Enheduanna

Enheduanna was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, the king who, in the twenty-fourth century BCE, united the city-states of Mesopotamia under one rule for the first time and founded what historians call the Akkadian Empire. Sargon appointed his daughter as the en, or high priestess, of Nanna, the moon god, at Ur, one of the oldest and most important religious centres of southern Mesopotamia.

The name Enheduanna is a Sumerian title-name, usually translated as “en-priestess, ornament of heaven”. It was probably given to her when she took office; her birth name is unknown. As en, she was regarded as the earthly spouse of the moon god. She lived in the giparu, a large building beside the temple at Ur, where she presided over rituals and managed the estates of the god.

Enheduanna is remembered today above all as a poet. Ancient tradition attributes to her a group of hymns in the Sumerian language, including passages in which the poet speaks in the first person and names herself. If the attribution is correct, she is the earliest author in the world known by name, about a thousand years before Homer and several centuries before the earliest surviving versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In 1927 the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley, excavating the giparu at Ur, found fragments of a round alabaster (calcite) disk. Reassembled, it shows a scene of worship carved in relief. A naked male priest pours a libation, a liquid offering, before an altar or a stepped structure. Behind him stands a woman in a long flounced robe and a distinctive headdress, raising her hand in a gesture of reverence, followed by two attendants.

The inscription on the back identifies her as Enheduanna, wife of Nanna and daughter of Sargon. The disk is thus one of the very few ancient images of a named woman from the third millennium BCE. Parts of the face and inscription were damaged and have been restored. The disk is now in the Penn Museum (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) in Philadelphia.

Other finds confirm that Enheduanna was a real person. Seals bearing her name and belonging to members of her household, dating to the Sargonic period, were also found at Ur. These objects show that she held an important office with her own staff and administration.

Ur lay near the Euphrates in the far south of Mesopotamia, close to the marshes and the head of the Persian Gulf. It was already an ancient and wealthy city when Enheduanna arrived. A few centuries earlier its rulers had been buried in the famous Royal Tombs, filled with gold, lyres and jewellery, which Woolley also excavated in the 1920s.

The city’s patron god was Nanna, the moon god, whom the Akkadians called Sin. His temple complex stood in the heart of the city. The great ziggurat of Ur that visitors see today was built later, around 2100 BCE, by King Ur-Namma, but a temple of the moon god stood on the site long before.

As en-priestess, Enheduanna was not only a religious leader but also the head of a large household. The god’s temple owned fields, flocks and workshops, and employed many people, from farmers and weavers to scribes. Her seals and the staff named on them show that she managed this organisation. Her life thus combined ritual, administration and, according to tradition, literary composition.

Four major compositions are most often attributed to Enheduanna. The best known is Nin-me-šara, “Lady of all the divine powers”, usually called in English The Exaltation of Inanna, a hymn of about 150 lines. The second, In-nin ša-gur-ra, “Stout-hearted lady”, praises Inanna’s terrifying power in battle. The third, In-nin me-huš-a, known as Inanna and Ebih, tells how the goddess destroys a mountain that refused to honour her.

The fourth is a collection of 42 short hymns to temples across Sumer and Akkad, known as the Sumerian Temple Hymns. Each hymn addresses a temple as if it were a living being, praising its beauty and its god. Near the end, two lines name Enheduanna as the compiler of the tablet and declare that something has been created that no one had created before.

These poems are full of powerful images. Inanna rides on beasts, rains fire on the land, and is praised as greater than the sky god An. The poet also speaks of her own suffering: she has been driven from her temple, her beauty has turned to dust, and she calls on Inanna to rescue her. This mixture of praise, pleading and personal voice is what has made the poems so admired.

The Exaltation of Inanna begins by celebrating Inanna as queen of all the me, the divine powers that make up civilisation, and as a warrior goddess whose fury no one can withstand. It then turns to a crisis. A man named Lugal-Ane has seized power in Ur. The poet says she has been expelled from her temple and her office, and that her own god Nanna has not come to her aid.

In the central section, the poet appeals directly to Inanna, asking her to judge the case and punish the rebel. Some scholars, notably Annette Zgoll, have read the poem as structured like a legal petition, in which the priestess brings her case before a divine court. At the climax, the poet says she has composed the hymn during the night and offers it to the goddess; in the final lines Inanna accepts the prayer and the priestess is restored.

The historical background seems to be the revolts that broke out against the Akkadian kings, especially against Sargon’s grandson Naram-Sin, when several Sumerian cities rose against Akkadian rule. Naram-Sin crushed the rebellions. The poem may thus reflect real events in which Enheduanna, as a representative of the Akkadian dynasty in Ur, was driven out and later returned. Scholars disagree about how precisely the poem can be connected with specific historical events.

Enheduanna’s hymns use the full resources of Sumerian poetry. Lines are often built in parallel pairs, in which the second half repeats or intensifies the first. Lists of epithets pile up to overwhelm the listener with the goddess’s greatness. Images come from nature and warfare: Inanna is compared to a storm, a flood, a lion and a raging fire, and she is shown riding on beasts and scattering enemies.

What stands out is the poet’s own presence. In The Exaltation of Inanna the speaker moves from third-person praise to first-person lament and then to direct address, telling the goddess what has happened to her and what she wants. She describes the hymn itself as something she has “given birth to” during the night, making the act of composition part of the poem. This self-awareness about creating a text is rare in the literature of the time.

The Temple Hymns work differently. Each short hymn follows a similar pattern: it names a temple, praises its splendour, and ends by naming the god who dwells there. Together they form a sacred map of the land, from Eridu in the far south to cities in the north. Read as a collection, they present Sumer and Akkad as a single religious landscape, which fits well with the political project of the Akkadian kings.

For modern readers, the poems can be difficult. Many lines are broken or obscure, and translators must make choices about difficult words. Comparing several translations is a good way to see both the power of the poems and the uncertainties behind any single version.

Sargon was an Akkadian, a speaker of a Semitic language, from the north of Mesopotamia. His empire brought together the ancient Sumerian cities of the south, each with its own gods and traditions. Placing his daughter as high priestess in Ur, the city of the moon god, was a political act: it tied a prestigious Sumerian religious institution to the new dynasty and gave the Akkadian royal family a presence at the heart of Sumerian religion.

Enheduanna’s poems also seem to bring together different religious traditions. The Sumerian goddess Inanna is closely identified with the Akkadian goddess Ishtar, and the hymns praise Inanna as supreme over other gods. Some scholars have suggested that her poetry served to promote a unified religious outlook for a unified empire, although it is difficult to prove such an intention.

The office of en-priestess of Nanna became a lasting tradition. Later Mesopotamian kings continued to appoint their daughters to the post for centuries. As late as the sixth century BCE, King Nabonidus of Babylon revived the office for his own daughter, drawing on ancient inscriptions about earlier priestesses. Enheduanna stood at the beginning of this long line.

Almost all the manuscripts of Enheduanna’s poems date from the Old Babylonian period, roughly 1900–1700 BCE, several centuries after her lifetime. They come from scribal schools at Nippur, Ur and other cities, where students copied Sumerian literature as part of their education, even though Sumerian was no longer a spoken language by then.

The Exaltation of Inanna was one of the most frequently copied works in the Old Babylonian schools, which shows that it was considered a classic. Later still, some of the hymns were copied with Akkadian translations.

After cuneiform went out of use in the early centuries CE, the poems were forgotten. They were rediscovered in the twentieth century from tablets found in excavations. William W. Hallo and J. J. A. van Dijk published an edition and English translation of The Exaltation of Inanna in 1968, and Åke Sjöberg and others edited the Temple Hymns. Today translations are also available through the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature at Oxford.

In the late twentieth century Enheduanna became an important figure beyond Assyriology. In 1976 the folklorist and anthropologist Marta Weigle introduced her to a wider feminist readership as the first known author in world literature. Since then she has been widely celebrated as a pioneering woman writer, and her poems have been translated and adapted by poets and scholars.

Scholars of rhetoric have studied The Exaltation of Inanna as an early example of persuasive composition, and Hallo compared the poem’s persuasive strategies with later literature, including the biblical prophets. Her poems have also been compared with later traditions of hymns and prayers throughout the ancient Near East.

In 2023 Sophus Helle published a complete English translation of the poems attributed to her, with essays, bringing her work to a broad audience. At the same time, many specialists urge caution: celebrating her as the “first author” should not obscure the real uncertainties about who composed the poems and how the idea of an author worked in ancient Mesopotamia.

The case for authorship rests mainly on internal evidence. In The Exaltation of Inanna the speaker calls herself Enheduanna and describes her own situation; the Temple Hymns include lines naming her as compiler. Hallo and van Dijk (1968) and Åke Sjöberg argued that these statements should be taken at face value, and Hallo later warned against what he considered excessive scepticism.

The case for doubt rests on the nature of the manuscripts. All substantial copies date from centuries after Enheduanna’s lifetime; they were copied in school contexts; and their language shows no clear traces of the Sumerian of the Akkadian period. Jeremy Black and colleagues noted that the texts as we have them could have been composed or heavily reworked in the Old Babylonian period. Miguel Civil suggested that “Enheduanna” might refer more to a priestly office than to an individual author. Black also argued that the lines in the Temple Hymns may apply only to the final hymn.

Between these positions, several scholars suggest that the attribution itself is significant. In a period when literary works were almost always anonymous, naming Enheduanna as author may have given these compositions special authority, linking them with a revered princess-priestess of the Sargonic dynasty. Whether that attribution preserves historical memory, a later literary construction, or a mixture of both remains an open question.

Most scholars agree on a middle ground: Enheduanna was a historical person who held the office of en-priestess, and the poems belonged to a tradition associated with her name. Whether she personally composed the texts we read today, and in what form, cannot be proved with the current evidence.

Three kinds of evidence meet in Enheduanna. First, contemporary archaeological evidence: the disk and seals from Ur, which establish her historical existence, title and family. Second, the literary manuscripts, which require philological study: establishing composite texts from many Old Babylonian copies, analysing language, spelling and variants, and asking what features might point to an earlier original. Third, the historical context of the Akkadian Empire, known from royal inscriptions and later traditions.

Interpretation depends heavily on how these kinds of evidence are combined. Linguistic analysis alone cannot easily date a composition that was modernised during centuries of copying. Historical readings of The Exaltation of Inanna depend on identifying Lugal-Ane and dating the revolt. Feminist and literary approaches ask how authorship, gender and voice were constructed in the poems and their reception.

Recent work emphasises that the concept of an “author” in ancient Mesopotamia differs from the modern idea of an individual creator. Studying Enheduanna therefore raises broader questions about authorship, anonymity, authority and canon formation in the world’s earliest literature.