Ishtar

by Deborah Biancotti

  The first day, Sargon was kept out of Ishtar’s bedroom. He was furious, wanting to see his daughter. Ishtar knew she should feed from her own breasts and she struggled to do so, though in a way which made the midwives roll their eyes. They didn’t say anything, but I knew they were thinking a mortal woman manages this but a goddess chooses not to.

  She gave perhaps five mouthfuls of milk to the baby then gave up. “Hire a wet nurse. I have no milk. My breasts are there for beauty, not to be used as vessels.”

  Alone with me, she wept. “Once I fed three boys from these breasts and they did not struggle! Then my milk flowed.” She rubbed at her breasts as if to wipe them away. “Is that right?” she asked me, as if I had been there. She always did get us confused. “Did I feed those babies? Or did they just chew at my nipples?”

  The next day Sargon was allowed in, and the first thing he did was to carefully examine the child’s genitalia. Many babies are born girl-boy and these people, while not unhappy, are separate. They were considered fortunate to have the best of the two sexes, but they were also seen with suspicion.

  The girl was beautiful, and had her own way from the moment she could burble. With her position in life, she could become whatever she liked, though she always said she had no choice.

  They named her Enheduanna, meaning Chief Priestess of the Ornament of the On High. Ishtar left Enheduanna increasingly to the wet nurse. This woman secretly took another child to feed as well. She sat there with one at each breast as if there was nothing wrong with sharing the tit meant for a goddess’ child.

  I had to tell Ishtar. The wet nurse was tortured before a crowd; her breasts cut off, her head shaved. Her fingers broken.

  A new wet nurse was found.

  For all of that, Ishtar knew her daughter would need a friend, and that having shared the milk, the two babies would share a life. This was true, although the other child grew to be dull, humourless and tongue-tied. Her mother was a businesswoman with her own silver sewn into the hem of her coat. She dealt in buying and selling property, and Ishtar was quite happy to talk to her, because she was strong and vital.

  As the girls grew, Ishtar’s daughter Enheduanna became a poetess and the other girl became a weaver.

  ****

  Sargon was a great and powerful king in his city surrounded by mountains. Yet he turned to feathers at the sight of Ishtar and his daughter, Enheduanna. Both he and Ishtar were weakened by parenthood, as was natural. We pass our strength to our children.

  Sargon had near six thousand men keeping the peace around the city. They were a strange bunch. Idle soldiers were always difficult; they found things to do which were not always pleasant. These soldiers knew about the army in the walls and some would stare in through a crack and poke sticks through to try and rouse them to action.

  But the stillborns would not rouse until Ishtar asked them to.

  ****

  Ishtar placed my sister in charge of the army of washerwomen needed to keep Sargon’s soldiers clean.

  “I protect you from such a chore,” my goddess told me, though I would have loved to wash more than her bloodstained face cloths. My sister marched to war with the army. She told us terrible stories about Sargon’s cruelty in battle. He liked to destroy completely, to take away any chance of rebellion, of people rising up to take revenge. She told us of the stillborns, how at times their skin would drop off from burns or dryness, and new skin would grow back in an instant. We saw this as we followed behind; Ishtar, her daughter and me.

  Akkad had soon filled with desperate, displaced people. Ishtar tutted at this. “He is not very nice. Why destroy their homes so completely there is no point rebuilding? They don’t respect him more because of it. They are just tired. You, where are you from?”

  “The Land of Rivers, lady.” The young man was close to starvation; all of them in the long line were.

  “Where, fool? Where is your place?”

  “Kazilla. But there is not even a bush left for a bird. Your Sargon has razed us.”

  “He is not mine,” Ishtar said.

  The young man spoke of an army so terrifying, so ugly, that he would have nightmares all his life. She helped feed these people and spread word they were not to be harmed. Later that night, she let Sargon know what she thought. “Why do you take their homes? You may as well kill them.”

  He kissed her, eyes wide open, dark and mesmerizing.

  Ishtar’s temples were very busy and there was money being made. The girls liked the soldiers because they were strong and determined. They sometimes sewed a small sprig of hair into a man’s shirt, casting a love spell.

  Ishtar would dry their cunts up if she found out.

  Daughters of kings and rulers were sent to Akkad seeking husbands. Sent to spend time in Ishtar’s temple. They were easily seen, with their raised-rim caps, their folded garments, their jewels. Some carried a staff with the insignia of their fathers.

  I was happy there. There were gutters for taking away the dirty water. Even when it had not rained for some time, we were not thirsty.

  Our houses were built from oven-baked mudbricks. Some had stairs inside, one room above another. Our streets were wide and well planned, and we had secure places to store grain. Cats killed all the pests.

  But always, of course, there was war. I don’t know if there was a week without it, in the reign of Sargon.

  Sargon’s advisors told him that Ishtar needed to produce a male heir if she wanted to remain ‘first wife’. Ishtar did not care. She laughed at Sargon, made him angry. Scoffed at his law-making, which she said made him a boring man. At the same time, she told me he was the most virile lover she had known. This contrast interested her, despite herself. Great lover, dull law-maker, cruel leader.

  Ishtar felt unattractive; I know because she wore loose, ugly clothes and kept her hair unwashed. She would sit in her own temple and wait for one of the men to notice her, but they didn’t.

  Until the beardless traveller came.

  No other girl would touch him. “A man without a beard won’t pay. He will steal your sandals and be cruel.”

  Ishtar slept with him. Found him sleepy and lazy. He was funny, though. She liked him. When Sargon found out, he was disgusted that she had lain with a beardless man.

  She said, “You bore me so much. You are so worried about your filing. Your administration.”

  This is what I mean about Ishtar. She didn’t understand the importance of records.

  He brought sense to us. In the market, there were standards of weight which were not there before. He did this. Ishtar thought this was dull, but I knew his work would be remembered.

  Sargon wanted a boy. Ishtar said she risked death if she had another child. Sargon did not believe her. He thought there was a problem and they needed to have a sheep’s liver read to find out what it was. He wanted to travel to the Oracles of his childhood, those he trusted more than anyone else.

  “It is so far and war is so close. We should stay here,” Ishtar said. “We do not need another child. We need to protect our city. We have our daughter who you will adopt as a son. Enheduanna will transform into a man, and she will manage all our kingdoms.”

  An advisor suggested they send a clay model of the sheep’s liver instead.

  “That is the lazy way. We will accompany the sheep,” Sargon said.

  Ishtar disagreed. “We have fortune tellers here. This one can read the patterns of oil poured on water.”

  But when a calf with two heads was born, Sargon knew he had to go to his Oracle.

  We travelled twenty double hours, taking forty sheep, because they died so easily and Sargon wanted plenty to choose from. He would boon some of those not needed, and order a great barbeque pit to cook the rest.

  I loved meat cooked like this. You could tear strips off and chew them as you walked or worked. If I chewed sheep meat while washing in a field, I was never bothered by animals; the smell of the flesh frightened them.

  The desert was searing an
d swarming with snakes. A great dust storm lifted as we travelled. Though Sargon’s men were well-practiced, four of them died while putting up shelters of thin wood for protection.

  The smell of hot sand filled me. At night, when we stopped at last, we built beds of the hot rocks, and they kept us warm throughout the chilling dawn.

  We led animals and prisoners with us. This was called abaku. They did the work and were sacrificed if need be.

  The sheep turned from white to black, a terrible omen. If it was not for the love of Ishtar and Sargon, the caravan would have dispersed.

  As the dust storm eased, the sheep nibbled at camel thorn bushes. Their memories were so short it was as if the storm had never happened. Some men we lost to quicksand, that sucking brown death you couldn’t always see. Mostly, I was aware of the filth. The beer they drank on the way, and the washing this caused, with the vomit and the shit and piss as they fell down drunk.

  We came across a flock of flamingos and watched in wonder. Our omen reader was confused by the good and bad. “We shall eat three of these birds,” he decided. “Or thirty. Those we catch deserve to be eaten.”

  Sargon arranged trade with the communities we passed through. Metal ore and goods, textiles. His brilliance at negotiations was close to his brilliance at war, and even Ishtar could not help but be impressed. He controlled the trade from silver mines in Anatolia, lapis lazuli mines in Badakusha, and the cedar forests of Byblos. These forests gave him the biggest headaches, because of the difficulty in transporting unwieldy, heavy cedar. At least there was less risk of theft. Although I have known a caravan, sleeping over night, to find itself awash with fortune tellers seeking to read the future in the texture of the bark.

  Finally we reached the Oracles, and they greeted Sargon as if he were a young boy; they had known him that long.

  They cut open one of our sheep and read the liver.

  If the liver was loose, they said, a prince would be slain in the palace.

  But one part was distended, and this meant that the son of a king would take the throne.

  “I have no son.” Sargon roared so mightily that his exhausted men collapsed to the ground. “That is why we have come to you. Where is my son and why does my goddess not wish to bear him?”

  They slaughtered another dozen sheep, consulted for three days, and finally told Sargon that the goddess of love and war would have two children, a girl for love and a boy for war. There was no doubt about this.

  Ishtar said, “I will fill my cunt with thorns before I have another child.”

  Foolish Sargon to think a fortune teller could convince Ishtar otherwise. “Women have five or six children, Ishtar. Not just one.”

  “They are women. I am Ishtar.”

  “But if our daughter dies?”

  “Our daughter will not die.”

  And so it was said, and we all returned to our ordinary lives. Of course, the ordinary life of a worker was very different from the ordinary life of the elite.

  Ishtar’s domestic staff might include, apart from myself: one hundred and fifty slave women, spinners, woolworkers, brewers, millers, kitchen workers, a singer, a musician, six women to grind grain for pigs, forty men, six women in brewery, the wet nurse and nursemaid when her daughter was young, personal servants and a hairdresser. The ruling class had no real idea of our daily existence. They thought we disappeared when they closed their eyes. They should be horrified if they saw the homes we live in, how mean they are. Except they would not care.

  Ishtar liked to take Enheduanna to her temple, to let her feel the worship. Let her daughter see how women should be treated. Women went to be worshipped by serving the goddess.

  Enheduanna liked to walk alone through the city, but was angry when taken for a prostitute. “You think I would be here and not in my mother’s temple?” In the temple, women were worshipped for their sex, but in a brothel, there were naked women all over the walls, many in degrading situations.

  In the brothels, men were worshipped as Tammuz once was, receiving the passion — the love — that the god deserved. Enheduanna did not care for this. She watched as farmers brought their wheat and got a shekel coin. Wheat on one side, Ishtar on the other. They would come back at festival time and spend the shekel on sex with a sangaress, to ensure fertility of fields. Fertile fields meant wheat for the temple, and so it continued.

  Enheduanna wrote a poem to Ishtar, describing her mother as powerful and passionate. This poem, it left no doubt her words would be remembered forever.

  She loved jewellery and wore it with great majesty. Large, golden earrings. Silver arm and leg rings. She paid the price of solitude to the god of writing, Marduk’s son, Nebo, because she would never marry. She would marry her words.

  ****

  Then the river changed its course. The land became drier, and the people blamed Sargon, who was not used to their anger. He had no other time of unrest in his entire rule. “Am I in control of An, heaven? No, I am not. I have power over Ki, the earth, in that I can move it, and I can build on it, and I can spill blood on it. But I cannot control the water. This is not in my power.”

  They listened to his voice of reason, and he helped to move the earth so that the river flowed through Akkad again.

  ****

  Sargon reigned for fifty-five years. Or perhaps sixty-one. Nothing in history is certain. He aged, while Ishtar remained so beautiful it hurt your eyes to look at her.

  He took another wife, and another. They had son after son. Ishtar, tired by life itself, did nothing more than send Sargon a perpetual rash to make his beard itch. That was suffering enough, she thought, for all those wives. She left him to his young women and his sycophants.

  “I am tired of the smell of old man,” she told him.

  He sacrificed his great love, Ishtar, to have a son.

  When Sargon was a hundred or more, the cities around Akkad finally banded together to fight him. He still won. Afterwards, he walked down to the river, alone, carrying only his great sword.

  I was already there, my back aching, as I rinsed out my goddess’ robes. We stood side by side, the King of the World and I, washing in the river. He did not want ceremony. He simply cleaned his weapons, as if to say, “I am done. I have conquered all.”

  He gave me a smile. “Enough,” he said, and he went to his bed and did not rise. As he died, he threatened, “Whoever lays hands on the cursed stones of Akkad — should she fall — will find pain for many generations.”

  Touching a stone of Akkad is called Qatu. Perhaps my descendants will know of what happens to the stones.

  When he died, there was such grief that the men drank more beer in a day than they would drink in a week. Men lay stultified in the streets, women huddled inside, all of them weeping at the loss.

  At his funeral, perfume and fragrances were part of the ritual, and desiccated fruit was laid out to be chewed for sweetness. At the back, quiet, grey-faced, stood line after line of inhuman soldiers. They stood stooped but not tired, smelling of ash and vinegar. They watched — the stillborn army of Ishtar — with no emotion on their faces. They merely ensured that no upstarts tried to take the throne from Sargon’s son to another woman.

  After the funeral, Enheduanna and I helped shift the army to large, dry caves. Ishtar faded visibly; she needed rest. We made her a bed in the caves amongst her soldiers, and we left her there to sleep.

  And that son, once king, was killed by his own servants. Did they use him as a scapegoat for all his father did? I don’t know. Ishtar and I no longer lived in his tower, then. Once Sargon died, we had no reason to stay.

  His daughter, Enheduanna, was removed as High Priestess when Sargon died. As if she had never held that position in the first place. “The words chose me. I am a poetess and that is all there is.”

  She wrote this poem:

  Me who once sat triumphant, he has driven out of the sanctuary.

  Like a swallow he made me fly from the window. My life is consumed.

&nb
sp; He stripped me of the crown appropriate for the high sangarhood.

  He gave me dagger and sword — “It becomes you,” he said to me.

  It was in your service that I first entered the holy temple,

  I, Enheduanna, the highest sangaress. I carried the ritual basket,

  I chanted your praise.

  Now I have been cast out to the place of the lepers.

  Day comes and the brightness is hidden around me.

  Shadows cover the light, drape it in sandstorms.

  My beautiful mouth knows only confusion.

  Even my sex is dust.

  SHULGI: 1990 BC

  THE WASHERWOMAN NINEVAH

  On that day, the storm howled, the tempest swirled,

  The North Wind and the South Wind roared violently,

  Lightning devoured in heaven alongside the seven winds,

  The deafening storm made the earth tremble,

  Ishkur thundered throughout the heavenly expanse

  The rains above embraced the waters below

  Its little stones, its big stones lashed at my back

  But I the king was unafraid, uncowed.

  ~ Shulgi

  Four generations passed. My mother, my grandmother, my grandmother’s mother.

  Ishtar’s temples multiplied and grew in importance. There was also an increase in the violence against the Sangaresses and the temples; a greater fear. Was it because the Sangaresses learnt to read, write and count? Did the men think this would destroy society as we know it?

  Ishtar complained to me: “I hear a whining noise. Most irritating. I think it is the pleas of men who have never visited my temple. Hard to imagine why they think I will help them. Perhaps I will consider them my enemy instead. Perhaps I will send them great mismatches, like the scorpion, the Zuqiqpum and the crab. I will send the bite of the crab to their genitals, and it will not release its grip until they rot in the ground. The crab is very stubborn.”