ITCHY FEET TRAVELS

New York

Aug 26, 2023

Note: As mentioned in the post Cradle of Civilization III, I had to wait until I got home to write the story of Enheduanna. I took all the photos at the She Who Wrote  exhibit at the Morgan Library & Museum. The translations of cuneiform are taken from Black, J.A., Cunningham, G., Fluckiger-Hawker, E, Robson, E., and Zólyomi, G., The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, Oxford 1998.

It is the reign of legendary king Sargon I in the third millennium BCE (2334-2279) and for the first time in history has an empire been formed uniting southern Sumer and northern Akkad. Enheduanna, (2285-2250 BCE) whose name means Ornament of the Heavens is his daughter and she is appointed High Priestess for the moon god Nanna-Sin, the patron deity of Ur. And so she remained all her life, during the reign of her father and later during the reign of her nephew, Naram Sin. Statuettes of her show her in a meditative pose with a tablet on her lap as befits a writer. She is also shown wearing a flounced dress in the disc ascending the stepped ziggurat of the temple along with other attendants.

A remarkable woman, Enheduanna was not only a gifted poet, but she was amazingly prolific. She wrote a collection of forty-two temple hymns, two hymns to the goddess Inanna as well as the mythical story of Inanna and Ebih. Her declaration at the end of the Temple Hymns makes her original authorship unambiguous.

The compiler of the tablet (is) Enheduanna. 

My lord, that which has been created (here) no one has created before.

So important were her literary works, that they became canonical texts, continually copied by scribes more than a thousand years later. A hundred copies have been found to date, in various sites in Iraq. Among them are three tablets found in Larsa written by a scribe in 1750 BCE, containing her most famous work, the Exaltation of Inanna in its entirety. The 153 lines are written in the first person, making this an autobiographical work.

In one tablet (below) in lines 51-100, she speaks of being accosted and abused by a rival king Lugalanne, of being nearly forced to drink poison. An excerpt reads:

Yes, I took up my place in the sanctuary dwelling

I was high priestess, I, Enheduanna.

Though I bore the offering basket,

Though I chanted the hymns,

A death offering was ready, was I no longer living?

I went towards light, it felt scorching to me.

I went towards shade, it shrouded me in swirling dust.

A slobbered hand was laid across my honeyed mouth.

What was fairest in my nature was turned to dirt.

In other lines she speaks eloquently of her futile appeals to the moon god, Nanna Sin and her joy at being heard and rescued by the goddess Inanna. Some excerpts from the third tablet of the trio:

The almighty queen, who presides over the priestly congregation,

She accepted her prayer.

…

To my queen, arrayed in beauty,

To Inanna be praise!

The first book in human history is this, and the author, a woman named Enheduanna.