Nuove prospettive sulla teologia e sul culto di Inanna/Ištar: la pervasività del modello mesopotamico nel I millennio a.C.

This article is devoted to the study of the characters of the cult of the goddess Inanna/Ištar in the Ancient Near East during the first half of the first millennium BCE according to the most recent developments in the research on Mesopotamian religion. First, it is stressed that the dramatic expansion of the Assyrian empire caused an intense circulation of deities, both forcedly and spontaneously. Divine statues from conquered lands were forcedly abducted for depriving the local populations of divine protection, divinities from annexed countries were admitted and inserted into the imperial official pantheon, Assyrian deities were imposed, albeit very smoothly, in the territories occupied and turned into provinces; cults were changed and intermingled, some times imposed and often simply favoured. This circulation produced either a widespread collaboration or local obstinate resistance, thus provoking a general religious crisis in the whole Near East. In this context, the most circulated divine cult seems to have been that of the goddess Inanna/Ištar, an ambiguous deity who was conceived as the paradoxical "coincidence of opposites", being both pure and impure, virgin and whore, lover and warrior, loving mother and fearful, cruel fighter; her cult had strong sexual components, including emasculation and transvestitism; other important characteristics were initiation and secrecy. The Assyrian kings of the VIIth century BCE strongly favoured her cult, a phenomenon which certainly helped its diffucion even outside of the empire. Her cult largely spread among groups of initiated people belonging to the highest social classes or in oppressed groups of poor people who tended to stress its eschatological aspects. This diffusion solicited also strong resistance, as attested in the Biblical texts as regards the strongly blamed cult of Asherah in Israel.