Enheduanna

Ancient Sumerian bas-relief portrait depicting Enheduanna
Notable Sumerians
Pre-dynastic kings: Alulim • Dumuzid, the Shepherd • En-men-dur-ana
1st Dynasty of Kish: Etana • En-me-barage-si • Aga of Kish
1st Dynasty of Uruk: Enmerkar • Lugalbanda • Gilgamesh
1st Dynasty of Ur: Meskalamdug • Mesh-Ane-pada • Puabi • Mesilim of Kish
2nd Dynasty of Uruk: En-shag-kush-ana
1st Dynasty of Lagash: Ur-Nanshe • Eannatum • Entemena • Urukagina
Dynasty of Adab: Lugal-Ane-mundu
3rd Dynasty of Kish: Kug-Bau
3rd Dynasty of Uruk: Lugal-zage-si
Dynasty of Akkad: Sargon • Tashlultum • En-hedu-ana • Man-ishtishu • Naram-Sin of Akkad • Shar-kali-sharri • Dudu of Akkad • Shu-Durul
2nd Dynasty of Lagash: Puzer-Mama • Gudea
5th Dynasty of Uruk: Utu-hengal
3rd dynasty of Ur: Ur-Namma • Shulgi • Amar-Suena • Shu-Suen • Ibbi-Suen
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Enheduanna (Sumerian: 𒂗𒃶𒁺𒀭𒈾, also transliterated as Enheduana, En-hedu-ana, or variants;[1] fl. 23rd century BC)[2] was a daughter of Sargon of Akkad, High Priestess of the goddess Inanna and the moon god Nanna (Sin)[3] in the Sumerian city-state of Ur.

Enheduanna has left behind a corpus of literary works, definitively ascribed to her, that include several personal devotions to the goddess Inanna and a collection of hymns known as the "Sumerian Temple Hymns" (certain texts not ascribed to her might also be her works[4]). This makes her first named author in world history.[5]

She was the first known woman to hold the title of EN, a role of great political importance that was often held by royal daughters.[6] She was appointed to the role by her father, King Sargon of Akkad. Her mother was probably Queen Tashlultum.[7][8] Enheduanna was appointed to the role of High Priestess in a shrewd political move by Sargon to help secure power in the Sumerian south where the City of Ur was located.[9]

She continued to hold office during the reign of Rimush, her brother. During the reign of Rimush she was involved in some form of political turmoil, expelled, then eventually reinstated as high priestess. Her composition 'The Exaltation of Inanna' or ‘nin me šara’[10] details her expulsion from Ur and eventual reinstatement (Franke 1995: 835). This correlates with 'The Curse of Akkade'[11] in which Naram-Sin, under whom Enheduanna may have also served, is cursed and cast out by Enlil. After her death, Enheduanna continued to be remembered as an important figure, perhaps even attaining semi-divine status.[12]

Background and archaeological discovery

In 1927, British archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered the Enhuduanna calcite disc in excavations of the Sumerian city of Ur.[13] The figure of Enheduanna is placed prominently on the disc, emphasizing her importance. Woolley also uncovered the temple complex where the priestesses were buried.[14] Wooley described Enhuduanna in a one page summary in his "Excavations at Ur",[15] but the significance of Enheduanna was not generally recognized until Adam Falkenstein published "Enhedu'anna, The Daughter of Sargon of Akkad", the first scholarly article on Enheduana in 1958,[16] followed by Hallo and Van Dijk publishing the first translations and book-length discussion of Enheduana's work in 1968.[17]

Archaeological and textual evidence

A modern reconstruction of the Ziggurat of Ur (background) looms over the ruins of the Giparu, the temple complex where Enheduanna lived and was buried

Enheduanna is well-known from archaeological and textual sources. Two seals bearing her name, belonging to her servants and dating to the Sargonic period, have been excavated at the Royal Cemetery at Ur.[18][14] In addition, an alabaster disc bearing her name and likeness was excavated in the Giparu at Ur, which was Enheduanna's main residence. The statue was found in the Isin-Larsa (c. 2000–1800 BCE) levels of the Giparu alongside a statue of the priestess Enannatumma.[19]

Copies of Enheduanna's work, many dating to hundreds of years after her death, were made and kept in Nippur, Ur and possibly Lagash alongside Royal inscriptions which indicates that they were of high value, perhaps equal to the inscriptions of Kings (Westenholz 1989:540).

Literary work

Ancient Akkadian cylinder seal depicting Inanna, the subject of many of Enheduanna's hymns, resting her foot on the back of a lion, c. 2334-2154 BC

Enheduanna composed 42 hymns addressed to temples across Sumer and Akkad including Eridu, Sippar and Esnunna.[20] The texts are reconstructed from 37 tablets from Ur and Nippur, most of which date to the Ur III and Old Babylonian periods (Sjöberg and Bergman 1969:6–7). This collection is known generally as 'The Sumerian Temple Hymns'. The temple hymns were the first collection of their kind; in them Enheduanna states: “My king, something has been created that no one has created before.”[21] The copying of the hymns indicates the temple hymns were in use long after Enheduanna's death and were held in high esteem.

Her other famous work is 'The Exaltation of Inanna'[17] or 'Nin-Me-Sar-Ra'[22] which is a personal devotion to the goddess Inanna and also details Enheduanna's expulsion from Ur.

Enheduanna's authorship raises the issue of female literacy in ancient Mesopotamia; in addition to Enheduanna royal wives are known to have commissioned or perhaps composed poetry[23] and the goddess Nindaba acted as a scribe: As Leick notes "to some extent the descriptive epithets of Mesopotamian goddesses reveal the cultural perception of women and their role in ancient society".[24]

The majority of Enheduanna's work is available in translation at the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.[25] It has also been translated and compiled into a unified narrative by Sumerian scholar Samuel Noah Kramer and poet Diane Wolkstein. Their version, published under the title Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer, was published by Harper Perennial in 1983.

List of compositions

Modern relevance

Studies of Enheduanna were limited to near-eastern scholars until about 1980, when Aliki and Willis Barnstone published a translation of "Ninmessara" in a more accessible (non-scholarly) form[26] in their anthology A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now.[27]

In 1983, Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer included English translations of several of Enheduanna's poems in their book Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, a compilation of ancient Sumerian poems about the goddess Inanna.[28] Wolkstein's adaptation became the basis of various other publications, including Judy Grahn's Queen of Swords (1987) Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette (1996), and Annie Finch's Among the Goddesses (2010). Jungian analyst Betty De Shong Meador in 2001 translated works by Enheduanna and wrote two books on the subject: Inanna: Lady of Largest Heart[29] and Princess, Priestess, Poet: The Sumerian Temple Hymns of Enheduanna.[30] Minnesota author Cass Dalglish published a "contemporary poetic adaptation" of Nin-me-sar-ra in 2008.[31]

Being not only the earliest known poet in world history, but also one of the earliest women known to history, Enheduanna has received substantial attention in feminism. To mark International Women's Day in 2014, the British Council hosted a pre-launch event for Niniti International Literature Festival in Erbil, Iraq, where "writer and previous NINITI participant Rachel Holmes [delivered] a TED Talk looking back on 5000 years of feminism, from major female Sumerian poet Enheduanna, to contemporary writers who [attended] the festival".[32]

Enheduanna is the subject of the episode "The Immortals" of the science television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, where she was voiced by Christiane Amanpour.

In 2015, the IAU named a crater on Mercury after Enheduanna.[33] Under IAU rules, all new craters on Mercury must be named after an artist, composer, or writer who was famous for more than 50 years and has been dead for more than three years.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ "En HeduAnna (EnHedu'Anna) philosopher of Iraq – 2354 BCE". Women-philosophers dot com. Archived from the original on 2013-02-09. "en" means high priest; With reference to Nanna, the Moon God, the title "heduana" is a poetic epithet the Moon ("adornment of the sky")
  2. ↑ Binkley, Roberta (1998). "Biography of Enheduanna, Priestess of Inanna". University of Pennsylvania Museum. "ca. 2285-2250 B.C.E."
  3. ↑ Gods, Demons, and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary by Jeremy Black and Anthony Green (1992, ISBN 0-292-70794-0), p. 134 (entry "Nanna-Suen").
  4. ↑ Hallo and Van Dijk 1968 p. 3.
  5. ↑ Roberta Binkley (2004). "Reading the Ancient Figure of Enheduanna". Rhetoric before and beyond the Greeks. SUNY Press. p. 47. ISBN 9780791460993.
  6. ↑ J Renger 1967: "Untersuchungen zum Priestertum in der altbabylonischen Zeit", Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäologie. Vol. 58. p. 118.
  7. ↑ Elisabeth Meier Tetlow (2004). Women, Crime, and Punishment in Ancient Law and Society: The ancient Near East. Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-8264-1628-5. Retrieved 29 July 2011.
  8. ↑ Michael Roaf (1992). Mesopotamia and the ancient Near East. Stonehenge Press. ISBN 978-0-86706-681-4. Retrieved 29 July 2011.
  9. ↑ Franke, Franke, S. "Kings of Akkad: Sargon and Naram-Sin", in Sasson, Jack, M., Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, Scribener, New York, 1995, p. 831
  10. ↑ ETCSL translation: t.4.07.2
  11. ↑ ETCSL translation: t.2.1.5
  12. ↑ Hallo and Van Dijk 1968 p. 5
  13. ↑ Mark, Joshua J. "Enheduanna", Ancient History Encyclopedia, March 24, 2014. Retrieved June 25, 2017.
  14. 1 2 Woolley, Leonard. Ur Excavations II: The royal cemetery: a report on the pre-dynastic and Sargonid graves excavated between 1926 and 1931". For the Trustees of the two Museums by the Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1934 p.312, 334–335 & 358.
  15. ↑ Woolley, C.L., Excavations at Ur, p.115.
  16. ↑ Falkenstein, A., "Enhedu'anna, Die Tochter Sargons von Akkade," Revue d'Assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale, Vol. 52, No. 2 (1958), pp. 129-131 (in German). JSTOR link. Retrieved 25 June 2017.
  17. 1 2 3 Hallo, William W. and Van Dijk, J.J.A., The Exaltation of Inanna, Yale University Press (1968).
  18. ↑ Gadd, C. J., et al., Ur Excavations Texts I – Royal Inscriptions," Trustees of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, London, 1928
  19. ↑ Weadock, P. 1975, "The Giparu at Ur," Iraq 37 (2), pp. 101–128.
  20. ↑ Sjoberg, A. W. and Bergman, S.J 1969 'The Collection of Sumerian Temple Hymns' J.J Augustin Publisher, New York p.5
  21. ↑ (ETCSL translation: t.4.80.1, line 543–544 )
  22. ↑ Angelfire description
  23. ↑ Leick, Gwendolyn. "Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature" Routledge, London, 1994 pp. 112 & 116
  24. ↑ Leick, Gwendolyn. "Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature" Routledge, London, 1994 p. 65
  25. ↑
  26. ↑ Enheduanna Research Bibliography (2001). Accessed 25 June 2017.
  27. ↑ Barnstone, Aliki, and Barnstone, Willis (1980). A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, Schocken Books, 1980 ISBN 0805236937, 978080523693; paperback Schocken Press 1981, ASIN: B000P20XU0; Penguin/Random House edition 1992 ISBN 9780805209976
  28. ↑ Wolkstein, Diane and Samuel Noah Kramer. Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. Harper & Row, NY 1983.
  29. ↑ De Shong Meador, 2001
  30. ↑ De Shong Meador, 2009
  31. ↑ Dalglish, 2008
  32. ↑ British Council Literature 'Poem for International Women's Day & NINITI International Festival of women writers in Iraq'
  33. ↑ Mercury Crater-naming Contest Winners Announced, IAU, press release, April 2015. The crater will appear in the IAU's Mercury gazetteer in due course.

References

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