Dumuzi, Geshtinanna, and the Seasons

The underworld's law, however, is that no one may leave it without providing a substitute to take their place, and Inanna is escorted back to the world of the living by a troop of demons whose task is to drag someone down in her stead. Passing through her cities, she finds her officials and courtiers in mourning for her, and spares them each in turn, but when she reaches her own husband, the shepherd god Dumuzi, she finds him seated on her throne in fine clothes, showing no sign of grief at all. Enraged, she fixes the demons' gaze on him, and Dumuzi is dragged down to the underworld in her place, despite his sister Geshtinanna's attempts to hide and then to substitute herself for him.

The poem's final resolution, recorded in a separate but related text, has Geshtinanna successfully negotiate a compromise: she and Dumuzi will each spend half the year in the underworld and half above, alternating so that neither is permanently absent from the world of the living. Assyriologists and comparative mythologists have long read this alternating absence and return as a Mesopotamian etiology for the agricultural cycle, mapping Dumuzi's time below onto the dry season when shepherding and grain both fail, though the Sumerian sources themselves do not spell out that equation as explicitly as later comparative scholarship sometimes implies.