Unveiling the Ishtar-Easter Mystery: Ancient Gods vs. Modern Holidays

Ishtar was an ancient Mesopotamian goddess of love, fertility, and war, worshipped by the Babylonians and Assyrians. Her name is sometimes linked to the word "Easter" because of shared themes of fertility and renewal, and because of a theory from the 19th century that tied the two together. The Venerable Bede, an 8th-century monk, claimed that the name "Easter" came from "Eostre," a Germanic goddess of spring and fertility, whose name might trace back to older Indo-European roots like *aust-, meaning "dawn" or "east." Some argue this could connect to Ishtar’s name, which in Semitic languages relates to similar concepts of vitality and the east, where the sun rises.