Goddess of war and love

Are you talking shit about my Pantokrator's waifu?

Maybe not 100% every time, but as far as I know it was pretty consensual and priestesses of Ishtar were viewed on in high regard.

what is this, waifufaggotry for ants?

....fuck you that took me too long to realize
Is the goddess of those things in that order?

>Pretty consensual
It was a society where it was absolute law you do this, and Babylon was a conquering society, meaning conquered peoples were also forced into this practice.

When you don't have a choice about doing something, it's forced, whether or not you personally don't mind it, those that do don't get a choice.

You may want to take Greek accounts of barbarians with a grain of salt, especially when it's so positive or negative it surprises you.

You'll have to find Babylonian sources that contradict it, in that case. I'm not aware of any.

Dominions, nice game with tiny sprites

Gate: Thus the JSDF fought here.
Perfectly good plot wasted by japanese army wank and standard harem shenanigans, sadly.

What're you gonna do about it, read the self-describing barbarian historical accounts that they didn't write?

History is written by the civilized.

>It was a society where it was absolute law you do this
Sorry, can't find anything on that. What are your sources?

>"women are whores" statement makes you a virgin
If we are to play the game of "empty assumptions" can I have a shoot too?
Are you a woman?

Greek accounts of Ishtar.

How about babylonian sources that support it? Sacred prostitution did exist in many cultures, but believing that everyone had their fiance publicly deflorated is on the same level as jus primae noctis being a widespread custom.

>babylonians aren't civilized and didn't write
You're retarded for believing "barbarian" meant "uncivilized" to a Greek.

user, when we only have one source and absolutely no sources contradicting it, we have to assume, even hesitantly, that it's the truth.

>Greek accounts
Nothing against the Greeks, but sometimes they can be full of shit.

I don't know, just plain accepting history is fake and propaganda without hoping to discover the truth is probably reasonable but seems defeatist.

>>>>>>>>>sometimes

Well, it all amounts to , because we don't have any detailed accounts of Ishtar worship from the Babylonians themselves.

>when we only have one source we have to assume that it's the truth
Said no academic ever, thank God.

Then we must assume much of what we know about history is innately entirely false, eh?

10/10
will worship

A quick research tells me that some researchers believe it may not even happened. Kinda boring.

Well yes, that's also part of only having one source. Researchers will doubt it, but they can't discount it entirely.

mmmmhyes

Like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes and that Marie Antoinette said "let them eat cake"? Indisputable facts, all, because a source said them.

Just untrustworthy.

First two have presented no archeological proof, which is important for standing architecture, while as a cultural practice this forced prostitution wouldn't necessarily do so. And the Marie Antoinette line is directly contradicted by other sources.

Except you're defeating your own point here. The only actual source we have for the "let them eat cake" quote (or something even remotely like that) is one of Rousseau's works, where an unnamed princess says that. There is not a single historical source connecting Marie-Antoinette to this phrase.

Especially since the primary suspect here is good old Herodotus, who had a famously cavalier attitude towards accuracy and reliability.

Look, you can't just bullshit your way out of this one.

Well, we do.

What bullshit? You either have to accept its true, or just throw your hands up in the air. You can't actually refute it without more sources.

your waifu a shit. filthy heathen needs to understand that the forests of the world belong to Volla. the Wardens of Avalon will see your 'goddess' properly disposed of, and your daughters taught by the Mothers of Avalon.

>War + Love = Rape
Took you that long to realize it, huh?

I heard there was war and love and came as hard as I could. Is this where the party is?

I don't see how the Babylonian religion isn't the most /r9k/ ever.

Worship centered on Uruk-- the city of whores. Possible Veeky Forums side note: Tolkien uses the word Uruk to refer to the largest, most powerful warrior orcs, especially those who might possibly have been bred with humans. Tolkien was a scholar and a devout Christian, so there's basically no chance at all that this isn't an intentional reference to a city and empire that the Bible detests. Oh, and among many other reasons, one reason given for the biblical Flood was the interbreeding between humans and beings translated variously as angelic/demonic/giants.*

Anyway, Ishtar was basically a Stacy before /r9k/ came up with the idea. A sex goddess who has a ton of lovers, all of whom she treats like crap: they suffer to make her happy when they're together, and then she gives them grisly punishments when she gets bored of them. When Gilgamesh refused her advances, citing what happens to people who sleep with her, she goes to elaborate lengths to sentence HIM to grisly punishments, too.

Someone who triggers violence and wars over her constantly bouts of crazy, and who probably presides over the orgy of retributive hate-sex that came with war.**

She's the perfect /r9k/ deity. I can see why the ancient Hebrews were so eager to stamp Ishtar-worship out, and why it was so prevalent anyway.

*Actually, while I gave the Christian view that tolkien would have held, the hebrew translations and talmudic interpretations of the passage are entirely different. Tolkien would have been well aware of this interpretation of scripture as well; it's probably while all three unions of Elves and Men involved the elf being the wife (and Melian was the Maia wife in her marriage to the Elf Thingol), to avoid an unwanted parallel with the biblical passage.

** I don't just mean post-conquest rape of conquered women. In the middle east, it was customary in antiquity to rape the POWs of a defeated army.

>Yet another matriarchal nature deity
yawn

The simple fact that all surviving Babylonian sources fail to talk about how every woman must get publicly deflorated before marriage is proof enough that it was bullshit, just like his story about dog-sized ants and one-legged people using their comically oversized feet as umbrellas.
Nor do the people they conquered, such as the Hebrews, complain about the horrific practice imposed upon them. They mention that they shouldn't let their daughters and sons become sacred prostitutes, which confirms that sacred prostitution did exist (Babylonian sources also mention them) but not that it was compulsory or widespread. They just shunned it like they shunned all foreign gods or practices (or didn't, because the Old Testament is basically one long rant about how Hebrews never listened to what "God" told them and embraced the most depraved foreign practices with much enthusiasm.)

But even beyond that, it's your entire conception of the method of historical inquiry that I'm mocking. It's not like in hard sciences where you got an experimental result and you're not sure if it's a fluke or a general rule before you replicate it, but at least you have something like concrete evidence to work with. History rarely works with concrete evidence so you need some critical thinking just to know what sources you should accept and under what caveats. If you're reading some Pharaoh's victory poem that talks about how he used his 50 foot long schlong to clobber an entire army before spitroasting all their women with it and you decide to take it as gospel until you find contradictory evidence, you're just not cut out to be a historian.

>someone wrote it, and no one contradicts it
>thus you have to accept it is true

even you're smarter than that user

The difference is that Babylon thought all of this was a good thing.

Babylon hardly ever talks about how their own worship worked. You get myths and legends but they never talk about temple worship, probably because they figured it so normal and mundane it wasn't worth detailing. They weren't writing for an audience thousands of years into the future.

Barbarian DID mean uncivilized to a Greek. Those stupid furriners had no philosophy, mathematics, humanism, or infanticide. They weren't necessarily illiterate, but they were certainly less civilized (over and above the fact that most lacked a "civil" or city-based culture, even the ones that had large cities).

But you're right that plenty of other societies were literate. It's just that most civilizations had no historians. The Egyptians did, but lied on purpose for religious/propaganda/post-modernist reasons. The Persians were a tolerant polyglot empire that had a thousand blasphemies and bizarre local practices. The Phoenicians and Jews were literate but probably were the ones who told the greeks how awful the Cult of Ishtar was to begin with.

And, just because it sounds bad to modern ears doesn't mean it's a lie or exaggeration.

In general, though, you're right. The old saying is wrong. History is written by the historians, and those aren't always the victors.

>Gilgamesh
Man Rule No1 - Don't stick your dick in crazy.

I'm an academic, and I'd sign on with what he said. If you have one source making an assertion, and nothing in the record contradicts it, and I'd add nothing we know about human practices contradict it, then you can TENTATIVELY accept it.

Look up the practices of the ancient Arabs pre-Islam, and you'll see all kinds of similar customs. Some mandated by the law of the time and that sound ridiculous to our ears, those of their own contemporaries in other cultures, and to their own descendants. There's only fifteen hundred years and zero changes of ethnicity and geography that separate those peoples.

There's hot debate over whether Ishtar's cult had prostitutes at all, whether forced prostitution occurred, and whether it involved brides-to-be. Multiple sources on both sides. So I'd call all this "possible but unconfirmed" until the experts unearth more data or achieve consensus on the issue.

Meanwhile, as an RPG convention, you follow Rule of Cool as always.

>Gap in her armor detected... will have to spear/10

Love is Violence. It's not hard to see why. Two opposing forces clashing together are often violent.

Shit, that means we need to assume headless giants really did exist because some drunk Greek motherfucker said so?

This isn't even about worship, it's about what would have been an important rite of passage in their culture. It's like refusing to talk about marriage or funerals.

>Those stupid furriners had no philosophy, mathematics, humanism, or infanticide.
Tell that to Xenophon and his manboner for Cyrus.

>It's just that most civilizations had no historians.
They still had people writing about laws and morality or otherwise mentioning daily life, even indirectly or in passing. Silence is often telling.

>manboner for Cyrus
EVERYONE had a manboner for Cyrus. To the Ancients, he was like our Julius, Augustus, or Constantine. Only a lot more popular with foreigners due to not feeling like he had to make people worship his predecessors.

You can't tell me that /r9k/ doesn't secretly revel in their inflated fantasies of being dominated and humiliated by women, society, and Chad.

And he and Enkidu still got punished anyway.

Of course. The point was that they looked upon Olde Persia with the same admiration (and upon contemporary Persia with the same disgust) that modern Europeans used to look at ancient India and China before they grew out of their orientalizing phase. It wasn't all about Cyrus in particular, just like Romaboos don't simply suck Cesar's dick in particular, it was about the virtues of the entire society that birthed the man.

I'm also an academic and this guy is wrong.

This. He's the only non-Jew in the Torah ever referred to as a Messiah. Another oblique but very likely Tolkien reference is that the Persian Emperors were often called the Gardener Kings. Also they were "crownless" in that they wore diadems; the subsequent idea of a crown was invented as a kind of variant one-upped version of the Persian practice because the Persians and especially Cyrus basically set the standard for the Western ideal of kingship.

You wouldn't know it from looking at how modern Iran runs its affairs, but Persia as a powerful and respected nation is still something that's within living memory. That's even though the Shahs weren't exactly paragons of good government. Even Iran, governed as it is, has proven to be wily and dangerous.

Well hey, let's be fair to everyone here. Modern China is an oppressive dictatorship that goes out of its way to act like a dick to everyone, Iran is an oppressive Islamic dictatorship that not only acts like a dick to everyone but rants about how infidels don't deserve to live, and modern India forgot how to use the toilet.

I still would love to see a series based on the adventures of Gilgamesh, Enkidu and Prometheus just traveling the world annoying the local gods and running the fuck away from everything. Especially Ishtar, crazy bitch that she is.

First episode would be breaking Prometheus out of prison by banging on his chains with Mjölnir that Enkidu stole from a passed out drunk Thor.

They do nothing particularly world changing beyond annoy a lot of people.

I think it's interesting how that was a facet of ancient religions that we've just completely forgotten.

Freyja was goddess of love, and held dominion over half of all warriors. A war goddess, called upon for favour in war.

Bast was a warrior goddess before she and Sekhmet started differentiation.

Turan is the Goddess of love and strength.

Same with the link ancient people's placed upon the link between love and death, except among the practitioners of Vodou.

>*laughter becomes increasingly yandere in volume*

I would add that the flaws the Greeks typically attributed to their barbarian rivals were the sort of flaws that will plague civilized urbanized people such as effeminacy, hedonism, godlessness and over-sophistication.
Greeks before the Hellinistic period were basically the Russians of their time, shitting on their much more prosperous and advanced but decadent neighbors.

Taking the phrase 'love is a battlefield' to a whole new level.

Don't forget Morríghan, at one point she was Veeky Forums's Brythonic waifu. She was all about the sex and violence.

And even today we have odes to love and rockets via the Voice of Ash:

"My head is full of magic, and I can't share this with you: I feel I'm on top again; that's got everything to do with you"

You can see the marriage of powerful forces of nuclear missiles and raw sexual desire, causing someone to feel alive. Oh, so alive.

Not only kingship but the Western conception of empire derives from the Persian one. When the Greco-Romans looked for a way to organize beyond their city states, the Persian model was what they studied for inspiration.

You're clearly not or there'd have been three opinions between the two of us.

>God of war and peace

Literally Slaanesh.

Well some form of Persia has always been their rival. From the Greeks, to the Romans, to the Byzantines, there was generally a Persia to the east they vied with.

Real shame about the arabs eating them and spitting out the present husk.

>Persia as a powerful and respected nation is still something that's within living memory
user, no one still alive was old enough to find the Ottoman Empire on a map in 1920. It's been generations since anyone has thought of the Middle East as anything but a complete mess.

>Ottoman Empire
>Persia
No. I don't think they ever even claimed that, like they did with their bullshit Rome claims that absolutely nobody believed at any point.

India didn't forget to use the toilet, their religion says that anyone who isnt upper class will go to hell for using one. Big difference, if Hinduism was a proselytizing, conquering religion no one would even notice the muslims.

Man it doesn't even get to standard harem, just kinda dicks around with the concept and focuses almost entirely on near-propaganda levels of JSDF circlejerking.

It was pretty cool to see dragons get absolutely BTFO by jets though.

>their religion says that anyone who isnt upper class will go to hell for using one
I don't think that's the case. At least I've never heard of it, and I know their government (Which is basically almost entirely made up of the upper castes) are trying desperately to get the stupid peasants to shit in the toilets.

>No one would notice the muslims
Nah Hindus can drink like all other civilized peoples.

>India didn't forget to use the toilet, their religion says that anyone who isnt upper class will go to hell for using one
That's taking the whole caste system nonsense to a frightening level.

>Then we must assume much of what we know about history is innately entirely false, eh?
Most of ancient history at least.

>Hindus can drink like all other civilized peoples.
This is the big difference.

The socializing. Sequestering you and your own among your own in your own little socially walled off section does nothing to make people think you aren't a fucking tosser.

This is in error, and it annoys me how much it is error.

It is true that the Roman imperial figure would take huge, huuuuuge cues from the Persian King of Kings, but that really only happened after the empire was split.

Similar institutions developed, yes, but they developed independently, such as the imperial cult and the divine nature of the king of kings, other didn't of course.
The institution of bowing, or kneeling, or supplication in front of the monarch is of course Persian in origin from the perspective of the west, but the actual institution of how the the actual power of the emperor worked was completely different.

The Roman model is based on republicanism, and all of the offices until they gave up the pretense were based either in military term or republican offices.
Augustus, and the rest of the Julio-Claudian dynasty didn't hold "supreme power". Augustus held the power of Consul, and later Tribune and Proconsul in perpetuity.

It was an appropriation of republican powers, as were the later officers which became proto-feudal.

You don't understand how history works, do you?

People are obligated to assume absolutely nothing, no matter how much evidence is piled up to support it. Of course, deliberately turning a blind eye to lots of evidence to insist upon a specific narrative is foolish to say the least, but there's nobody stopping you from doing it unless you live in one of those dumb Yuropoor countries that criminalize holocaust denial or something.

In order to build up a historical narrative that's decently sturdy, especially if you want to build up a narrative so sturdy that you'd have to be pants-on-head retarded to deny it, you really need to bring a lot of evidence to the table -- high-quality evidence, too.

What makes an evidence high-quality? Well, a number of things.
The first criterion is that evidence should be trustworthy. Roman accounts of the pagan rites of the countries they were conquering should obviously be taken cum grano salis. Of course the Romans would want to paint the barbarians as decadent savages, so that the Roman public would want to keep the war justified in the eyes of the people back home.
The second criterion is that any evidence supported by multiple independent sources is of higher import. If both sides' record of a battle is the same, then that's likely a pretty accurate description of the battle. If you can find a common thread throughout multiple sources that are unlikely to have influenced each other, then that's a big point in favor of that narrative.

Any contradicting report is judged on all those same terms, and we then use whichever one wins out to form an idea of what we think actually happened. The greater margin by which it wins out, the more solid that final conclusion is.

We have exactly one, quite flimsy source saying that Babylonian women were required to lose their virginity as temple prostitutes before getting married. That barely tips the scale at all.

You're of course not pointing out the most damning point.

The idea that the enemy lets privileged men fuck brides to be is literally on of the most common form of propaganda.

Really sorry but i prefer Conquest of Elysium better.

>that picture
wtf

I ran out of characters. But yeah, that's an example of how our idea fails the first criterion

Dinnae be slagging ol' Hero D.

His Histories may have been quite fanciful in places, but at least Herodotus generally doesn't pretend to know anything exactly.
He's very careful to qualify what he wrote with "Well X says that..." or "The people of Y say such-and-such, which is contradicted by the people of Z"

>The true problem is being a virgin and not an angry misogynist.
/r9k/ is hated because of how much sexist, whiny and entitled most people there are, not only because they are virgins.
And obviously you can be good at getting laid AND still be this kind of asshole.

Am I the only one that thought of this ?

>they can't get laid because they're sexist
>they're sexist because they can't get laid

Kinda chicken and egg desu

but only when it's inside her

I stole it from Veeky Forums some time ago.

Her, have some sex and violence to make up for it.

The entitlement causes the inability to get laid, which adds the whining and sexism to the mix. Or at least, that's how I've seen it play out.

Requiem is so fucking good.