Ishtar (Venus)
ISH-tar
babylonian: Ištar
Definition
Ishtar (Sumerian Inanna; written in cuneiform as dDele-bat or d15) is the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war, identified with the planet Venus. Within Enūma Anu Enlil — the master series of celestial omens — the Ištar section (Tablets 59-63 in the Reiner-Pingree edition) deals with the planets. Tablet 63, the Venus Tablet of Ammiṣaduqa, is the foundational planetary-omen text and the earliest dated systematic record of planetary observation that survives in cuneiform.
In Tradition
In Babylonian astral religion, the visible planet was the goddess made visible. Ishtar's two sides, love and war, were mirrored in the way Venus appears: as a morning star she carried the warrior aspect, as an evening star the love aspect. Both the Old Babylonian Reiner-Pingree planetary-omen corpus and the Late Babylonian astronomical record preserve this split.
In Practice
Babylonian scribes tracked the full cycle of Venus — its first appearance as a morning star, its stretch of morning-star visibility, its disappearance into superior conjunction, its first appearance as an evening star, its stretch of evening-star visibility, and its disappearance into inferior conjunction — and reported to the Assyrian king anything unusual in the dates, the durations, or the way the planet looked. The Ammiṣaduqa Venus Tablet (Tablet 63 of Enūma Anu Enlil) records 21 years of Venus observations from the reign of Ammiṣaduqa — about 1650 BCE on Huber's 1982 short chronology — with a predicted outcome for each visibility phase. It remains a foundational text in debates over Old Babylonian chronology, because that 21-year pattern can be reproduced astronomically and so used to anchor dates.
Historical Origin
The earliest dated systematic record of planetary observation is the Ammiṣaduqa Venus Tablet (Old Babylonian, about 1650 BCE on Huber's 1982 chronology). It is edited in Reiner-Pingree, *Babylonian Planetary Omens* (BPO), Volume 1, and discussed in Rochberg, *The Heavenly Writing* (sections 1.2.2 and 2.1), and Hunger-Pingree, *Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia*.
Further Reading
- Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing
- Hermann Hunger & David Pingree, Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia
- Erica Reiner & David Pingree, Babylonian Planetary Omens (BPO)