Scholars believe that Inanna and Ishtar were originally separate, unrelated deities, but were equated with one another during the reign of Sargon of Akkad and came to be regarded as effectively the same goddess under two

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Inanna has posed a problem for many scholars of ancient Sumer due to the fact that her sphere of power contained more distinct and contradictory aspects than that of any other deity. Two major theories regarding her origins have been proposed. The first explanation holds

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Gwendolyn Leick assumes that during the Pre-Sargonic era, the cult of Inanna was rather limited, though other experts argue that she was already the most prominent deity in Uruk and a number

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The Sumerians worshipped Inanna as the goddess of both warfare and love. Unlike other gods, whose roles were static and whose domains were limited, the stories of Inanna describe her as moving from conquest to conquest. She was portrayed as young and impetuous,

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Inanna's twin brother was Utu (known as Shamash in Akkadian), the god of the sun and justice. In Sumerian texts, Inanna and Utu are shown as extremely close; some modern authors perceive their relationship as bordering on incestuous. In the myth of her descent into the

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In addition to the full conflation of Inanna and Ishtar during the reign of Sargon and his successors, she was syncretised with a large number of deities to a varying degree. The oldest known

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Symbols
Inanna/Ishtar's most common symbol was the eight-pointed star, though the exact number of points sometimes varies. Six-pointed stars also occur

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