Enheduanna
Let's start at the beginning. No really. This is the tale of the first known author in all of human history, who also just happens to be a woman.
At the end of the 2300s BC, a man named Sargon tore through the middle east.
Sargon’s origins are obscure, steeped in layers of later myth, but he seems to have begun his career as the king of Agade, a city that probably lay somewhere in modern day Iraq, along the route of Tigris river.1
King he may have been but Sargon remained unsatisfied; he mustered an army and embarked upon an unprecedented campaign of conquest.
Sargon began in Sumer, capturing the city states of Uruk, Umma, Lagash and Ur, extending his dominions till he reached the waters of the Arabian gulf. Then he marched south-east, into the deserts, to capture Elam before turning northward, up towards the source of the Euphrates, to take the ‘Upper Lands’ around Mari and Ebla. His armies may even have reached central Anatolia, a land his inscriptions describe as one of cedar forests and silver (snow-capped) mountains.
All in all, Sargon’s own inscriptions claim the capture of thirty-four cities.
Sargon was not a modest man, and nor was he a merciful one. The king imposed his own systems of law and administration onto the territories he had conquered, centralising power and uniting upper and lower Mesopotamia into what is often called the world’s first known empire.
It was into this new empire that Sargon’s daughter Enheduanna was born. The palace at Agade, where Enheduanna likely spent her childhood, would have been a place of extreme luxury and constant movement. Sargon’s centralisation of power had ensured that his halls received an endless stream of visitors from across the empire and beyond: governors, courtiers, scholars, merchants, artists, petitioners, diplomats.
Inscriptions from the time describe the ships that lined the city’s docks; boats bringing copper from Dilmun, ebony and lapis lazuli from Meluhha, frankincence and myrrh from Magan.2
Growing up here, alongside her brothers, Enheduanna was given an exceptional education; although she was not being groomed to assume control of her father’s empire, she was set to play a vital and delicate role in its stabilisation.
The city of Ur lay to the south of Agade, in what is now Iraq. Today, the site is well inland, but when Enheduanna arrived there, towards the end of the 24th century BC, it sat right on the Persian gulf, near the mouth of the Euphrates. The city formed part of Sumer, a southern Mesopotamian civilisation of city-states and kingdoms united by shared language, art and religion.
An ancient city even in Enheduanna’s day, Ur had been one of the regions richest and most important centres of power before Sargon’s conquest and now it was one of the most important lynch pins in his new empire.
Cities in ancient Mesopotamia each had a patron deity. At Ur, that deity was Nanna, the god of the moon who was also associated with cattle, divination and divine judgement. Ur’s survival was believed to depend on Nanna’s favour.
The city had built the god a great temple complex and his worship was overseen by a woman known as the En-priestess. Believed to symbolise the god’s chosen wife on earth, the En-priestess was revered at Ur - and it was to this role that Sargon appointed Enheduanna.
The king’s decision to install his daughter as En-priestess was a political one, calculated both for reconciliation and control. In sending Enheduanna to Ur, Sargon demonstrated the value he placed on the southern cities and the respect in which he held their traditions, but he also established a new power base for his regime in one of the most significant, and potentially problematic, cities in the empire.
The journey from Agade took some time. Barges would have borne Enheduanna along the canals that crossed the plain; when they reached the river Euphrates, it was downstream, past the great cities of Sumer, to Ur.
Though part of her father’s empire, Ur was a new world. The city had long-established hierarchies and an old aristocracy of its own, many of whom bitterly resented the imposition of Sargonic rule.
The main language here was not Akkadian but Sumerian, a complicated, isolate language, albeit one that used the same cuneiform alphabet. Even the years turned on a different calendar, one in which the months were marked and broken up by unfamiliar local festivals.
Enheduanna’s destination was a monumental temple complex that dominated the cityscape with its shrines, courtyards, banquet halls, living quarters, and administrative buildings. A temple hymn, traditionally attributed to Enheduanna herself, describes Nanna’s temple via a series of striking metaphors.3
House of Alabaster, your shimmering moonlight shines over the country,
your dazzling daylight spreads across the land.
House. Your court is a mighty serpent, a marshland of snakes.
Your foundation reaches down to the fifty Deep Seas, the seven Deep Waters.
Shrine. You see into the heart of the gods.
Enheduanna’s new home would be the priestess’ palace, or gipar, which lay within the temple complex itself. The gipar would be razed and rebuilt many times over the centuries that followed Enheduanna’s death and little trace of the palace she inhabited survives in the archeological record. When the best preserved iteration of the structure was constructed around a century later, its floor-plan covered an area larger that that of the White House.
Although the gipar of Enheduanna’s day may have been a little smaller, it probably shared its successor’s structure; an enfilade of airy courtyards which opened into luxurious living quarters, in-house shrines, storerooms, treasuries, offices, kitchens, and grand reception halls.
Enheduanna’s job here was primarily a religious one - to serve the god Nanna, to ensure he was appeased, to be the earthly representative of his divine consort Ningal - and she was painfully aware of its gravity. In the temple hymn quoted above, Enheduanna calls Nanna ‘the lord who delivers decisions… the crown of vast heaven’, and his temple the ‘most sacred place in heaven and earth’: this was serious business.
We can actually reconstruct something of what Enheduanna’s duties here might have looked like. Day to day, the god expected to be fed with baskets of bread and beer prepared in the complex’s kitchens, perhaps supplemented with offerings of dairy, honey, oil, dates, and nuts.
Enheduanna would also have overseen the rituals of purification and offering that were so crucial to keeping the god happy and the city safe - directing the libations and leading the correct combination of prayer, gesture and song.
There were magnificent festivals to be arranged too, replete with music and feasting; ‘your feast is a song’, recalls the temple hymn to Nanna at Ur, ‘and your great holy halls are the sacred drums’.
An extraordinary archeological survival allows us to see Enheduanna in action. In 1927, excavations in the area of the gipar turned up several fragments of a translucent alabaster disk, around 27 cm in diameter, with a short frieze carved in relief across its centre. Four figures stand in procession before a ziggurat-like structure; the first pours a libation from a tall vessel, the second raises their hand in a gesture of prayer, the third and fourth follow behind with ritual objects.
The second figure is clearly the most important: she is taller than the others, wears a complex tiered, pleated gown and rolled head-dress, and she is depicted in prayer rather than engaged in the manual elements of the ritual. This, an inscription on the back of the disk tells us, is Enheduanna.
Important though Enheduanna’s religious role was, she was hardly divorced from the temporal world. The temples of ancient Mesopotamia were as much palaces at the centre of vast estates as they were places of worship.
Nanna’s temple at Ur would have been supported by hundreds of hectares of farmland and workshops employing hundreds of members of staff: stewards, farmhands, millers, boatsmen, builders, shepherds, guards, weavers, and skilled craftsmen. Because the En-priestess remained unmarried, this veritable empire fell entirely under the jurisdiction of Enheduanna.
To aid in the running of the temple and its estates, and to attend to her personal needs, Enheduanna built up a significant household for herself at Ur. A number of cylinder seals have been found that identify their owners as members of the priestess' staff.4 We know she had a steward named Adda, a scribe named Sagadu, and a hair-dresser called Ilum-palil.
With the resources at her disposal and the ties of dependence and loyalty that attached to the temple and its estates, the En-priestess could not help but be a major political figure in Ur and the Mesopotamian south. This was doubly true for Enheduanna: her appointment had, from the start, been a strand of her father’s imperial policy and her first literary output appears to have been consciously political in its conception.
Enheduanna is named as the author of a series of ‘Temple Hymns’ written in the same strange, complex style, that characterises her later, more self-referential, poetry. Each one of these forty-two short poems or songs is addressed to a Mesopotamian city, its temple, and its patron deity. The collection begins in the south, in Eridu - believed by the Sumerians to be the oldest city on earth, founded by Ea, the god of wisdom himself. The poems travel north-west, zig-zagging across the alluvial plain, until they reach Sargon’s capital - and Enheduanna’s home city - Agade.
If Enheduanna did compose the Temple Hymns (the authorship of which is somewhat disputed), the structure and content of the collection can hardly but be read as a political statement. This was an Akkadian princess writing in the Sumerian language, as a high-priestess in Ur, to the ancestral gods of cities all across her father’s newly constructed empire.
The message is one of unity, but also of Akkadian supremacy. The gods of the final poems, the ones we meet in the temples of Agade are notably more war-like and rebel-wary than their predecessors. From her temple ‘made of silver and lapis lazuli,/treasury built of gold’, the goddess Inanna ‘wears war, jubilant and beautiful’ and, thus arrayed, ‘impose[s] silence on the rebel land,/pouring cruel words upon it until it submits’. Likewise, Ilaba, the city-god of Agade is characterised as the ‘battle-ax that fells rebels,/then digs up their green meadows’.
By poem forty-one we seem to have reached our final destination - the capital at Agade with its dynasty protecting gods - but the last poem in the collection is in fact addressed to a temple in a place named Eresh. An otherwise relatively insignificant city, this was the home of Nisaba, the goddess of learning, allowing the collection to conclude with a hymn in honour of the power of writing itself, of female intelligence, and of Enheduanna’s role as author.
Righteous woman of unmatched mind.
Soothing...and opening her mouth,
consulting a tablet of lapis lazuli,
giving guidance to all the lands.
Righteous woman, cleansing soap, born
to the upright stylus.
She measures the heavens and outlines
the earth:
All praise Nisaba.
The weaver of the tablet was Enheduanna.
My king! Something has been born
which had not been born before.In the Temple Hymns, we encounter writing as a powerful tool of social control and political stabilisation. Inscribed tablets ‘give guidance to all the lands’; the writing stylus ‘measures the heavens and outlines the earth’; the collection itself honours and reinforces the strength of Sargon’s empire.
In Enheduanna’s other poetry, however, authorship and the act of writing would be forced to fulfil a much more personal role.
When Sargon the Great died, his empire passed to his son Rimush, one of Enheduanna’s brothers. Rimush ruled for nine years before he fell victim to a court conspiracy; his successor was another brother, Manishtushu, who lasted fifteen years before meeting the same fate.
He was succeeded by his son, Naram-Sin, Enheduanna’s nephew. Cut from the same cloth as his grand-father, the new king would expand the empire, ruthlessly quash his enemies, and, eventually, take the unprecedented step of declaring himself a living god.
Naram-Sin’s leadership style was, unsurprisingly, not for everyone. In an event that would later come to be known as the Great Revolt, the king was forced to quell nine uprisings over the course of one (very bad) year. In Ur, the revolt appears to have been led by a man called Lugal-Ane.5
As the daughter of Sargon and the de facto representative of the empire in the South, Enheduanna was an obvious target for the rebels and she found herself ousted from the priesthood and exiled from the temple.
Enheduanna prayed to Nanna, the god she had served for years - decades perhaps - and the god whose earthly spouse she was meant to be. He did nothing. So, in exile and in danger, Enheduanna began to write.
The poem she produced, generally known as the Exultation of Inanna, is a strikingly intimate narrative of struggle and retribution - one that still retains the power to move. The author is centred throughout, her identity reasserted and her emotions laid bare. We are in no doubt as to whose story this is; 'I am Enheduana,’ she writes, ‘I am the high priestess’.
Her position, however, has bought her no mercy from the rebels, and Enheduanna exposes a litany of Lugal-Ane’s abuses:
Lugal-Ane stood in triumph, he stepped out from the temple. I fled like a swallow swooping through a window—my life is all spent. The thorns of foreign lands—is that what you have decreed for me? He took the crown of the high priestess from me, giving me a knife and dagger instead: “These suit you better,” he said.
The exact nature of Lugal-Ane’s attack on Enheduanna is difficult to pin down. He certainly insulted her, deposed her from the position of high-priestess, and evicted her from the temple-palace. ‘He has made himself’, Enheduanna rages, ‘my equal’.
The knife and dagger he sent her - if we are meant to read these sentences literally - might have been intended as an insult to her gender, as an illusion to the hardships and dangers she would face in exile, or as an invitation to suicide.
Whatever Lugal-Ane did, the pain it caused Enheduanna is palpable. ‘I went to the light,’ she writes, ‘but the light burned/me; I went to the/shadow, but it was/shrouded in storms./My honey-mouth/is full of froth, my,/soothing words are/turned to dust’.
In her hour of need she turned first to Nanna, but found him unable, or unwilling, to help; ‘I cannot make Nanna care for my case’, she laments. Instead, her focus returned to a deity she must have known well in her childhood: Inanna - the multifaceted goddess of war and sex, and the patron deity of Sargon and his dynasty.6
In the Exultation, Enheduanna presents Inanna as a goddess of creation but also of merciless destruction. ‘Let them/know’, she says, ‘that you crush/every rebel. Let them/know that you grind/skulls to dust.’
It is this type of wrath that she calls down on Lugal-Ane: ‘chase him’, she begs the goddess, ‘chain him’.
This time Enheduanna’s prayers did not fall on deaf ears. The final section of the poem moves into the third person to tell us of the destruction of the rebels and Enheduanna’s triumphant restoration to the palace and the priesthood at Ur.
Nanna extolled her, Ningal blessed her, and the temple's thresholds welcomed her home.
Next month we’re going to ancient Rome to meet the archetypal evil advisor. Jafar and Iago have nothing on this guy.
And if you want more in the meantime you can order my book about the scandalous Roman empress Messalina which comes out in under a month. Its endless sex, murder, and ancient history - what more could you want?
For clarity the civilisation is generally referred to in the scholarly literature as Akkad, and its eponymous capital as Agade. Both are legitimate transliterations of the original shared name.
Dilmun seems to have been situated on the coast of the Persian gulf in modern day Oman, Bahrain or Saudi Arabia; Meluhha was most likely in the Indus Valley; and Magan probably lay further down the gulf from Dilmun in what is now Oman or perhaps Iran.
All translations are taken from Sophus Helle’s masterful new edition: The Complete Poems of Enheduana: the world’s first author. Yale University Press, 2023.
Cylinder seals were highly decorated and personalised cylindrical stamps often worn around the owner’s neck. They were rolled into clay document tablets, leaving a unique impression that functioned like a signature.
Lugal-Ane is mentioned as a leader in Ur during the Great Revolt against Naram-Sin by a later source, the reliability of which is somewhat questionable. Given the political instability of the period and the frequency of uprisings in the empire, it is possible the the Lugal-Ane who persecuted Enheduanna was actually involved in an earlier attack on Akkadian rule. Either way, the narrative of Enheduanna’s personal persecution remains much unchanged.
Known as Inanna in Sumerian, this goddess was also known as Ishatar in Akkadian.
Further Reading
Sophus Helle, The Complete Poems of Enheduana: the world’s first author. Yale University Press: New Haven & London, 2023.
Benjamin R. Foster, The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia. Routledge: London & New York, 2016.
James B. Pritchard ed. The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts & Pictures. Princeton University Press: New Jersey & Woodstock, 2011.
Agnette W. Lassen & Klaus Wagensonner eds. Women at the Dawn of History. Especially Wagensonner, ‘Between History and Fiction - Enheduana, the First Poet in World Literature’. Yale University Press: New Haven & London, 2020.
Penelope Weadock, The Giparu at Ur: A Study of the Archeological Remains and Related Textual Material. University of Chicago, 1958.
Irene Winter, On Art in the Ancient Near East Volume II: From the Third Millennium BCE. Especially Chapter 18, ‘Women In Public: The Disk Of Enheduanna, The Beginning Of The Office Of En-Priestess, And The Weight Of Visual Evidence’. Brill: Leiden & Boston, 2010.
I really enjoyed reading this. To read some of the first poetry ever written was a joy, thank you for sharing.