In the Babylonian pantheon, Ishtar was the principal goddess, identical with the Sumerian fertility goddess Innanna.

In his book Les Religions de Babylonie et d’Assyrie (The Religions of Babylonia and Assyria), French scholar Édouard Dhorme said of Ishtar: “She was the goddess, the lady, the merciful mother who listens to prayer and intercedes before the angry gods and calms them. . . .

The city’s most famous gate, Ishtar Gate, was named after the fertility goddess Ishtar, also called “queen of heaven” and “mother of the gods.”

It bore a votive inscription in the Akkadian language revealing that it had been dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, who “shone in Ebla.”

In the lower city was a sacred area dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, also viewed as a fertility goddess by the Babylonians.

DURING an archaeological campaign at Ebla, Syria, a relic portraying Ishtar, Babylonian goddess of fertility and war, was discovered.

According to Matthiae, this offers “conclusive proof” that Ishtar worship spanned some 2,000 years.

The highway from the north passed through the 40-foot-high [12 m] Ishtar Gate into the city’s main artery, the broad Procession Way.

Nebuchadnezzar’s palace was on the right, inside the Ishtar Gate.

On entering the excavation site one first comes on the celebrated Gate of Ishtar.

Ishtar was the goddess of fertility.

However, “the most famous of [Nebuchadnezzar’s] achievements are the Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate,” says the book Babylon​—City of Wonders.

The Processional Way, which ran through the Ishtar Gate, was flanked by reliefs of striding lions.

Of this we already have evidence in [the ancient Greek historian] Herodotus, who ascribes to her the banks that confined the Euphrates (i. 184) and knows her name as borne by a gate of Babylon (iii. 155). . . . according to the legends, in her birth as well as in her disappearance from earth, Semiramis appears as a goddess, the daughter of the fish-goddess Atargatis, and herself connected with the doves of Ishtar or Astarte.—The Encyclopœdia Britannica, Volume 24, edition of 1911, page 617.

ISHTAR GATE

In the still darkness of the night outside Babylon’s walls, the force of Medes and Persians left by Cyrus gathered at one end of the city where the Euphrates entered, near the Ishtar Gate, and at the other extremity of the city where the Euphrates flowed out.

a Says page 65 of the book On the Road to Civilization (1937), by Heckel and Sigman: “With the opening of the gate of Ishtar to Cyrus, twenty-two centuries of Semitic supremacy ended and the Persian Empire became a power in the East.”

He was originally a Sumerian or Babylonian sun-god, called Dumuzu, the husband of Ishtar, who corresponds to Aphrodite [Venus] of the Greeks.

Ishtar long mourned for him and descended into the underworld to deliver him from the embrace of death. . . .

Regarding the religion of Babylon and its triadic worship we read: “In the late Babylonian period the worship seems chiefly devoted to Marduk, Nabu [Nebo, meaning Speaker or Announcer], Sin, Shamash and Ishtar. . . .

Another triad was that of Sin (the moon-god) and Shamash (the sun-god) and Ishtar—the rulers of the zodiac.

The Babylonians had worshiped her by the name Ishtar and the Phoenicians by the name Ashtoreth.

Thus archaeologists have uncovered carvings of the fertility goddess Ishtar.