protective · from c. 3000 BCE
The Star of Ishtar
Eight points for the planet Venus, and the standard way of writing a goddess into a scene without drawing her.
What the sources claim for it
Ishtar present as guarantor. On a boundary stone, a divine witness to the terms carved beneath it.
History
Where does the Star of Ishtar come from?
Mesopotamian art identifies deities by emblem, and Ishtar's is an eight-pointed star or rosette standing for Venus, the planet she governs. It appears on cylinder seals, on boundary stones and on the Ishtar Gate's programme, usually in a row with the crescent of Sin and the disc of Shamash — moon, sun and Venus as the three visible authorities of the sky.
The convention is worth stating plainly because it is unlike anything later in this corpus. These are not secret marks. They are captions: a scribe or a stonecutter uses them the way a modern document uses a letterhead, and a literate viewer reads which gods are guaranteeing the object.
1 figure
Who is it attached to?
Figures who carry it
An attribute rather than a signature — held, worn or associated in the texts and the images.
Afterwards
What did it turn into?
The eight-pointed star passed into Islamic geometric ornament and into modern national and commercial heraldry across the region, entirely detached from the goddess.
Which texts describe it?
Oldest first, with what each one does with the mark. A mark described in a Bronze Age incantation and a mark first drawn in a seventeenth-century manuscript are different kinds of claim, whatever the shape has in common.
Enuma Elish
Anonymous Babylonian · c. 1100 BCE · Akkadian
Belongs to the same astral pantheon the poem orders.
Read Enuma Elish in full ↗Cover: Public domain · editor Austen Henry Layard , drawing by L. Gruner · Wikimedia file page
The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld
Anonymous Akkadian; earlier Sumerian recension of Inanna · c. 1000 BCE, from older Sumerian material · Akkadian
The goddess whose emblem this is, in her best-known narrative.
Read The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld in full ↗Cover: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Gennadii Saus i Segura · Wikimedia file page
Nearby
Related marks
The Winged Disc
A sun with wings, borrowed by every empire in the region in turn — and the direct ancestor of the Persian faravahar.
The Rod and Ring
The objects a seated god hands to a standing king at the top of Hammurabi's stele — most likely a measuring rod and a coiled line.
The Spade of Marduk
A builder's tool as a god's signature — Marduk is identified on boundary stones by a spade, not by a weapon.
The Mušḫuššu Dragon
A scaled dragon with a lion's forelegs and an eagle's hind claws, set in glazed brick along the processional way into Babylon.
The Lamassu
A human-headed winged bull carved at palace gates, up to five metres high, and given a fifth leg so it reads correctly from two angles.
The Pazuzu Head
A demon's face worn to keep a demon out — the clearest surviving case of a malevolent spirit hired as a doorman.