Ishtar and Izdubar

by Leonidas Le Cenci Hamilton (Translator), Epiphanius Wilson (Introduction)

Ishtar is the Assyrian and Babylonian counterpart to the Sumerian Inanna and to the cognate north-west Semitic goddess Astarte. Ishtar is a goddess of fertility, love, war, and sex. In the Babylonian pantheon, she "was the divine personification of the planet Venus." Ishtar was above all associated with sexuality: her cult involved sacred prostitution; her holy city Uruk was called the "town of the sacred courtesans"; and she herself was the "courtesan of the gods." Ishtar was the daughter of Sin or Anu. She was particularly worshiped at Nineveh and Arbela (Erbil).

Genres: Sexuality

200 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2009

Reviews

[Bad Horse · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Izdubar" is the name Europeans first used for "Gilgamesh". This book claims to be a translation of the Legend of Gilgamesh, but large sections--like the first 2 "tablets"--aren't found in other sources, because they're extrapolations of what the story might have been, from fragments. I don't even know which version this is a translation of, but evidently many parts of it still hadn't been found when Hamilton finished & published his translation in 1884. And Hamilton changed the ending! He has Gilgamesh become immortal in the end. Maybe the ending was missing, & he assumed that must be how it ended.

This book caused me terrible confusion. I'd just finished writing an article on how startling it was that this Assyrian epic resembled modern literature so much in certain ways. Less than a week before going to press, I discovered that all the parts of it that I'd cited as evidence of Gilgamesh's modernity were extrapolations.

I revised my rating from 1 star to 4 because I discovered that the first edition, now unobtainable, explained in the introduction that large sections had been made up to fill out the story. Those made-up sections are well done, if not very Sumerian. The edition I read was based on a later reprint by the publisher, which cut out the entire introduction to save space, and so failed to mention that Hamilton made up a lot of the story. If you find a version with that introduction, please let me know!