Inanna and Gender Ambiguity: Some Evidence from Sumer

Dedication

For my teacher, Daniel Reisman, 1941 to 2024

Abstract

This paper presents two examples of the intersection of ritual and myth from approximately four thousand years ago. The focus is on gender ambiguity enacted in the rites of Inanna, Sumerian god of sexuality and fertility. Textual, linguistic, and archaeological sources are considered to explore the possibility of a four-tier gender system (no gender, female, male, both female and male) and how such a system might relate to the worship of Inanna.

Keywords: gender, Sumerian, non-binary gender, Inanna, sacred marriage, Royal Cemetery at Ur, Puabi, ancient goddess worship

Introduction

I begin by referencing one of the most provocative statements about gender from the ancient Sumerian literary corpus. Unfortunately, like the concept of gender itself, the passage is as ambiguous as it is provocative. The entire composition is challenging to translate. For the most part, a summary translation offered by the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL, Black et al., 2001) follows Reisman’s interpretation. However, although the site remains active, ETCSL has not been updated for almost twenty years. The site that is currently being maintained, the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), generally presents a translation after each line of transliteration, but for whatever reason, does not offer a translation for this composition (CDLI, 2024b).

All we know about the Sumerian corpus, indeed all we know about the Sumerian language and associated culture, has been the result of archaeological excavations. Large quantities of clay tablets have been unearthed from Asia Minor, particularly in an area referred to as Mesopotamia by European colonial powers. Sumerian could only be deciphered due to the existence of bilingual texts in Akkadian (of literary compositions and of reference materials such as lexical lists). Akkadian in its turn was deciphered from other multilingual sources, although the reconstruction of Akkadian was facilitated because it is a Semitic language and thus shares characteristics with modern Semitic languages. This is not true of Sumerian.

The script used to write Sumerian and Akkadian is called cuneiform. It was not an alphabet. Rather, the signs were originally pictographs based on words and then expanded to include syllables. Signs were multivalent — the picture for “mouth” was also used to write “word” but also for grammatical elements. Related concepts like “to eat” and “to drink” were written with modifications of the basic “mouth” picture. An important step in translating a cuneiform text, in whatever language in which it was written, is to select the appropriate reading of the signs from context, a process called transliteration.

As part of my graduate studies I was able to work through the transliteration and translation of the Iddin-Dagan composition with Dr. Reisman. We assembled hand-drawn copies of cuneiform tablet fragments and then transliterated and translated. Reisman had worked with the cuneiform tablets themselves, comparing the published drawings and transliterations with what he was able to see on the tablets and what he expected to see based on his preliminary translation. I am not so hands-on. Reisman could read a number of Ancient Near Eastern languages. I chose to limit myself to Sumerian.

I tend to think of the culture which produced these texts also as Sumerian, probably because this is what Professor Reisman taught me. I learned that Sumerian was the dominant cultural force for a large part of the ancient Near East from some time around the early third millennium b.c.e. The Sumerian homeland was in what was to become southern Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. I learned that the Akkadian homeland was further north, around Baghdad.

That is what I was taught. But no. The situation was more complex. The area was multilingual throughout the “Sumerian period” — one scholar has suggested it was multilingual as early as the end of the fourth millennium, that is, before 3000 b.c.e. (Zólyomi, 2011, p. 396; see also Gelb, 1960). To complicate matters further, Sumerian continued to be used as a language of learning long after it faded from everyday use. Experts in the field agree that by the period from which most of the extant literary texts in Sumerian date, the Old Babylonian period (early second millennium, i.e., after 2000), Sumerian was no longer a living language (Crisostomo, 2015). Scholars also have concluded that much of what does survive were school exercise tablets (Delnero, 2012), so not the most reliable of sources.

Many of these Old Babylonian literary texts in Sumerian feature stories about the activities of gods. These stories continued to be told in Akkadian, with various adaptations, including changing the names of Sumerian gods to Akkadian ones. This was certainly the case with a story about Inanna, called “Inanna’s Descent to the Netherworld,”  simply “Inanna’s Descent” or as I prefer it, “Inanna’s Journey” (see Jones, Mijares, and Dalglish, 2023; Wolkstein and Kramer, 1983, pp. 51-73). Inanna’s name becomes Ishtar, among other changes, but it is easily recognized as the same story (for an online text of “Inanna’s Journey,” see CDLI, 2024a; for Ishtar’s CDLI, 2024c). Since it turns out that this particular story is relevant to this discussion of gender ambiguity, I will be offering a synopsis of the Sumerian story after the following synopsis of our Iddin-Dagan composition.

Synopsis and Discussion of Iddin-Dagan A

The Iddin-Dagan composition I read with Reisman appears to be a script for a New Year’s ritual in which Iddin-Dagan has sex with Inanna, the female god of fertility. Sumerian scholars classify this text as a royal hymn and refer to ritual sex with Inanna as a “sacred marriage” (see Kramer, 1969; Lapinkivi, 2004). Iddin-Dagan was a king in the dynasty at Isin, a city in southern Mesopotamia. Reisman dates the Isin dynasty from 2017 to 1794 b.c.e., but does not place Iddin-Dagan chronologically within that span (Reisman, 1969, p. 13). While these dates fall within the Old Babylonian period, on stylistic grounds Reisman classified the hymn as neo-Sumerian (1969, pp. 11-12, note 51). “Neo-Sumerian” references a period of resurgence of the Sumerian language after the end of an Akkadian incursion southward (see Thomsen, 1984, pp. 26-30).

The hymn is divided into ten major sections of varying lengths. The first section opens with a greeting highlighting Inanna’s connection to celestial realms and light. The second section shifts to matters of Inanna’s earthly authority: she decrees fates and renders judgment. This section ends with a statement that the people walk before her. The next several sections describe this procession.

First, the various musical instruments played in the procession are named. In the next section a certain type of cult personnel — I’ll call them cult personnel 1 — is described as wearing distinctive clothing. Their hairstyle is mentioned as well as colored bands that decorate their hair or neck area. Next come a righteous  man — in one exemplar a righteous king — and a woman who holds a leadership role among other women. Music is again mentioned and weapons are introduced. 

The fifth section opens with the lines I quoted at the beginning of this paper. It is a very short section; the only other thing that happens involves a competition with jump ropes and colored cords. The sixth section opens with mention of young men and young women. The women are described in terms of their hairstyle. In Reisman’s translation, the men are “carrying hoops,” but ECTSL has the young men wearing neck stocks, a rigid collar worn by soldiers to protect the neck from sword gashes. This seems a better translation, since later in the sixth section, cult personnel 2 wield swords and make what sounds like a blood offering. The procession then ends with loud drumming (Reisman, 1973, p. 188; Black et al., 2001). 

By the seventh section  the focus shifts to descriptions of abundance, fertility. Various animals and plants are named, including fish and birds. A feast is prepared and married couples are said to make love. In the eighth section we learn something about the results of fertility: once the storehouses are full the people take their concern to Inanna for her to punish wrongdoing and reward the just. The theme of fertility is continued in the ninth section, where offerings are made to Inanna — offerings of incense, sheep, ghee and cheese, several kinds of fruit, beer, bread made with date syrup.

It is in the tenth section that we learn this is a New Year’s ritual. The “sacred marriage” is described. Afterwards Inanna sits beside Iddin-Dagan on the throne and he hosts a feast for her while musicians play.

In the procession we met two female-male couples as well as two types of cult personnel whose gender is not explicitly specified. But, I suggest, we can read gender from the descriptions. In section four, cult type 1 is described in terms of hairstyle and colored bands that decorate the head area. Then weaponry is mentioned later in the section. Conversely, in the fifth section, cult type 2 is described specifically in terms of weaponry, with hairstyle mentioned earlier in the section. Stereotypic as it may sound, hairstyle-related descriptions are feminine and weaponry mentions are masculine. Later in this paper I will be presenting evidence about why we should accept this gender equation. Since the syntax of the four processional sections is difficult, I can’t say for certain that both cult types are being described in terms of both genders. I can say that in both of these sections, gender markers are juxtaposed, just as in the intervening section women’s and men’s clothing are juxtaposed.

I have left the names of these cult personnel untranslated in part because they don’t translate easily into English and in part because the translations are contested.²  I can say that the cuneiform for the Sumerian name for cult personnel 1 could be read as “head-warrior” — not as in “lead-warrior” but as in “hairstyle-warrior.”  The spelling of the name of cult personnel 2 is a compound of the most common Sumerian word for the Land of the Dead (spelled with a pictograph for “mountain”) plus a form of the verb “to put or place.”  Significantly, the name for cult personnel 2 is the same name as one of the two creatures sent to rescue Inanna in “Inanna’s Journey.”  These two types of cult personnel generally appear together in ritual, so I am a little surprised that the name of cult personnel 1 is not the same as the name of the other creature sent to rescue Inanna. Still, it seems reasonable that these two types of cult personnel are meant to reference — or even embody — the two creatures who saved Inanna.

In “Inanna’s Journey,” these two creatures are made from the dirt under the god Enki’s fingernails. A. Leo Oppenheim has taken up the question of why the creatures were created in this manner. He first postulated that to prevent anyone from attempting to rescue Inanna, the god of the Land of the Dead, Ereshkigal, uttered a curse against anyone — male or female, born from a womb — who tries to do so (Oppenheim, 1950, p. 132). Such a malediction is not specified in the Sumerian composition, or even most versions of the story in Akkadian, but Oppenheim does offer evidence to support his supposition.³  However credible his evidence may be, and whether the prohibition was due to the god uttering a curse or whether it was simply a well understood law of the Land of No Return, Oppenheim’s explanation is useful in that it helps us make sense of the gender patterns we find in Iddin-Dagan’s hymn. To comply with the terms of the malediction, these cult personnel cannot be either female or male. They can be both, which is what I think the evidence from this hymn suggests.

Synopsis of “Inanna’s Journey”

The story opens as Inanna is making arrangements to visit the Land of the Dead. She dresses in full regalia and instructs her assistant about what to do if she is unable to return. After Inanna arrives at the Land of the Dead, she is taken through seven gates. At each gate she is divested of an item of her regalia. By the time she is taken into the presence of Ereshkigal, Inanna is naked. Ereshkigal condemns her to death.

After three days, when Inanna does not return, her assistant does as she had been instructed — going to other gods asking for someone to come to Inanna’s aid. The first two gods refuse to help but Enki agrees. He fashions those two creatures from the dirt under his fingernails and gives these creatures instructions about how to get into the Land of the Dead, how to trick Ereshkigal into turning over Inanna’s corpse, and how to revive Inanna.

This all goes to plan — until Inanna tries to leave the Land of the Dead, the Land of No Return. She is only allowed to leave if she provides a substitute. Demons are sent with her to retrieve this substitute. First they encounter Inanna’s assistant, who is in mourning for Inanna. Mourning is marked by wearing ragged clothing, sitting in the dirt, even by scratching oneself. Inanna is moved by her assistant’s faithfulness and will not let the demons take her. Two others are encountered, also in mourning. Inanna will not let them be taken either. One is described as Inanna’s “singer, manicurist, and hairdresser.”  About the other Ianna says “outstanding Lulal follows me at my right and at my left” (CDLI, 2024a).

So the demons and Inanna go on until they come to Inanna’s husband, the shepherd Dumuzi. They find him under an apple tree, but instead of being clothed in rags sitting in the dirt, Dumuzi is dressed in fine garments and sitting on a throne. Inanna is so angry she tells the demons to take him. Of course, Dumuzi does not go willingly. He appeals to his brother-in-law, the sun god, reminding him of the milk Dumuzi had supplied to the family and asking to be turned into a reptile to slither away from the demons. The sun god does as he asks, but…. Here the text breaks up and we don’t have what happens until the very end when Dumuzi is serving as substitute for half of the year and his sister is serving for the other half.

Linguistic Gender

Our task to understand how gender is constructed in the Iddin-Dagan hymn — and by extension perhaps in other Sumerian language compositions — is complicated by the way gender is treated by this language. I use the term “linguistic gender” to mean a distinction in grammar related in some way to a female/male dichotomy.⁴  Some languages, like Spanish and French, over-extend this difference, assigning “gender” to ordinarily non-gendered objects such as tables and chairs. These languages require different versions of pronouns and adjectives to mark agreement with this apparently arbitrarily assigned gender. Akkadian took this type of linguistic gender distinction even further, requiring gender agreement in the verb conjugations (for an introductory Akkadian textbook, see Erickson & Hugenberger, 2022).

In contrast, the Sumerian language is disinterested in gender distinctions to such an extent that even the vocabulary for speaking of gender is limited. There were words for “mother” and “father,” but none for “daughter” or “son,”  only a word for “child.”  Based solely on this grammatical analysis, I think it is safe to say the Sumerian language recognized three gender positions: female, male, and neither.

That is not to say that the speakers (or writers) of this language could not specify a gender for a child or other subordinate. In later periods especially, scribes wrote the character for “female” preceding the word for “child” to indicate that “daughter” was meant. Scholars call these presumably non-vocalized markings “determinatives.”  Due to the multivalence of the cuneiform writing system, determinatives had long been used to help clarify what reading was intended (for an introductory Sumerian textbook, see Bowen & Lewis, 2020).

Sumerian may not have pronouns based on gender, but it does have a different distinction, what linguists refer to as animacy (see Comrie, 1981, pp. 178-193). Perhaps it is more appropriate to think of this distinction in terms of a continuum of animacy — or even agency — because for this language the gods and humans fall on the animate side while animals and objects fall on the inanimate side. The inanimate pronoun was also used for collective entities such as assemblies and councils (Thomsen, 1984, p. 49, p. 71).

To return to the lines from our text quoted above, specifically the first and fourth lines, the passage is generally translated into English using third person plural, but the Sumerian text uses the third person inanimate possessive pronoun, “its”:

On its right side, men’s clothing is worn
On its left side, women’s clothing is placed⁵

Recalling that in Sumerian the third person inanimate could be used for collective entities, perhaps the participants as a group is being referenced. Or, perhaps “it” was used deliberately because of a desire for a pronoun to refer to ambiguous gender situations.

Gender in an Archaeological Record

It was the wearing of both female and male clothing at the same time that called our attention to this Iddin-Dagan hymn. Unexpectedly, the archaeological record also contains evidence of a similar type of gender ambiguity, not in terms of clothing, but in terms of the more durable artifacts placed on or near corpses at burial. Specifically, this evidence comes from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, from burials dated the Early Dynastic III and Sargonic periods, prior than the “stylistic date” of the composition and perhaps four or five hundred years before the date of the tablets.

It was the excavator, Leonard Woolley (1934), who named this the “Royal Cemetery of Ur,” on the assumption that the level of wealth revealed by the burials indicated royal status. This wealth included not just objects of gold, silver, and other precious materials, but human wealth as well. In one of the more memorable of these burials,⁶ three attendants were buried in the same chamber as the female principal; outside the chamber several more individuals were interred. We know the name of the principal from inscriptions found in the tomb, although how to read that name is not straightforward. The excavation team read the name in Sumerian, but an Akkadian reading, Puabi, has been widely accepted. I adopt the reading here, even though the exact transliteration of the name is still contested. The inscriptional material names her as queen, but unlike inscriptions for other queens from the cemetery, no husband is named (Hafford & Zettler, (2015); Penn Museum, n.d.).

Evidence for gender ambiguity in burials at the Royal Cemetery is presented in a study by Susan Pollock (1983). Her interest was not in a treatment of gender as such; her goal was to study the symbolism of prestige. She wanted to identify which artifacts were markers of status. To that end Pollock conducted a distribution analysis to determine if any of the objects associated with individual skeletons tended to occur together or tended not to co-occur.

One group thus identified consisted of objects such as axes, dagger, and whetstones (what we might call a “warrior” group). Pollock found that this particular group exhibited virtually no association or overlap with other groups. She interpreted this group of objects as representing a “male” dimension, while she considered a gold earring-silver/gold pin-wreath-gold ribbon “comb” group as a “female” dimension (Pollock, 1983, p. 153; shall we call it the “head-hairstyle group?). Pollock puts female and male in quotes because, she notes, she was unable to correlate these artifact groupings to the sex of the associated skeletons and because these artifacts might be related to occupation rather than gender. I think this lack of association to skeletons is an advantage since it allows us to see these artifacts as markers of how gender was socially constructed without regard to how that might relate to biology.

The majority of burials from Ur had to be excluded from Pollock’s analysis because they did not contain any distinctive grave goods. These lowest status or “subordinate” graves had no markings for gender, just as linguistically, Sumerian is indifferent to the gender of subordinates. What I find most intriguing about Pollock’s results is that many of the highest status burials contained both “female” and “male” artifacts. Pollock reports several instances were artifacts from one “gender” were on a skeleton and artifacts from another “gender” were found nearby (Pollock, 1983, pp. 154-159). So, some of the highest status burials were marked for two genders — just as in the Iddin-Dagan ritual where we met cult personnel who seem to be both female and male. We have now identified four possible gender positions: no gender, female, male, and both female and male.

I should note that the attendants — these subordinates who were killed in order to be buried with a royal principal — were marked for gender, and quite richly (Woolley, 1934; Pollock 1983). Does this mean that the model I have been developing is imperfect — or  has been imperfectly developed?  Were other factors at play?  I think of Inanna’s husband Dumuzi dressed richly and seated on a throne when he should have been in mourning. Were these attendants being offered as substitutes?  To be sure, we have moved from a simple family situation — adults and subordinate children — to a socially stratified situation with the poorest unmarked for gender, the intermediate marked as either female or male and the most elite who, according to Pollock, were marked for both.

One of the problems with archaeology as a means of reconstructing the past is that it offers a very close look at a very small slice of life — a single site may or may not be in any way representative of the larger culture. This applies to the Royal Cemetery. Even though these burial practices went on for a few generations, this time span is only a few hundred years out of millennia. The cemetery is also unique geographically. I know of no other sites like this from the ancient Near East. This “royal cemetery” seems to have taken a place in scholarship that is disproportionate to its actual significance. The cemetery is so compelling, I think, not just because of its dazzling wealth, but also because of its undeniable evidence of human sacrifice.

Puabi and Inanna

The last question I want to address is whether these instances of a combined female and male gender were limited to contexts associated with Inanna or whether they may have been more widespread. To address this question, I focus on the tomb of Puabi since information about this burial is readily accessible. Is Inanna referenced in any way in the burial of Puabi?  The answer to this question is yes. On her head Puabi wore a gold comb with seven spikes, each topped with a rosette with a lapis center [Place illustration 1 – here  Courtesy of the Penn Museum, image 299835.  Used by permission.  All rights reserved]. The rosette, a star-shaped eight-petaled flower, is one of the symbols of Inanna (Van Buren, 1939, p. 99).

Highly evocative of the fertility associated with Inanna were gold pendants found amongst about ten thousand small lapis beads. The excavator reconstructed a single item — what he called a diadem — although after careful study Penn Museum curators believe the beads and pendants were more likely from several separate pieces of jewelry [Place illustration 2 – here  Courtesy of the Penn Museum, image 296810.  Used by permission.  All rights reserved] (Pittmann & Miller, 2015). In any case, the pendants themselves are of gazelles, rams, stags, and bearded bulls, plus apples, date fruit, and date palms (Miller and Zettler, 2012).⁷  I am reminded of the seventh section of the Iddin-Dagan hymn with its listing of animals and  plants. These pendants also give a nod to Dumuzi sitting under his apple tree, Dumuzi claiming to have given milk to his in-laws. Some of the pendants were apples. Another set of pendants are a curious, loop-shape — often referred to informally as a “carpet beater.”  According to Penn Museum curators, the carpet beater depicts a harness used to hold animals together during milking (Miller & Zettler, 2012). 

The context of this find, in a burial, certainly suggests Inanna’s journey to the Land of No Return. Was the tableau of Puabi’s internment ritual — her final public appearance as she made her final journey — intentionally set to evoke Inanna?  It is tempting to pose this question in a way that pre-supposes an answer:  “what self-respecting, royal devotee of Inanna would not have had her burial staged to emulate “Inanna’s Journey?”  Did Puabi, or her survivors, intend her regalia to evoke Inanna’s in “Inanna’s Journey”?  I’m not sure. We have many images of Inanna (see Wolkstein and Kramer 1983 for a collection), but none of them appear to show her on this journey. We have only the description of Inanna’s attire from the composition where the most relevant lines are difficult to translate.

Puabi is certainly well dressed, and, I think I can say, in ways that appear similar to, but not exactly like, what we have from the text of “Inanna’s Journey” — even allowing for the inevitable loss of certain types of detail. Some remnants of cloth might survive archaeologically, but the absence of such traces does not indicate cloth was never there. We cannot know, for example, if Puabi wore make-up — Inanna wore eye make-up — but we do know that containers of cosmetics were found in the burial. And some of the things that do match up are relatively generic. Both Inanna and Puabi wear lapis necklaces and gold rings.

Puabi’s headdress seems much more elaborate than what Inanna wore. Puabi’s is made of precious metals; Inanna’s was made of cloth (it was spelled with the determinative for cloth.)  The bands of Puabi’s headdress remind me of the colored bands used in Iddin-Dagan’s procession.   

Though I did not find a one-to-one correspondence between Puabi’s burial and “Inanna’s Journey,” there are identifiable correlations between artifacts from Puabi’s grave and iconography used for Inanna in the sacred marriage ritual, the story of Inanna’s journey to the Land of the Dead, and other contexts. There are similar kinds of gender ambiguity in both the Iddin-Dagan hymn and Puabi’s burial tableau. It should be recognized that the rituals surrounding the burial of Puabi as a queen must have served a political agenda as well as a religious one. I certainly do not present this reading of Puabi in the Royal Cemetery at Ur as a counter to the work of Pollock and others (for example, Cohen 2005) who focus on different aspects of these burials. The tombs should be considered multivalent — just like the cuneiform writing system itself and in perhaps a slightly different way, the Sumerian gender system.

Conclusion

Working on this paper has certainly furthered my knowledge of how the ancients worshipped Inanna. I began with the assumption that Inanna’s sacred marriage and Inanna’s journey to the Land of No Return were two separate and very different episodes. The burial of Puabi makes it clear that the ancients did not necessarily make such distinctions, just as it suggests that the people of the Royal Cemetery might have had other goals besides just the disposal of their dead.

I also began with the assumption, based solely on Sumerian grammar, that gender expression might have been less problematic for these ancients. Adding evidence from textual and archaeological sources has deepened my analysis, allowing me to identify a four-tiered gender system:  unmarked for gender, marked for female, marked for male, and marked for both female and male.

Evidence for the fourth gender position is limited. The Iddin-Dagan hymn and the Puabi burial together suggest that this position might be tied to the worship of Inanna, specifically to the two creatures created from the dirt from under Enki’s fingernails to rescue Inanna from the Land of the Dead. It hardly seems surprising for a wealthy queen to have her own burial rites staged to emulate the myth of Inanna’s return from the Land of No Return, but in this case the abundance associated with Ianna seems to have been highlighted as well.

References

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Cass Dalglish, Jack Johannessen, Sean Sanford, and the Coreopsis peer reviewers for their thoughtful comments. Thanks also to Sharon Mijares for her encouragement.

End Notes

 Brackets here indicate corrections made to the published copy, where “men’s” and “women’s” were inadvertently reversed. Dr. Daniel Reisman and I discovered this error as we read the text together.

² Due to the peculiar way in which scholarship about the ancient Near East has developed, scholars have relied on philological studies made of the Akkadian counterparts of the cult personnel featured in the Iddin-Dagan’s hymn. But unlike Sumerian, Akkadian requires gender assignments to nouns as well as agreement between nouns and verbs. The Akkadian term for “cult personnel 1” has both a masculine and a feminine form in Akkadian. When scholars were first trying to understand the nature of this cult personnel, their philological studies were done on a masculine name (Reiner, 1968, p. 341), whether because this form of the name was more common or because of bias on the part of the scholars, I cannot tell. Working first in Akkadian blinded scholars to its possible “both female and male” gender category. Instead, Oppenheim looked to sexual behavior rather than gfender, concluding that these cult personnel “were made sexually impotent (perhaps in various ways)” (1950, p. 135). To reinforce this point, there exists an alternate spelling of our “head-warrior” spelled “head-female dog” (Soden, 1965, pp. 73-74). Following this reasoning, Reisman translated the name of cult personnel 1 as “male prostitute” (1973, p. x). 

Working independently of Reisman, a team from the University of Chicago compiling a multi-volume dictionary of Akkadian (CAD) rejected a sexual interpretation of the term:  

There is no specific evidence that he was a eunuch or a homosexual; the Era passage may mean simply that Ishtar turned his interest from the masculine role to the feminine role (Reiner, 1968, p. 341).

The source here referenced as “Era” has it that “Ishtar had changed [them] from men to women to show the people piety”  (Reiner, 1968, pp. 341-342). The Chicago team’s study of the term may not have been available to Reisman while he was doing his research, but Reisman’s translation was repeated in the ETCSL translation, well after the publication of the relevant volume of CAD. 

I follow CAD in being suspicious of the interpretation that sexual practices rendered these priests “not male,” or at least the priests being described in the Iddin-Dagan text. The internal evidence of the text, together with evidence like that from the cemetery at Ur, make a strong enough case for solely gender-based understanding of the cult personnel. 

³ This evidence includes one damaged line from a late version of the Akkadian version, text from a different composition, plus common curses from building inscriptions and legal texts (Oppenheim, 1950, pp. 132-135). 

⁴ Linguistically, the term gender might also refer to any system of noun classes, without reference to differences in sex. In the context of this discussion, I find it useful to limit the notion of linguistic gender to its narrower meaning of one particular type of noun class system related, however remotely, to sex.

⁵ Translation by the author, following Sumerian word order. Not only does the use of passive voice avoid the question of the gender of those wearing the garments, but it seems appropriate since no agency is specified.

⁶ Burial PG8000

⁷ The question-and-answer section at the end of this video includes discussion of relationships between the Puabi tomb and “Inanna’s Journey.”