One morning after Christmas when the winter sun shone with the warmth of an Irish summer, myself and a nursing colleague named Mary took a taxi south of Baghdad to the town of al-Hillah. Relieved that the taxi driver proved competent in negotiating the kamikaze city traffic we sat back and watched unruliness reigns in a sea of well-worn cars and pick-up trucks. The driver wove his way skilfully through minor skirmishes managing to avoid the pedestrians who suddenly stepped onto the busy roadway, apparently willing to leave their fate in the hands of Allah.
Pergampn 011 Head of Lion Ishtar shrine Nimrud 865 BC 001 Pergampn 010
When a traffic policeman, his face beaming red under the heat of the morning sun, raised an imperious white gloved hand our driver stopped right on cue. Outside Baghdad he drove through a maze of streets, past one horse villages lined with huckster shops selling everything from car-parts and kitchen utensils to packaged foods which were likely way past their sell by date. Small children played happily amongst the donkeys on sandy street verges. Any attempt at conversation with the driver was frustratingly thwarted, our Arabic being as non-existent as his English. We assumed he was married judging by the photograph of two young children displayed on his dashboard. Beside the photograph stood the image of a dark haired young woman her face partially covered by a gossamer yashmak that revealed voluptuous red lips.
“Definitely not his wife”, said Mary.
“I shouldn’t think so,” I nodded, bemused at this Arabic equivalent of a page three girl.
A string of glass prayer beads colored with the prophet’s emblematic green dangled from the rearview mirror. The heat of the sun shining through the pock-market windows lulled us into a state of semi slumber as the sultry voice of Umm Kulthum emanated from the taxi radio, our driver doing his best to sing along. We drove through the sleepy satellite town of al-Hilla, and out into the arid land that signaled the edge of habitation. Stopping by the side of a dirt track the driver pointed us in the direction of the most famous mud brick city in the world.
Passing through the unattended makeshift entrance we arrived at the Ishtar Gate, the most important of the eight entrances that once led into the city of Babylon. Built by Nebuchadnezzar II around 575B.C. it was made of blue glazed tiles decorated with reliefs. The dragon symbol of the chief Babylonian god Marduk, the city god of fertility, and the young bulls that represented Adad the weather god depicted in muted shades of yellow, brown and red stood out against the vivid blue of the background. Once an inscription on the door stated that the king had the roof of the doorway covered with the wood of “majestic cedars”, which more than likely came from the famous cedar groves of Lebanon, long since reduced to a handful of desolate trees. The gate marked the opening to the processional way that led to the temple of Marduk. Walls of blue glazed tiles decorated with lion reliefs, the sacred symbol of the goddess Ishtar, once lined the pathway which was now represented by a simple stretch of earth. The door is a full scale replica of a smaller reconstruction made from the original bricks which were excavated in the early 20th century by the German Archaeologist Koldewey. Under the old colonial rule of finders keepers, this reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate is now housed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin where a constant flow of visitors marvel at its majestic monumentality.
To the Babylonians, Ishtar was the goddess of fertility, love and war. Her personality developed from that of the more ancient Innana, the Sumerian goddess of carnal love who had neither husband nor children but was renowned for discarding her numerous lovers. First of the many goddesses whose emblem is the planet Venus, she was known as Queen of Heaven and the more chaste Christian Mary who would later share this title. Innana’s outbursts of rage helped raise her to the level of the male gods and she became goddess of war who led men into battle. Now here was a female figure I could identify with, a goddess with lusty human urges, so unlike the impossible image of womanhood symbolised by the Mary that the nuns and priests held up as exemplary and with whom I could never identify. Innana loved Dumuzi or Tammuz the protector of flocks and god of vegetation who died in winter and was reincarnated in spring along with the rest of plant life. In their dependence upon nature the Sumerians believed that the annual sacred marriage between the god and goddess must take place to secure the reproduction of plant and animal life and thereby ensure their own survival. The practice of sacred marriage is believed to have developed in Uruk in the Sumerian south. The king representing Dumuzi consummated the rite with a priestess of Innana. Later in Babylon a practice known as sacred prostitution developed from this rite where once in her lifetime each woman of the city went to the temple of Ishtar to offer herself to a stranger in service to the goddess.
Herodotus the Greek “father of history” or “father of lies” depending on you viewpoint was an early adherent of the propaganda that perpetuated the notion of the “Whore of Babylon”. He described the custom of “sacred prostitution” as “wholly shameful”, and tells us that rather than mix with the riff raff, the rich women of the city drove in their carriages to the temple of Ishtar, called Aphrodite by the Greeks. Once there the woman stayed until a male stranger had thrown her a silver coin and taken her outside to “lie with him”. The woman had no choice but to accept the first man who threw her a coin as once thrown it became sacred and could not be refused. When her duty to the goddess was completed the woman returned to her home where “it will be impossible to seduce her by any offer, however large”.
Recommended Reading:
Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City, Gwendoline Leick.
The Histories, Herodotus.
