Ishtar of Nineveh was the great Assyrian goddess of war and of love — Sumerian Inanna under another name, and yet not quite the same. She was the patroness of the Assyrian kings; she addressed them in oracles delivered through her prophetesses; her temple Emashmash at Nineveh was among the most splendid in the empire. Where the Sumerian Inanna's love-aspect predominated, the Assyrian Ishtar's war-aspect was supreme: she rode at the head of the Assyrian armies, and the kings invoked her constantly in their campaigns.
Before thisAdad
Next on the wallNabu
Curator’s note
What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay
The Assyrians distinguished sharply between Ishtar of Nineveh and Ishtar of Arbela; the two were treated as distinct goddesses with distinct cults, though both received the name Ishtar. Their oracles, preserved in collections from the libraries of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, are among the most direct first-person divine speech to survive from the ancient Near East. The image of Ishtar of Nineveh was sent abroad on diplomatic missions — most famously to the Egyptian court of Amenhotep III in the fourteenth century BCE, when the Mitanni king Tushratta dispatched her statue to Egypt to assist in the recovery of the pharaoh's health.
Kin in the sources
Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.
Named as the same god asInannaSumerian Inanna under another name, and yet not quite the same
Named as the same god asMullissuHer identification with Ishtar of Arbela in some Sargonid-period texts
Named as the same god asShaushkaShaushka's identification with Ishtar is direct and was acknowledged in antiquity
Named as the same god asAstarteAstarte was the Phoenician name of the goddess whom the Mesopotamians called Ishtar and the Sumerians Inanna
The same god in other rooms
The ancient sources themselves name these as one god under different names. See Inanna, Ishtar of Nineveh, Shaushka and Astarte hung together
When the sources speak
Dated witnesses for Akkad, Babylon and Assyria. 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.