Geshtinanna

The demons worked through her in order. First a skin disease across her loins, then her face raked open, then the skin taken off her buttocks, then tar poured warm into her lap. Between each one they asked her where her brother had gone, and between each one she gave them the same answer, which was nothing at all.

Her name was Ĝeštin-ana, and it is usually read as the grapevine of heaven. The oldest form of it, in documents from Early Dynastic Lagash, was Amageshtin or Amageshtinanna, with ama, mother, at the front, probably hardened into a title rather than meant as a description. Manfred Krebernik has argued that the -anna was the later addition, since Amageshtin turns up on its own as an ordinary woman’s name in the same period. There is a further wrinkle. The Sumerian word geštin means vine and wine, but it may also have carried the sense of sweet or lovely, in which case a goddess everyone has quietly filed under viticulture may never have had anything to do with grapes.

Her family is where the record starts arguing with itself. Dumuzi the shepherd is her brother, and most texts give their mother as the goddess Duttur, while a hymn of Shulgi hands her instead to An and Urash, which is the kind of promotion that tends to happen to a minor deity once a king takes an interest. She was probably imagined as the elder of the two, since she is addressed with words meaning mother, old woman and wise woman. And there is Belili, also called Dumuzi’s sister, who appears separately in the same poem, sheltering him in her house and pouring him water and flour. Krebernik treats the two as independent goddesses. Others have suggested Belili is simply Geshtinanna under another name. Nobody has settled it.

What she demonstrably does is read. In the poem known as Dumuzid’s dream her brother wakes shivering in the open country and calls for her by her competencies rather than her name: bring my scribe proficient in tablets, bring my singer expert in songs, bring my wise woman who knows the meanings of dreams. She comes. He tells her what he saw. Rushes rising up around him and growing. A single reed shaking its head at him. Twin reeds, one being separated from the other. Water poured over his holy coals, the cover lifted off his churn, his drinking cup torn down from the peg where it hung, and the churns lying on their sides with no milk poured.

She tells him to stop talking, and then she goes through it item by item, and every item is worse than the last. The rushes are bandits already waiting in ambush. The single reed is his mother, shaking her head over him. The twin reeds are the two of them, and one is going to be taken. The tall trees are men closing on him inside walls. Water on the coals means the sheepfold will become a house of silence. She works all the way down to his male goats dragging their dark beards in the dust and his rams scratching the earth with their thick legs, and she tells him what those mean too: that her hair will whirl in the air like a hurricane for him, and that she will lay her own cheeks open with her fingernails. She reads her own grief out of her brother’s dream as one entry among the rest. It is the coldest piece of professional competence in Sumerian literature.

He sends her up onto the mound to watch the road, telling her not to climb it like an ordinary person but to go up already tearing at her clothes. Her friend Ĝeštin-dudu is waiting there and confirms it. The big men who bind the neck are coming. Two came from Adab, two from Akshak, two from Uruk, two from Ur with head-smashing clubs tied at their waists, two from Nippur in clean clothes on the quayside. They caught her at the sheepfold before they caught him. They offered her a river of water. They offered her a field of grain. She took neither, and the demons said to one another that nobody since the most ancient times has known a sister to reveal a brother’s whereabouts, so they went to his friend instead. The friend accepted the water, accepted the grain, and talked. They found Dumuzi in the ditches of Arali. He turned very pale and said that in the city his sister had saved his life and his friend had caused his death.

It saves nothing. In every version the demons get him.

The other great text she appears in ends with the arrangement she is remembered for. Inanna, having clawed her way back out of the underworld, is required to send someone down in her place, and she chooses her husband. The tablet then breaks exactly where it matters most. Someone is weeping. Someone comes up to the sister and takes her by the hand. Then Inanna speaks the terms: you for half the year and your sister for half the year, and when one of you is demanded the other is released. The moment itself, where Geshtinanna volunteers for half of her brother’s death, has not survived. We have the verdict without the scene.

Down there she held an office. Sumerian sources call her dubsar-mah aralike, chief scribe of the underworld, a role set out at length in one of the Udug-hul incantations, and Dina Katz reads it as custodial: she kept the list of the dead and admitted them on the strength of it. From the Old Babylonian period onward the Akkadians identified her with Belet-ṣeri, lady of the steppe, and it is Belet-ṣeri who kneels in the seventh tablet of Gilgamesh before Ereshkigal with the tablet in her hands, reading the names aloud. Whether the underworld was ever her original business is unclear. Her scribal skill also appears in contexts with nothing to do with the dead, in surveying and in the praise poems of Shulgi, where she is a heavenly figure, and the netherworld post may have come to her later.

Her cult was real, modest and stubbornly local. She had a centre at Sagub near Lagash, a temple in Girsu built by Ur-Baba, and probably the Esagug, which Enannatum I rebuilt and Lugalzagesi later ransacked; his men stripped the precious metal and lapis lazuli from her statue and threw the statue down a well. Gudea dedicated several statues to her, and in his inscriptions she is one of only three deities, with Nanshe and Ningirsu, said to have turned their true gaze on him. Under Shulgi something odder happened: the king’s own mother was treated as a manifestation of Geshtinanna, an honour no other queen of the Third Dynasty of Ur received. Offerings reached her at Umma, at Uruk, at Bad-tibira in a temple whose name means house established by the brother, at Isin and Nippur, and as far north as Tell al-Rimah. After the Old Babylonian period the offerings stop. She survives on clay after that, in god lists and in the poems about her brother, some of them still being copied under Seleucid rule more than a thousand years after anyone last set food in front of her.

Nobody knows what she looked like. No text describes her, and no image is certainly hers. There is an argument from Lagash that she is the goddess who appears in local art with a mushhushshu beside her, the horned serpent-dragon standing in for Ningishzida, who in the Lagash tradition was her husband; the animal is shown looking toward her rather than away. Beyond that there is a fragment of a marble bowl from Uruk with her name cut into it, now in the British Museum, which is a strange kind of likeness: the signs of a goddess whose face was never fixed.

What she has instead of a body is a set of capabilities, and they are unusually consistent for a Mesopotamian deity. She reads dreams, tablets and the roll of the dead. She sings, and her lament in the poem where the demons take Dumuzi covers the horizon like a cloth and spreads out like linen. She endures, which in her case is a power rather than a virtue, since the whole method of the galla depends on people breaking and she does not break. And she can do the one thing nobody else in the corpus manages, which is to go down into the underworld and come back up on a schedule.

The limits are just as sharp. Her reading changes nothing that she reads. She can tell her brother precisely how he will be taken, and all the telling buys him is a few hours of knowing. She has no power over the demons at all, only over her own mouth. Her substitution does not rescue Dumuzi. It halves him, and it costs her half of every year in a place she otherwise only administers, sitting at the desk with the register open in front of her and her own name presumably somewhere on it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Geshtinanna?

Geshtinanna is a Sumerian goddess, the sister of the shepherd god Dumuzi, best known for interpreting the dream that foretold his death and for taking his place in the underworld for half of each year. She was also called the chief scribe of the underworld and kept the register of the dead. Her name is usually translated “grapevine of heaven,” though the Sumerian word behind it may have meant “sweet” rather than “vine.”

What does Geshtinanna do in the underworld?

Geshtinanna served as the underworld’s chief scribe, a title Sumerian texts give as dubsar-mah aralike. She was believed to keep the list of the dead and to admit them on the basis of it. The Akkadians identified her with the goddess Belet-ṣeri, who appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh kneeling before Ereshkigal and reading the names aloud from a tablet.

Why does Geshtinanna spend half the year in the underworld?

When Inanna returned from the underworld she was required to provide a substitute and handed over her husband Dumuzi. The surviving text is broken at the crucial point, but its ending has Inanna set the terms: Dumuzi for half the year and his sister for half the year, each released when the other is demanded. The passage where Geshtinanna actually offers herself has not survived.

What happened to Geshtinanna when the demons came for her brother?

The galla demons caught Geshtinanna at the sheepfold and tried to buy Dumuzi’s location from her with a river of water and a field of grain, which she refused. In a second poem they tortured her, afflicting her loins with a skin disease, tearing at her face and skin and pouring tar into her lap, and she said nothing. They found Dumuzi only after his friend accepted the same bribes and talked.

Was Geshtinanna widely worshipped?

No. Geshtinanna was a minor deity whose worship was concentrated in the state of Lagash, where she had a cult centre at Sagub and temples at Girsu and possibly Sagub itself. She also received offerings at Umma, Uruk, Bad-tibira, Isin, Nippur and Tell al-Rimah, but active worship ceased after the Old Babylonian period, after which she survived only in god lists and in literary texts about her brother.

Related Entries

Inanna, Ereshkigal, Gallu, Anunnaki, Enki, Enlil, Shamash, Nergal, Ishtar, Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Persephone, Demeter, Adonis, Osiris