Concept

Queen of Heaven (antiquity)

Résumé
Queen of Heaven was a title given to a number of ancient sky goddesses worshipped throughout the ancient Mediterranean and the ancient Near East. Goddesses known to have been referred to by the title include Inanna, Anat, Isis, Nut, Astarte, and possibly Asherah (by the prophet Jeremiah). In Greco-Roman times, Hera and Juno bore this title. Forms and content of worship varied. Inanna Inanna was the Sumerian goddess of love and war. Despite her association with mating and fertility of humans and animals, Inanna was not a mother goddess and is rarely associated with childbirth. Inanna was also associated with rain and storms and with the planet Venus. The Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa, believed to have been compiled around the mid-seventeenth century BCE, referred to the planet Venus in the tablet as the "bright queen of the sky" or "bright Queen of Heaven". Although the title of Queen of Heaven was often applied to many different goddesses throughout antiquity, Inanna is the one to whom the title is given the most number of times. In fact, Inanna's name is commonly derived from Nin-anna which literally means "Queen of Heaven" in ancient Sumerian (It comes from the words NIN meaning "lady" and AN meaning "sky"), although the cuneiform sign for her name (Borger 2003 nr. 153, U+12239 𒈹) is not historically a ligature of the two. In several myths, Inanna is described as being the daughter of Nanna, the ancient Sumerian god of the Moon. In other texts, however, she is often described as being the daughter of either Enki or An. These difficulties have led some early Assyriologists to suggest that Inanna may have been originally a Proto-Euphratean goddess, possibly related to the Hurrian mother goddess Hannahannah, accepted only latterly into the Sumerian pantheon, an idea supported by her youthfulness, and that, unlike the other Sumerian divinities, she at first had no sphere of responsibilities. The view that there was a Proto-Euphratean substrate language in Southern Iraq before Sumerian is not widely accepted by modern Assyriologists.
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