Inana's descent to the nether world

"Inana's descent to the nether world" is a Sumerian literary composition focused on describing this goddess' plan to conquer the realm of the dead, ruled by her divine sister, Ereškigal, as well as the results of such attack. To reconstruct these 412 lines of composition, modern scholars have used more than fifty cuneiform fragments and tablets, from different space-temporal contexts. Though most of the surviving copies, identified at Ur and Nippur, are dated to the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE, the origins of this story appear rooted in the preceding millennium. The composition can be divided into five main sections: a) Inana's decision and preparations for the journey and the consequent arrival at the first gate of the Netherworld (lines 1-73); b) the goddess' interaction with Neti, the guardian of the Netherworld, and her subsequent passage through its seven gates (lines 74-163); c) the confrontation between Inana and Ereškigal and her captivity (lines 164-172); d) the process for rescuing Inana and the attempts to find her a substitute (lines 173-367); e) the imprisonment of Dumuzi, Inana's traditional divine lover, and the ultimate decision of having his sister, Geštinanna, taking turns with him in the Netherworld as Inana's substitutes. Sladek (1974:51) identified how this last section integrated an original independent story, focused on Dumuzi's death and known traditionally as "Dumuzi's Dream", which appears in circa seventy tablets. This composition has a profound literary richness, dealing with several different themes, such as the limits and rules of cosmic domains; limits to divine powers; conceptions on death and funerary practices; and of course, the nature and roles of goddess Inana. Despite the deep parallelisms with the storyline of the Akkadian composition known as "Ištar's Descent to the Netherworld", a closer look allows to observe a certain autonomy between both texts, which is visible in the goals, tone, and literary mechanisms of each one. For instance, it should be stressed how the Sumerian composition is more focused on Inana's actions and individual consequences, while the Akkadian text boosts this "personal" dimension into a cosmic one. In fact, by describing how Ištar's imprisonment impacted the fertility on both heavenly and earthly domains, the tone of the Akkadian text is much more intense (Katz 2003:256-258; Almeida 2015: 268-270). Accordingly, each introductory section expresses a thematic shift, which is deepened as the events are unfolded in the following segments.