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The Sumerian name Inanna is most often analyzed as nin-an-na, 'lady of heaven,' though some scholars read it as a contraction of nin-an-ak, 'lady of the An-shrine.' She was the paramount goddess of the Sumerian pantheon, associated with the planet Venus, with the city of Uruk, and with the two great powers she acquired from the god Enki: the me, a Sumerian term for the fundamental civilizing forces and divine laws that structure reality. Among the me she obtained were kingship, descent to the underworld, the art of lovemaking, the priesthood, and the art of war. The Sumerians conceived of these not as metaphors but as actual divine objects, tablets or decrees held in the hands of the gods.

The most significant literary achievement connected to Inanna is the hymn-cycle composed by Enheduanna, a High Priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur and daughter of the Akkadian emperor Sargon the Great. Writing around 2285 BCE, Enheduanna composed the Hymn to Inanna in the first person, declaring her own experience of exile and calling on Inanna for rescue. The hymn opens with some of the oldest literary self-expression ever recorded: 'The heart of the world is unknown; I, Enheduanna, will make it known.' This is the first time in human history that a writer signed their work — Enheduanna is the earliest known author by name. That the oldest named author was a woman writing about a goddess is a fact that literary historians still find remarkable.

The Descent of Inanna to the Underworld is a Sumerian myth predating its Akkadian counterpart, the Descent of Ishtar, by several centuries. In the Sumerian version, Inanna travels to the Great Below to attend the funeral of her sister's husband, setting her ear to the underworld. She passes through seven gates, surrendering an emblem of power at each — her crown, her rod of power, her lapis lazuli necklace, her breastplate, her golden ring, her measuring rod and line, and her royal robe — until she stands before Ereshkigal completely stripped of identity and power. Ereshkigal kills her with a look. Inanna hangs on a hook for three days and three nights until her faithful servant Ninshubur appeals to the gods for rescue. The parallel with later Christian theology — voluntary descent, death, resurrection on the third day — has generated enormous scholarly and popular debate about the relationship between Mesopotamian and later Near Eastern religious traditions.

Inanna's name in English carries the accumulated weight of more than four thousand years of scholarship, archaeology, and feminist reinterpretation. Beginning in the 1970s, several scholars and writers — most influentially Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer in their 1983 collection Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth — presented Inanna's myths in literary translation for general readers. She became an icon in feminist spirituality movements, celebrated as evidence of a powerful, autonomous, sexually active goddess at the origin of Western civilization. Whether or not that reading overrides the scholarly complexity, the name Inanna now functions in popular culture as a symbol of female divine power before the patriarchal religions systematically diminished it.