Star of 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.

Inanna-Ishtar is among the best-attested deities of the ancient Near East, central to the Sumerian hymns of Enheduanna, the earliest named author in world literature, and to the myth of the Descent to the Underworld, in which the goddess passes through seven gates, surrendering an ornament at each until she stands naked before her sister Ereshkigal. Her Venus-star travelled: eight- and six-pointed stars in later Near Eastern and Mediterranean iconography draw, directly or at a distance, on this Mesopotamian astral vocabulary, and the same eight-pointed motif recurs on Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian seals centuries after the Kassite kudurru that first fixed the triad convention.

The symbol is best read in its own terms, a specific astral theology of the third and second millennia BCE, rather than assimilated to the later Star of David or to modern star emblems, with which it shares only geometry; the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, though it bears the goddess's name, carries a wholly different visual programme of glazed-brick bulls and dragons rather than the star sign, and the two are often wrongly conflated in popular accounts. Museums and modern jewellers now circulate the star as a generic emblem of Mesopotamian religion, a convention of display rather than a continuation of Kassite or Neo-Assyrian devotional use.