Nanaya

Nanaya was one of the most worshipped goddesses in Mesopotamia for two thousand years and was in this registry only as an alias on a Sogdian record — the eastern descendant without the original. Whether she began as a minor Akkadian goddess or as an aspect of Inanna that hardened into a separate deity is not settled; the genealogies are inconsistent about her too, giving her Urash or Anu for a father and sometimes Inanna for a mother, which is what one would expect of a goddess who may have started as somebody else's hypostasis. This record takes no position on the origin and leaves her parentage empty rather than choosing between the lists.

Variant accounts

• Whether Nanaya began as an independent goddess or as a hypostasis of Inanna is unresolved.It has been proposed that she originated as a minor Akkadian goddess and, alternatively, that she began as a hypostasis of Sumerian Inanna that separated into a deity in her own right; the reference literature calls the evidence inconclusive. Her recorded parentage varies with the source — Urash, Anu, sporadically Inanna as mother, and Sin under syncretism with Ishtar — which the record leaves unresolved rather than picking one.Reference treatment of Nanaya, stating that the proposals of Akkadian origin and of origin as a hypostasis of Inanna are both inconclusive, and listing the variant parentages. (secondary)

Domains

• love

Relations

• counterpart of: NanaThe Sogdian Nana of Panjikent and Bukhara descends from her, and this registry already carried the eastern end of that line without the Mesopotamian original. The two are recorded separately because the cults are two thousand years and three thousand kilometres apart and the Sogdian goddess has her own iconography, consort and city; the link states the descent.Reference treatment of Nanaya and of the Sogdian Nana, the pre-eminent goddess of Sogdiana, descended from the Sumero-Akkadian Nanaya. (secondary)

Sources

• Nanaya is a Mesopotamian goddess of love closely associated with Inanna, worshipped continuously from the Ur III period into the Hellenistic era at Uruk, Larsa and Borsippa, and the ancestor of the Sogdian and Bactrian Nana.: Reference treatment of Nanaya: her love-goddess character, her association with and possible origin as a hypostasis of Inanna, her cult centres, and her Greek renderings Nanaia and Nana. (secondary)