors, more detail, and more problems than we thought we already knew.

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References

1. Fritz Graf, “What is Ancient Mediterranean Religion?”, in: Sarah Iles Johnston (ed.), Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 11; Jeremy A. Black & Anthony Green, Gods, Demons, and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), p. 108.
2. Brigitte Groneberg, “The Role and Function of Goddesses in Mesopotamia”, in: Gwendolyn Leick (ed.), The Babylonian World (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 323.
3. Martin Stol, “Nanea”, in: Karel van der Toorn et al (eds.), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 1999), p. 612; Joan Goodnick Westenholz, “Nanaya: Lady of ystery,” in: Irving L. Finkel & Markham J. Geller (eds.), Sumerian Gods and their Representations (Groningen: Styx, 1997), p. 57.
4. Joan Goodnick Westenholz, “Trading the Symbols of the goddess Nanaya”, in: Peter Wick & Volker Rabens (eds.), Religions and Trade: Religious Formation, Transformation and Cross-Cultural Exchange between East and West (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 167.
5. Paul-Alain Beaulieu, “Histories – Mesopotamia”, in: Sarah Iles Johnston (ed.), Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 168.
6. Ivan Hrůša, Ancient Mesopotamian Religion: A Descriptive Introduction (Münster: Ugarit Verlag, 2015), p 51.
7. Black & Green, Gods, Demons, and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 108.
8. Groneberg, “The Role and Function of Goddesses in Mesopotamia”, p. 323.
9. Michael P. Streck & Nathan Wasserman, “More Light on Nanaya”, Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie 2012, 102 (2), p. 183, note 3; Black & Green, Gods, Demons, and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 109, 134. For respectively an opponent and a proponent of this later syncretism with Inanna/Ištar, see: Westenholz, “Nanaya”, p. 80; Martin Stol, “Nanaja”, in: Dietz O. Edzard et al (eds.), Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie – Band 9 (Nab-Nuzi) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998-2003), p. 147-148,
10. And we may wonder whether identifying Nanāya with Inanna/Ištar does not merely stem from ancient scholars’ attempts to create theological homogeneity instead of actual beliefs, see: Westenholz, “Inanna and Ishtar”, p. 342.
11. Westenholz, “Nanaya”, p. 58.
12. Joan Goodnick Westenholz, “Inanna and Ishtar: The Dimorphic Venus Goddesses”, in: Gwendolyn Leick (ed.), The Babylonian World (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 342.
13. Frans A.M. Wiggermann, “Nackte Göttin (Naked Goddess). A. Philologisch”, in: Dietz O. Edzard et al (eds.), Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie – Band 9 (Nab-Nuzi) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998-2003), p. 51; Black & Green, Gods, Demons, and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 157. We already met Nabû, if you recall, as the son of the great god Marduk in a previous entry of the series Forgotten Gods.
14. Hrůša, Ancient Mesopotamian Religion, p 95-96.
15. That’s why I did not mention some very famous texts that include prayers and ritual instructions, specifically when they hail from the first millennium BCE, see: Westenholz, “Nanaya”, p. 67; Hrůša, Ancient Mesopotamian Religion, p. 115-116.
16. Kassandra Jackson, “Father-daughter Dynamics in the Iliad: The Role of Aphrodite in Defining Zeus’ Regime”, in: Amy C. Smith & Sadie Pickup (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Aphrodite (Leiden: Brill, 2010), p. 161.
17. Streck & Wasserman, “More Light on Nanaya”, p. 187-188. The text was probably written in northern Babylonia during the first half of the second millennium BCE, see: Ibidem, p. 185. As is customary by now, I have italicized the Akkadian and presented the Sumerian terms and names, which are used here as word signs and determinatives, with CAPITALS. Some of the damaged signs are at least partly legible and are marked by Streck and Wasserman with half square brackets. As some browsers struggle with displaying this kind of brackets, I have opted in this blog to uniformly use only full square brackets with damaged signs. For the system used here, see: Jean-Jacques Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles, Edited by Benjamin Foster (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004), p. xvii.
18. Jeremy A. Black et al (eds.), A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), p. 325, 449.
19. The signs ŠI and IM should be read here as KI and IM, see: Streck & Wasserman, ”More Light on Nanaya”, p. 192.
20. Westenholz, “Nanaya”, p. 64; Stol, “Nanaja”, p. 147.
21. Westenholz, “Nanaya”, p. 57.
22. Tzvi Abusch, “Ishtar”, in: Karel van der Toorn et al (eds.), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 1999), p. 455; Stol, “Nanea”, p. 612-614.