“Stay, my lady, do not break it down,
I will go and announce thy name to the queen Allatu.”
The porter then informs Allatu that her sister Ishtar stands at the door. The goddess is displeased at the news but bids the porter open the door and treat her according to the “ancient laws.” These demanded that she should lose some part of her apparel at each of the seven gates of the under-world until she stood naked before the throne of its goddess. At the first gate the porter takes away her crown and she asks: “Why, O porter, dost thou take the great crown from my head!” He answers: “Enter, O lady, for these are the commands of the mistress of the world.” At each gate Ishtar remonstrates at having her ornaments taken from her, and each time the porter returns the same answer.
When Ishtar comes before Allatu, the latter commands her messenger Namtar to smite the goddess with disease in all parts of her body. But while Ishtar is being detained in the lower world, all life has stopped on the earth’s surface. The gods demand her release. A being is specially created to bring her back. The rest of the story and the meaning of this and the flood myth is told by C. P. Tiele[o] as follows:[a]
The story of Ishtar’s descent into hades is unmistakably a nature myth, which describes in picturesque fashion her descent into the under-world to seek the springs of living water, probably the central force of light and heat in the world. When she is imprisoned there by Allatu, the goddess of death and of the shadow world, and even visited with all sorts of diseases, all growth and generation stand still in the world, so that the gods take council and decide to demand her release. Ea accordingly creates a wonderful being a kind of priest, called “his light shineth,” who is to seek out the fountain of life, and whom Allatu cannot withstand, however much she may scold and curse. The goddess is set free, returns to the upper world and brings her dead lover Tammuz back to life by sprinkling him with the water of immortality. This myth is not cosmological nor ethical, but has already become a pure anthropomorphic narration, the physical basis for certain episodes and details of which is often not clear, and which has a tendency to strengthen belief in immortality. The account of the flood also, which we have in several versions and which was itself put together out of various parts, some of them heterogeneous, betrays the fact that it was put together by a polytheist and originated in a nature myth. But the nature myths as such lie already so far behind the author, there is such a naïve humour in the way the gods are represented, everything happens in such a human fashion—one needs only to think of Ishtar’s complaint that she has created men but no brood of fishes, of the sly excuse with which Ea excuses himself to Bel for having rescued his favourite from the destruction planned by the latter, one needs only to hear how Bel is preached at by the wise Ea for his unreasonable and blind passion, and how the great Ishtar declares him to have forfeited his share of the sacrifice, and then see how he silently acknowledges his wrong by himself accompanying the man over whose rescue he had become so excited, and raising him with his family to a place among the gods—one needs only to think of all this to see that the narrator made use of the mythological material only to describe the fall of sinful humanity and at the same time to remind his hearers that the gods always have means at their command, such as hunger, pestilence, and wild beasts, to punish the evil-doer.[o]
The Babylonian view of life after death was particularly gloomy. There was no hope of anything better. The highest state of happiness pictured was to lie on a couch and drink clear water; even for the pious it was a place of gloom. And there was no possibility of escaping from it. Sit-napishtim tells Gilgamish in this connection that death must come to all (we translate again from the version of Jeremias[n]):
So long as houses are built,
So long as contracts are made,
So long as brothers quarrel,
So long as enmity exists,