The Struggle to Unearth the World’s First Author

 

The Struggle to Unearth the World’s First Author

Photo by Fang-Wei Lin on Unsplash

On the back of the disk, an inscription identifies her as Enheduanna, a high priestess and the daughter of King Sargon. Some scholars believe that the priestess was also the world’s first recorded author. If Enheduanna wrote those words, then she marks the beginning of authorship, the beginning of rhetoric, and even the beginning of autobiography. To put her precedence in perspective, she lived fifteen hundred years before Homer, seventeen hundred years before Sappho, and two thousand years before Aristotle, who is traditionally credited as the father of the rhetorical tradition.

The poem, written in the wedge-shaped impressions of cuneiform, describes a period of crisis in the priestess’s life. Enheduanna’s father, Sargon, united Mesopotamia’s city-states to create what is sometimes called history’s first empire. Although Sargon ruled from Akkad, in the north, he appointed his daughter high priestess at the temple of the moon god in the southern city of Ur. The position, though outwardly religious, was in practice political, helping to unify disparate parts of the empire.

«He has turned that time into a house of ill repute. / Forcing his way in as if he were equal, he dared approach me in his lust!» Enheduanna says. Cast out of the city, she wanders the wilderness. Enheduanna’s salvation depends on her rhetorical skill, but she finds that her powers have dried up.

«Enheduanna’s nephew eventually put down the rebellion, and Enheduanna was restored to her office. » The poem is political, inscribing the relationship between power and language, but it’s also hauntingly personal. Taken together, the hymns form what the Yale scholars William Hallo and J.

«In ancient Mesopotamia, Enheduanna’s works were celebrated and were even part of the curriculum in the edubbas, or scribal schools, which trained future priests and civil servants in cuneiform writing and Sumerian grammar. » For hundreds of years, students learned by etching Enheduanna’s words onto clay tablets, and about a hundred of these copies of «The Exaltation of Inanna» survive.

But since their discovery, in the mid-twentieth century, scholars have fiercely debated Enheduanna’s authorship. «You ask anyone you know and they’ll say the first author is Herodotus or some other man,» Sidney Babcock, the show’s curator, told me. The city of Ur was first excavated in the eighteen-fifties. But much of it went unexplored until 1922, when a British archeologist, Leonard Woolley, led a joint expedition funded by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania.

Wooley was drawn to Ur as the Biblical home of Abraham and the ancient pagan kings. Woolley’s great find was the royal cemetery, where his team unearthed the tombs of kings and queens, along with jewelry, weapons, pottery, musical instruments, and other treasures. Ur was also, of course, the adopted home of Enheduanna. In 1927, five years into the dig, the excavators discovered the ruins of a temple.

Elsewhere in the temple were clay tablets covered in cuneiform script. «Here was definite proof that the priestesses kept a school on their premises,» Woolley wrote. His book doesn’t even name Enheduanna, referring to her merely as the daughter of Sargon. In the years that followed, archeologists and looters unearthed other tablets with Enheduanna’s words, in cities such as Nippur and Larsa.

«We can now discern a corpus of the poetry of the very first rank which not only reveals its author’s name but delineates that author for us in truly autobiographical fashion,» Hallo and van Dijk wrote in their introduction to the translation. «In the person of Enheduanna, we are confronted by a woman who was at once princess, priestess, and poetess.» The pair acknowledged that the picture assembled by scholars might be incomplete. «We still do not know the full extent of Enheduanna’s literary oeuvre,» they wrote, «but so strong is the stamp of her style and her convictions in the poems that can be attributed to her, that it may one day be possible to detect her authorship also in other, less well-preserved pieces». The British scholar W. Lambert raised the possibility of a ghostwriter, suggesting that at least one of Enheduanna’s texts could have been authored by a scribe.

«Our emotional response to ancient texts is not necessarily the best criterion of judgment,» he later wrote, in 2001. «She speaks in the first person, but that’s not the same as being the author,» Paul Delnero, a professor of Assyriology at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Enheduanna could be a cultic figure honored by later writers, her name invoked in the works to lend them authority. «Why would the scribes look back and find a high priestess and say she wrote the texts?» Benjamin Foster, a professor of Assyriology at Yale, asked me.

«There’s a tendency in our field to regard it as a sign of wisdom not to take ancient texts at their word,» he said. Meanwhile, postmodern thinking encouraged skepticism, uncertainty, and the irrelevance of the author. Today, many see the priestess, not as a vital female poet but, as the British Assyriologist Eleanor Robson has called her, a «wish-fulfillment figure». The Morgan exhibition presents Enheduanna without the shadow of these doubts.

Specifically, it places her in the context of other Mesopotamian women of the late fourth and third millennia B. There are scenes of women at the temple, directing male attendants. One image shows a man transferring lands to his daughter. «All of the evidence is there,» Zainab Bahrani, a professor of ancient Near Eastern art and archeology at Columbia University, told me, ticking off the various records that support Enheduanna’s authorship. «If you think about it, it makes perfect sense that an élite woman would be the first poet. »

It was this kind of tradition that may have inspired Enheduanna to identify herself, making work like «The Exaltation» both a kind of prayer poem and an offering to the goddess. Woolf did not live to learn of Enheduanna, but she articulated the longing for a lost literary tradition. For today’s writers, Enheduanna has become a personification of creative power, regardless of the academic debate.