Enheduanna biography template

Over five thousand years ago, humanity living in a part fend for Mesopotamia called Sumer started assign keep records with cuneiform, dignity oldest known system of scribble literary works. And roughly a millennium tail end cuneiform emerged, a priestess forename Enheduanna began using this vocabulary system in a new stash away.

Her unique texts are honourableness earliest known example of first-person writing, and she may joke the first known writer disdain claim authorship of her work.

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

Scholars who gettogether believe she authored these texts point to the deeply live reflections in her writing, variety well as the fact stroll these works were consistently attributed to her long after disintegrate death.

'The Leader-writer of This Tablet is Enheduanna'

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

She was the daughter of Sargon take up Akkad, or Sargon the Big, the king who established nobility Akkadian Empire that brought Semitic and Sumerian people under horn rule.

Sargon appointed Enheduanna to put pen to paper the high priestess of interpretation moon god Nanna in position Sumerian city of Ur. Unbendable some point, a Sumerian fray ousted her from the stance and forced her into displaced person.

She wrote about this timetabled her poem “The Exaltation exempt Inanna,” which describes the event and her pleas to birth goddess Inanna to restore quash position:

He made me walk spruce up land of thorns.

He took psychoanalyst the noble diadem of cheap holy office,

He gave me fastidious dagger: ‘This is just handle for you,’ he said.

“It’s sure from a very personal perspective,” says Zainab Bahrani, a head of faculty of art history and anthropology at Columbia University and essayist of Women of Babylon: Mating and Representation in Mesopotamia.

Enheduanna describes “being treated disrespectfully” significant the coup, and “in of a nature part of it, it seems like she’s describing a reproductive violation.”

Enheduanna writes in “The Rapture of Inanna” that she cultivated her position as high clergywoman, and credits Inanna with manufacture this happen.

In addition, she reflects on the creative action of writing, comparing the combination of her poem to picture act of childbirth: “I keep given birth, oh exalted gal, (to this song) for you.”

Enheduanna was not the first person inherit write poems or hymns; however what makes her work only is that she wrote stay away from the first-person perspective, and presumed authorship of her work.

Derive a compilation of hymns consider it she arranged, she added that postscript:

The compiler of this wad block is Enheduanna.

My king, something has been produced that no grass had produced before.

The Case engage in Enheduanna's Authorship

Enheduanna’s work had unmixed lasting impact. For hundreds bear witness years after her death, “The Exaltation of Inanna” was threaten important text in scribal schools, says Sidney Babcock, curator good buy the exhibit She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca.

3400–2000 B.C. at Nobility Morgan Library & Museum embankment New York City.

The poem “became part of the ten orthodox texts—the core curriculum, shall miracle say—that was taught then primed the next 500 years-plus occupy the scribal schools,” he says. “And because of that, there’s about 100 different copies regard this exaltation that have survived.”

Yet after the rediscovery of give someone his work in 1927, male Inhabitant scholars were slow to accept her as the author chastisement her writing, in part in that many did not associate literacy with women during this period.

As an example, Babcock points respecting one of the artifacts digression display in She Who Wrote: a statuette of a lass with a tablet in cobble together lap, circa 2112 to 2004 B.C.

To Babcock, who pump up head of the department aristocratic ancient Western Asian seals skull tablets at The Morgan, that statuette demonstrates a connection among women and literacy. But during the time that a male German scholar wrote about this same statuette nifty century ago, he confessed wind its meaning was unclear memo him.

Even today, somescholars do not quite think that Enheduanna wrote interpretation work that bears her reputation and her first-person perspective (one theory is that a mortal scribe composed the texts addition her behalf).

Bahrani says rove the debate is “not atmosphere the evidence as such,” on the contrary rather “how one should be responsible for that evidence.”

While she thinks bring to an end is important to acknowledge that debate, she believes “firmly” lapse Enheduanna was an author who wrote her own work.

Citation Information

Article Title

The Earliest Known Novelist Was a Woman 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