Her Words Remain - First Author in Human History

Let us go far back in time, to a world without electricity, reality T.V. , or credit scores, and into the ancient civilization of beautiful Mesopotamia. Around 5,000 years ago, in the bustling cities of ancient Sumer, humanity as we know it today began the use of cuneiform, which would become one of its greatest inventions. writing. So what profound thoughts did our ancestors feel compelled to preserve for future generations? Poetry? Philosophy? Declarations of undying love? Not quite. They were keeping receipts![1]

Some of the earliest known written records were administrative accounts documenting goods such as grain, livestock, and even beer! These records were created using a system we now call proto-cuneiform, the earliest predecessor of cuneiform writing. Developed in ancient Mesopotamia around 3300 BCE, proto-cuneiform began as a system of pictographic symbols and numerical markings impressed or drawn into clay tablets. Over the centuries, these symbols evolved into the distinctive script known as cuneiform. What began as a practical method of keeping track of traded goods would eventually become a way to preserve laws, literature, and the thoughts of people who lived thousands of years before us. [1], [2] 

And with writing came something far more extraordinary than the accounting of grain and livestock. Humanity could now preserve its stories and culture. Words that once vanished into the air could be given permanence, surviving long after the voices that spoke them had fallen silent. Nearly a thousand years after the earliest written records, a woman living in the ancient city of Ur would leave behind something remarkable. [3]

Her name was Enheduanna. She was a princess, a high priestess, and a poet. Enheduanna lived around 2300 BCE and is recognized as the earliest known named author in human history whose name has survived the ravages of time. The daughter of Sargon of Akkad, one of antiquity's greatest conquerors, Enheduanna held an impressive amount of religious and political authority. Yet it is neither her royal lineage nor her position of power that makes her most remarkable to us today. It is her poetry that makes Enheduanna such a remarkable figure in human history. [4], [5] 

In hymns devoted to the goddess Inanna, Enheduanna wrote of divine power, devotion, suffering, and her own personal struggles. She left behind a rare treasure from the ancient world. Not merely a record of what happened, but an expression of what one human being had felt within her being. In a composition now known as The Exaltation of Inanna, traditionally attributed to her, she wrote of devotion to the goddess Inanna, of exile, suffering, and her desperate longing for deliverance. [6]

“I, En-hedu-ana the en priestess, entered my holy jipar in your service. I carried the ritual basket, and intoned the song of joy. But funeral offerings were brought, as if I had never lived there. I approached the light, but the light was scorching hot to me. I approached that shade, but I was covered with a storm. My honeyed mouth became venomous. My ability to soothe moods vanished.”
— The Exaltation of Inanna, lines 66–73 [6]

 

These words evoke a world almost unimaginably distant from our own. Yet the anguish they convey remains profoundly recognizable. Enheduanna could scarcely have imagined that thousands of years later, people would still be reading the composition associated with her name. And for much of history, it seemed her words had been lost. [9]

In the late nineteenth century, archaeologists began uncovering the remains of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Nippur, in what is now Iraq. Among its ruins were countless clay tablets, their surfaces covered in the ancient script of cuneiform. Some of these tablets contained literary compositions attributed to Enheduanna. They were not the original tablets made during her lifetime, but copies painstakingly produced by scribes centuries after her death. One surviving manuscript of The Exaltation of Inanna, dating to approximately 1750 BCE, came into the collection of the University of Pennsylvania through a purchase in 1888. [10], [11]

Then, in 1926, another extraordinary discovery was made. While excavating the ancient city of Ur, archaeologists working under Leonard Woolley uncovered the broken remains of an alabaster disk. Carved into one side was the image of a woman presiding over a religious ceremony. On the reverse was an inscription identifying her as Enheduanna, daughter of King Sargon and high priestess of the moon god Nanna. For the first time in thousands of years, there was a surviving image bearing the name of the woman associated with these ancient hymns. Through the painstaking work of scholars, fragments of the literary past were translated, compared, and pieced together. The words that generations of scribes had preserved in clay could once again be read. [12]