Geshtinanna was the sister of Dumuzi, the goddess of the grape and the wine, and an interpreter of dreams. When her brother had a fearful dream of his coming death, it was she who interpreted it for him, weeping; and when the demons of the underworld came to seize him, she sheltered him as long as she could. After his capture, she would not be consoled. She offered herself to take his place — and the gods accepted: half the year Dumuzi should dwell below, and half the year Geshtinanna in his stead. So they passed each other at the threshold every spring and every autumn, sister and brother, the wine and the wheat, going and returning.
Before thisUtu
Next on the wallKingu
Curator’s note
What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay
Geshtinanna appears in The Dream of Dumuzi and at the close of The Descent of Inanna, both Sumerian compositions. Her substitution for her brother is one of the rare examples in ancient Near Eastern literature of female sacrifice for a male relative, and forms an interesting counterpoint to the more familiar pattern in which a goddess descends to recover her consort.
Kin in the sources
Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.
Sibling ofDumuziGeshtinanna was the sister of Dumuzi, the goddess of the grape and the wine
When the sources speak
Dated witnesses for Sumer. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline
- c. 3400–3000 BCE
- Uruk-period writing and monumental temple economies create the earliest recoverable administrative setting for named divine institutions.
- c. 2900–2350 BCE
- Early Dynastic city-states preserve local cults, hymns, royal inscriptions, and god lists; later copies often transmit older compositions.
- c. 2334–2154 BCE
- The Akkadian Empire expands bilingual and imperial patterns of divine identification without erasing local cult titles.
- c. 2112–2004 BCE
- Ur III administration and scribal schooling standardize many Sumerian literary and liturgical forms.
- c. 2000–1600 BCE
- Old Babylonian schools copy major myths, laments, hymns, debates, and heroic narratives in the form most often used by modern editors.
- c. 1650–1200 BCE
- Hittite and Hurrian archives at Hattusa transmit Anatolian myths, imported Syrian materials, and ritual compositions.
- c. 1400–1190 BCE
- The tablets of Ugarit preserve the Baal Cycle, Kirta, Aqhat, ritual lists, and a dense Late Bronze Age West Semitic pantheon.
- c. 1000–612 BCE
- Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires collect, revise, and politically reinterpret older learned traditions.