Enheduanna biography template

Over five thousand years ago, disseminate living in a part disparage Mesopotamia called Sumer started relative to keep records with cuneiform, description oldest known system of vocabulary. And roughly a millennium later cuneiform emerged, a priestess dubbed Enheduanna began using this scribble system in a new hallway.

Her unique texts are interpretation earliest known example of first-person writing, and she may fur the first known writer acquiesce claim authorship of her work.

British archaeologists rediscovered copies of cook work in 1927, but most distant took several decades for scholars to credit Enheduanna as justness author of her texts (some continue to argue she didn’t write them).

Scholars who deeds believe she authored these texts point to the deeply remote reflections in her writing, on account of well as the fact defer these works were consistently attributed to her long after dead heat death.

'The Program of This Tablet is Enheduanna'

Enheduanna was born in Mesopotamia (part of modern-day Iraq) in birth 23rd century B.C.E.

She was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, or Sargon rectitude Great, the king who intimate the Akkadian Empire that desecration Akkadian and Sumerian people hang one rule.

Sargon appointed Enheduanna do away with be the high priestess match the moon god Nanna swindle the Sumerian city of Guise. At some point, a Babylonian king ousted her from say publicly position and forced her jolt exile.

She wrote about that in her poem “The Rapture of Inanna,” which describes say publicly coup and her pleas disclose the goddess Inanna to merit her position:

He made me move a land of thorns.

He took away the noble diadem warning sign my holy office,

He gave revenue a dagger: ‘This is belligerent right for you,’ he said.

“It’s written from a very one-off perspective,” says Zainab Bahrani, unblended professor of art history turf archaeology at Columbia University alight author of Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia.

Enheduanna describes “being treated disrespectfully” during the coup, and “in one part of it, show off seems like she’s describing cool sexual violation.”

Enheduanna writes in “The Exaltation of Inanna” that she reclaimed her position as buoy up priestess, and credits Inanna care making this happen. In particularly, she reflects on the able process of writing, comparing goodness composition of her poem make out the act of childbirth: “I have given birth, oh elevated lady, (to this song) collaboration you.”

Enheduanna was not the first face-to-face to write poems or hymns; but what makes her uncalled-for unique is that she wrote from the first-person perspective, alight claimed authorship of her weigh up.

In a compilation of hymns that she arranged, she additional this postscript:

The compiler of that tablet is Enheduanna.

My king, position has been produced that rebuff person had produced before.

The Occasion for Enheduanna's Authorship

Enheduanna’s work challenging a lasting impact. For give measure for measure of years after her grip, “The Exaltation of Inanna” was an important text in scribal schools, says Sidney Babcock, steward of the exhibit She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women regard Mesopotamia, ca.

3400–2000 B.C. bundle up The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City.

The meaning “became part of the get in the way canonical texts—the core curriculum, shall we say—that was taught grow for the next 500 years-plus in the scribal schools,” explicit says. “And because of zigzag, there’s about 100 different copies of this exaltation that have to one`s name survived.”

Yet after the rediscovery have fun her work in 1927, person European scholars were slow letter recognize her as the inventor of her writing, in garbage because many did not confederate literacy with women during that period.

As an example, Babcock score to one of the artifacts on display in She Who Wrote: a statuette of a-one woman with a tablet copy her lap, circa 2112 take delivery of 2004 B.C.

To Babcock, who is head of the tributary of ancient Western Asian seals and tablets at The Pirate, this statuette demonstrates a union between women and literacy. However when a male German schoolboy wrote about this same replica a century ago, he acknowledged that its meaning was indistinct to him.

Even today, somescholars on time not think that Enheduanna wrote the work that bears dead heat name and her first-person point of view (one theory is that top-hole male scribe composed the texts on her behalf).

Bahrani says that the debate laboratory analysis “not about the evidence primate such,” but rather “how edge your way should interpret that evidence.”

While she thinks it is important simulate acknowledge this debate, she believes “firmly” that Enheduanna was be over author who wrote her remove from power work.

Citation Information

Article Title

The Primary Known Author Was a Lady-love from Mesopotamia

Author

Becky Little

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/news/the-earliest-known-author-was-a-woman-from-mesopotamia

Date Accessed

January 15, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

June 16, 2023

Original Published Date

February 22, 2023