Once we ask who was once the primary literary creator in historical past, many call to mind Homer. The picture of the blind poet of Historical Greece continuously occupies the rostrum of the Western literary custom.
However in reality that we should glance a lot additional again, past Greece, even past writing, and direct our gaze to the very beginning of writing: historic Mesopotamia. There, greater than 4,000 years in the past, a lady signed her paintings together with her personal identify: Enheduana.
Who was once Enheduana?
Enheduana lived round 2,300 BC. and. c., within the town of Ur, which is now southern Iraq. Her determine stands proud for a number of causes: she was once a excessive priestess of the lunar god Nana, which gave her nice political and spiritual energy. Additionally, she was once the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, the founding father of the primary Mesopotamian empire, and above all, the creator of a literary paintings of deep theological, political and poetic content material.
“Enheduana” was once no longer her private id, however a spiritual name that may be translated as “high priestess, ornament of heaven.” His actual identify stays a thriller. What isn’t in dispute is her affect: Enheduana wrote, signed and recorded her authorship, making her the primary individual, male or feminine, recognized to have accomplished so.
Writing, energy and spirituality
Cuneiform writing existed already from the center of the fourth millennium BC. It emerged as an administrative device, helpful for retaining financial data, tax keep watch over or farm animals accounting. On the other hand, by the point of Enheduana, it had additionally come for use to specific non secular, philosophical and aesthetic concepts. It was once a sacred artwork, associated with the goddess Nisaba, patroness of scribes, grain and information.
On this context, the nature of this creator is especially proven. His paintings combines deep non secular devotion with a transparent political message. His poetry is framed by means of an imperial technique: legitimizing Akkadian dominance over Sumerian towns thru a commonplace language, a commonplace religion, and a unified theological discourse.
A high-flying paintings
A number of compositions had been preserved from Enheduana, amongst which the next stand out:
Exaltation of Inanna: An extended hymn praising the goddess of affection and struggle, Inanna, asking her for assist in her time of exile. It is regarded as his maximum private and strong paintings.
Temple Hymns: a number of 42 hymns devoted to the more than a few temples and deities of Sumer. Right here, Enheduana constructs a non secular map of the territory, raising the relationship between faith and political energy.
Different fragmentary hymns, together with one devoted to their god Nana.
Those examples don’t seem to be easy non secular texts: they’re structured with nice sophistication, charged with symbolism, emotion and political imaginative and prescient. In them Enheduana seems as a mediator between gods and males; between his father, the emperor and the conquered towns.
Why do not we all know her?
Shockingly, Enheduana does no longer seem at school textbooks or in maximum college literature classes. Few other folks out of doors of historic historical past or gender research have heard of it.
Plate, reproduction of the hymn Inanna B/Ninmesharra/Ekaltation of Inanna, written by means of Enheduana. Maša Stojanova/Pen Museum
It’s legit to invite whether or not the forgetting of Enheduana corresponds to the systemic invisibility of ladies in cultural historical past. As artwork historian Anna Valtierra Lacal issues out, the presence of ladies scribes or artists in antiquity has been denied for hundreds of years, regardless of archaeological proof proving that they knew the right way to learn, write and arrange sources.
Enheduana was once no longer an remoted anomaly: its life displays that ladies actively participated within the construction of Mesopotamian civilization, each within the non secular and highbrow spheres. The truth that she is the primary individual to signal a textual content together with her identify will have to have where it merits within the historical past of mankind.
Enheduana represents no longer just a literary turning level, but in addition a robust image of ladies’s skill to create, assume and lead for the reason that very starting of written tradition. Her voice echoes from clay pills with an influence that transcends millennia, as a result of together with her the tale starts no longer most effective with phrases, but in addition with voice, subjective enjoy and self-reflexive consciousness of the act of writing that are supposed to no longer cross disregarded.
