Ereshkigal is the Mesopotamian queen of the underworld, the land called Irkalla or the Kur, the land of no return, a place of dust and clay where the dead eat clay and are clothed like birds in feathers. She is a grim and jealously guarded sovereign, and the central myth about her is the Descent of Inanna (Akkadian Ishtar): when her sister Inanna comes down, passing through the seven gates and stripped of a garment or emblem at each until she stands naked and powerless, Ereshkigal fixes the eye of death on her and hangs her corpse on a hook, and only a ransom and a substitute win Inanna's release, at the price of her husband Dumuzi taking her place below for part of each year.
The myth survives in two related but distinct versions, an older Sumerian text usually called Inanna's Descent to the Netherworld and a later Akkadian retelling known as Ishtar's Descent, recovered among the tablets of King Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh in the nineteenth century; the two differ in detail, the Sumerian version, for instance, more fully develops the fate of Dumuzi's devoted sister Geshtinanna, who volunteers to share his sentence in the underworld for half of each year so that he need not remain there constantly, a resolution the shorter Akkadian version treats more briefly. Modern Assyriologists read the differences as evidence of a long, evolving oral and scribal tradition behind the story rather than a single fixed original.