The Eight-Pointed Star of Inanna-Ishtar

The eight-pointed star is the emblem of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love and war, known in Akkadian as Ishtar. It is one of the most frequently recurring divine symbols in Mesopotamian art, carved on boundary stones, cylinder seals and stelae, often beside the sun-disc of Shamash and the crescent of Sin to form a triad of the most prominent astral deities. A well-preserved instance is the kudurru of the Kassite king Meli-Shipak the Second, dated to around the twelfth century BCE and now in the Louvre, where the eight-pointed star sits directly above the crescent and the solar disc atop a stele recording a royal land grant, the three symbols invoked together to curse anyone who violated the boundary the stone marked.

A similar triad appears on the earlier kudurru of Nazimaruttash, from roughly two centuries before, showing the grouping was a settled convention across Kassite Babylonia rather than a one-off design. The star identifies the goddess with the planet Venus, whose appearances as morning and evening star map onto Inanna's double character as goddess of love and of battle. The number of points varies in practice, eight is standard, but six and other counts occur, and a rosette also serves as her sign.