Ishtar's most famous myth is her descent through the seven gates of the underworld to challenge her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the dead. At each gate a gatekeeper strips her of one article of clothing or power, so that she arrives naked and defenceless before her sister, who kills her and hangs her corpse on a hook. Only the intervention of the god Ea, who fashions creatures to revive her, allows Ishtar to return, and even then only on condition that someone take her place below; her lover Dumuzi is seized to fill it, though later tradition allows his sister Geshtinanna to share his sentence, spending half the year below in his place. The myth's descent-and-return pattern has long been read as tied to the agricultural cycle Dumuzi also represents.
Ishtar's mixture of desire and violence appears just as sharply in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where she proposes marriage to the hero and, spurned with a catalogue of the ruin she brought on her earlier lovers, persuades her father Anu to loose the Bull of Heaven on Uruk in revenge, an act whose consequences cost Gilgamesh's companion Enkidu his life. Centuries later, Nebuchadnezzar II's Ishtar Gate at Babylon, its blue glazed brickwork patterned with rows of dragons and aurochs, stood as the ceremonial entrance to the processional way used at her festival and is now reconstructed in Berlin's Pergamon Museum. Her cult travelled west as well, into the Phoenician Astarte and, through Cyprus, into the Greek Aphrodite, so that a single line of descent runs from Uruk's temple of Inanna to the goddess later worshipped across the classical Mediterranean.