Two quick notes on a recent paper about Ishtar of Assur
2026 already saw the publication of one rather remarkable paper pertaining to Inanna, The Sand Deposit underneath the Ishtar Temple in Assur, Iraq: Origin and Implications for the Foundation of the Goddess's Cult and Sanctuary by Mark Altaweel, Andrea Squitieri, Eileen Eckmeier, Eduardo Garzanti and Karen Radner. Long story short, in 2023 the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage granted permission for German excavations at Assur to resume (they’ve been going on and off since the 1980s, with a variety of geopolitically motivated breaks), and the first notable results are already getting published. Given my interests it probably doesn’t come as a surprise that what I want to discuss is the new data pertaining to the temple of Ishtar at Assur. The new excavations revealed a layer of sand apparently purposely deposited during its foundation in the very beginning of the Early Dynastic period - possibly as early as shortly after 2900 BCE, but likely no later than 2700 BCE, based on radiocarbon dating of other finds (before it was assumed the temple dates to ca. 2600-2340 BCE). This is not unusual in itself - while the practice is not otherwise attested at Assur, in lower Mesopotamia ritually purified sand was commonly deposited during temple foundation (The Sand…, p. 10). The most straightforward explanation for the existence of the sand deposit would be that we’re dealing with an early example of connecting (an) Ishtar with Inanna of Uruk, coupled with importing a practice common in the south (ibidem, p. 13). More broadly, the familiarity with a southern custom so far in the north, and so early at that, serves as an important reminder that contrary to a still common misconception, it’s not actually possible to sharply delineate between a “northern”, “Akkadian” culture and a “southern”, “Sumerian” one. As far as the available evidence goes, from the dawn of recorded history Sumerian and Akkadian speakers coexisted and were hardly members of two incompatible cultures. Both the south and the north provide evidence for similar sort of state organization, even though differences in the approach to land ownership or accounting practices can be detected (Aage Westenholz, Was Kish the Center of a Territorial State in the Third Millennium?- and Other Thorny Questions, p. 698). Therefore, it’s not very surprising the early inhabitants of Assur constructed what was at least partially a “southern” style temple - just like it’s not surprising their contemporaries in Lagash favored the Akkadian name of the moon god, for instance. However, the investigation cannot end here. The excavations revealed a further unusual detail - the sand was apparently imported. It doesn’t resemble the river sand from the immediate proximity of Assur, but rather the deposits from considerably more distant Zagros foothills (The Sand…, p. 10).
A considerably later Hittite relief of Shaushka (right) with Ninatta and Kulitta (wikimedia commons). Why Zagros? The excavators suggest that the key to this mystery might lie in the prominence of the Hurrian deity Shaushka in this area. It might be that given Assur’s location at a key point on a route between the Hurrian northeast and lower Mesopotamia, Ishtar of Assur was deliberately linked with both Shaushka and the goddess of Uruk in some capacity (The Sand…, p. 13). Clear evidence of Shaushka’s impact on Ishtar of Assur and a few other Ishtars was available from later periods already - their (see the relevant excursus here for an explanation why I generally stick to neutral pronouns when discussing Shaushka in the abstract) handmaidens Ninatta and Kulitta appear in Neo-Assyrian sources in association with Ishtar of Assur, but also Ishtar of Nineveh and Ishtar of Arbela (John MacGinnis, The Gods of Arbail, p. 107). However! There’s no textual evidence for any Mesopotamian awareness of Shaushka - whether in the south or the north - prior to the reign of Shulgi (Gary Beckman, Ištar of Nineveh Reconsidered, p. 1). If the assumption from the new paper is correct, we can push the first instance of Shaushka’s relevance in Mesopotamia possibly nearly a thousand years further back. It’s obviously not a certainty, and a lot of caution is necessary, but the possibility is quite thrilling!
