Who She Was
Enheduanna lived in the later 24th or the 23rd century BCE, in the period of the Akkadian Empire, and is the earliest author in history to whom works are firmly attributed by name. That statement needs one qualification at the outset. The poems that carry her name are known mainly from clay tablets copied roughly five centuries after her lifetime, in the Old Babylonian period, so scholars debate how much of the wording goes back to her and how much reflects later copying and editing. Even so, most Assyriologists accept that she was a real person and that she composed at least some of the works attributed to her.
According to inscriptions, she was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, the ruler who built the first large Mesopotamian empire. Her name is Sumerian, and its usual interpretation is “high priestess, ornament of heaven.” She was appointed en priestess of Nanna, the moon god, at Ur, an important religious office in the city of Ur and in southern Mesopotamia as a whole. The appointment is generally understood as a political move: placing a royal daughter in the main temple of a Sumerian city linked the new Akkadian dynasty with the older religious traditions of the south.
The Alabaster Disc
The best evidence for her existence outside the literary tradition is a carved alabaster disc found at Ur in the 1920s during excavations led by Leonard Woolley. It was found broken and was reassembled, and it is often cited in studies of Mesopotamian art. One side shows a priestess, identified as Enheduanna by an inscription, leading a ritual in front of an altar, with other figures. The inscription names her as the daughter of Sargon and as a priestess of Nanna. The disc is widely used as a portrait-like image of her, although it follows ceremonial conventions, so it should not be read as a literal likeness. Seals belonging to members of her household have also been found.
The Works Attributed to Her
Four compositions are most often credited to her:
- The Exaltation of Inanna (known in Sumerian as Nin-me-sara), a long poem praising Inanna as a powerful and terrible deity.
- Inninsagura, another hymn to Inanna, sometimes called “The Great-Hearted Mistress.”
- Inanna and Ebih, a poem in which the goddess confronts a mountain that has refused to submit to her.
- The Sumerian Temple Hymns, a collection of short hymns to temples across Sumer and neighbouring regions, whose closing lines name Enheduanna as the compiler.
Her hymns are written in Sumerian, the long-established literary language of the south, even though she belonged to the Akkadian-speaking ruling family. They show a sophisticated command of religious imagery and theology. The poems present the goddess Inanna, who later became associated with the Akkadian Ishtar, as a deity of war, storms and sovereignty as well as love, which fits her complicated place in the Sumerian pantheon.
An Author’s Voice
What sets the Exaltation of Inanna apart is the way the poet speaks in the first person. The text describes a crisis in which Enheduanna was driven out of her post and appeals to Inanna for help, reciting her own devotion and offering the poem itself as proof. A rebel named Lugal-ane is mentioned, and many historians connect the episode to a revolt against Sargon’s successors, possibly during the reign of her nephew Naram-Sin, although the historical background is reconstructed from the poem and is not independently documented in detail.
The poem culminates in the goddess restoring her. Whether this is autobiography, a literary construction, or a mixture is debated. Either way, the first-person voice, the personal appeal and the signature of authorship make the work unusual for its time. Most early Mesopotamian literature has no named author at all.
Why “First Named Author”?
Calling her the first named author means that she is the earliest figure for whom we have both an attributed body of writing and independent evidence of a historical person. Earlier written texts exist, such as the administrative tablets from the cities of the late fourth and third millennia BCE, but these are records of goods and labour rather than literary works by an identifiable individual. After Enheduanna, named authors appear gradually. Mesopotamian scribal tradition tended to credit works to legendary or divine figures, or to leave them anonymous, so her attribution stands out.
Some scholars caution against treating the title as settled. The surviving copies are late, the possibility that other poems were later attached to her name cannot be excluded, and our sample of early writing is small. The claim is best read as “the earliest author we can name with reasonable confidence” rather than an absolute statement about all human history.
Writing and Women in Early Mesopotamia
Enheduanna’s career also says something about literacy. The development of cuneiform writing in the south created a class of scribes who were mostly male, but a few women are known as scribes and as authors of letters, particularly in later periods and in cloistered communities of women, so her case is exceptional rather than unique in kind. The ability to compose complex Sumerian verse implies a high level of training of the kind associated with Sumerian literacy, and the high status of the en priestess gave her an unusual platform. Her poetry was later studied in scribal schools, and the wide circulation of copies suggests that it was admired and used as a literary model for generations.
Legacy
Her hymns influenced later religious poetry in Mesopotamia, particularly the traditions that celebrated Inanna and Ishtar. In the modern world, she has become a frequent reference point in discussions of women’s contributions to literature. The scholarly picture is still changing as tablets are re-read and new copies are matched with known texts, which is typical of a field where the sources are fragmentary. What can be said with confidence is that, more than four thousand years ago, a priestess at Ur composed poems that others considered worth copying and teaching, and that her name was remembered along with them.