Contents Updated: Thursday, March 02, 2000
Frymer-Kensky, an expert in Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and the Hebrew Bible, rejects the idea of a single Great Goddess in antiquity, and the hypothesis of primitive matriarchy. There were many goddesses of particular societies, in particular times, but their nature was complicated and impermanent. Goddesses were more important in ancient religions and could be powerful, but they were not usually the most prominent deities.
In ancient Pagan societies, goddesses accompanied a recognition of complementary male and female power rather than the domination of women. Ancient Near East pantheons reflected the idea that men and women were intrinsically different and, because of this essential difference, they legitimately had different fields of control. There was no matriarchy but the sexes were more equal than they were later.
Sumerian goddesses often had family responsibilities "and cultural functions that the Sumerians associated with women". Sumerian states were not led by women and their chief deity was never a Goddess. Their goddesses controlled sexuality, fertility and reproduction, roles that did not challenge male power. "The sky and the forces of the heavens" were always in male hands.
The famous goddess of Sumer was Inanna, daughter of the moon god, and chief goddess of the city of Uruk. At first she shared her role in temple worship with a spouse but she gradually displaced him in importance. She is a young and sexual attractive woman, the goddess of sexuality but also of warfare, rainstorms and the storehouse. The Semitic Akkadians worshipped her as Ishtar.
Much of what we know about this goddess comes from religious poetry and hymns written by the daughter of Akkadian King Sargon, Enheduanna. She was a priestess of the moon god in about 2300 BC. Her hymns praised Inanna as a "stout hearted lady." However, She was fierce and devastated the lands of those that would not worship her:
That you kill—be it known!
That like a dog you eat the corpses—be it known!
That your glance is terrible—be it known!
Inanna brings marital harmony through sensuality but she is also wild, disruptive, and troublesome. She is the very image of Hosea's wife. Yet, Inanna was marginal to the organization of the state, which remained a male hierarchy with a male high god, Enlil, the ultimate authority at the top of the cosmos. Nevertheless, Inanna is a woman not under male control and so is fearsome and dangerous. Later, in Babylonian texts there are contrasting pictures of Ishtar. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, even the gods cannot control her and she is identified with a demon who kills newborn children. Elsewhere, hymns extol her grace, beauty, and kindness.
Frymer-Kensky tells us that from the time of Sumer to the first Babylonian period, about 1600 BC, women and goddesses declined in visibility in the texts, and they effectively disappear in first millennium texts of the Assyrian period.
The world by the end of the second millennium was a male world, above and below; and the ancient goddesses have all but disappeared.
As monotheism advanced, culminating in the Hellenistic period in its extreme form in Judaism, goddesses were marginalized, eliminated, or even transformed into male gods. Though some goddesses remaining prominent, they meant little to judge by the importance of women in the texts. Male gods were always ranked higher than female gods. Goddesses were excluded from political power.
There seems to be no allowance in this analysis for the fact that either 1. the Aryan invasions started before the Sumerian civilisation was established and that it was therefore already influenced by patriarchy when Frymer-Kensky began her study, or 2. the Sumerians themselves were a part of a general movement of Central Asian stocks all with a similar sky god and patriarchal ideas.
The Sumerians were not Indo-Europeans but were Mongoloid and could easily have migrated along the same routes as the Indo-Europeans from the steppes of Eurasia. The habit of invading patriarchal gods of raping, subjugating or marrying the goddesses of people they encounter is well known. It might already have happened by 3000 BC.