Inanna the kleptomaniac
Inanna had already stolen mes from Anu, hearing of this, Ereshkigal asks her sister to help get out of being married to a bull, Gugalanna. Inanna agrees and pretends to get angry at Gilgamesh in order to get Gugalanna killed.Later, she attends her sister's husband's funeral, Ereshkigal realizes her sister is coming to collect a reward and forces Inanna to ditch all her artifacts of power, it doesn't help, however and Inanna at some point claims Ereshkigal's mes, including her throne, as reward for arranging Gugalanna's death. This causes Ereshkigal a great deal of pain (and possibly her death) as it's now Inanna who is protected from effects of the Underworld. Ereshkigal's judges then get angry and try to lynch Inanna (possibly not realizing she's now the Queen of the Underworld), so she plays dead. When the two demons sent to sent to revive her "dead" body, Inanna also steals the food & waters of life.
After escaping the Underworld, "Ereshkigal's" demons merely follow Inanna as she leaves, not attacking her, and even going after her husband Dumuzi, forcing him to take Inanna's place in the Underworld. Though this doesn't work out as she never fully died, so he only stays around half of each year; and his sister Geshtinana even gets to visit him.
The end result is that Inanna/Ishtar/Astarte winds up as the Queen of Heaven, the Earth, and the Underworld. She eventually abandons ancient Sumer and assumes a new identity, knowing that her misdeeds will be lost to the mists of human history.
- Historians say it's likely Aphrodite who got the remnants of Inanna's worshipers, another goddess associated with Venus, but in the Greek Pantheon. She's still known for war, as Aphrodite Areia
, but it's rare; which would make her into something of a Retired Badass, leaving war behind to focus on love. - Alternatively, what underworld goddess is known for the particular epithet of ruling over heaven, earth, and the sea (another conquest)? Hekate, with twin-torches symbolic of the morning & evening stars (aka the planet Venus). Hekate's "original" cult was in Anatolia, not too far from Mesopotamia geographically. Hekate even sided with the olympians against the the titans and was rewarded by Zeus; perhaps as a way to Leave No Witnesses who could identify her from before? It could even be that even Inanna was an assumed identity, if she goes all the way back to the Egyptian Heqet she could have been doing this for a long time.
Dumuzid is Too Dumb to Live, and Inanna a Love Martyr for him
In his epic, Gilgamesh cited what Inanna did to Dumuzid as reason for not sleeping with her... But references an event that happened after the Epic. What if he was citing a past instance of Dumuzid pissing Inanna off so much she killed him, and then resurrected him because she loved him so much?Utu is the reason why Inanna's lovers all meet ironic ends
The relationship between Inanna and her brother Utu frequently bordered on the incestuous, and Inanna's lovers had the bad habit of meeting ironic ends, at times at Inanna's hand. What if he arranged them?Inanna was trying to reward Gilgamesh by sleeping with him
The king of Uruk derives his power from his symbolic marriage to Inanna, consumed through a priestess... And Gilgamesh one day was approached by the actual goddess. What if he had impressed her so much she had decided he deserved to sleep with him directly rather than by possessing a priestess?