The first author in history was a woman<

Princess, poet and high priestess of Ur, one of the most important cities of Mesopotamia, Enheduanna (2285-2250 BC) is the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, founder of the "first Mesopotamian empire known by the texts", reports in his writings the French archaeologist, specialist in the ancient Near East, Jean-Claude Margueron. She is thus the oldest poet whose name has been recorded by texts. Copies of his works, reproduced from 37 tablets, most of which date back hundreds of years after his death, had been discovered at Ur and Nippur, one of the main religious centers of the empire. These records indicate that the temple hymns she wrote were in use for at least 500 years after Enheduanna's death and were of great value, as they were "preserved alongside the royal inscriptions", according to the report. Assyriologist Joan Goodnick Westenholz, former chief curator of the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. The entire collection, known as The Sumerian Temple Hymns, consists of 42 texts of personal devotion to the goddess Inanna, deity of fertility and love in Sumerian mythology (Ishtar for the Babylonians and Assyrians ). The story of Enheduanna was revealed by British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley who devoted fifteen years of his life, from 1919 to 1934, to excavating the site of ancient Ur (in present-day Iraq). His research has brought to light the immense city, with its ziggurat (the large multi-storey tower), its temples, its royal tombs, its dwellings and its ramparts. During her work, Woolley also discovered cylinder seals (or clay tablets) with Enheduanna's name and texts identifying her, as well as an ancient Sumerian bas-relief portrait depicting her. Similarly, an alabaster disc on which her figure and her name were engraved was excavated in the Giparu (temple devoted to the worship of the goddess Ivanna), as was an ancient Akkadian cylindrical seal representing the goddess, placing her foot on the back of a lion. On one of the discovered tablets, Enheduanna details her expulsion from Ur after the death of her father following the uprising of the peoples of the annexed kingdoms. She will eventually be reinstated as High Priestess once the uprising is put down by her half-brother Rimush, who succeeds his father Sargon, becoming the second king of the Akkad Empire.

A modern reconstruction of the Ziggurat of Ur in the ruins of Giparu where Enheduanna lived and was buried. Photo M. Lubinski/ Creative Commons

A theoretician in the service of Sargon

Enheduanna's poems were not only exaltations to the goddess Inanna. Having the makings of a true theoretician, her writings also served political purposes, providing support to her father Sargon, who was busy uniting the city-states in the Mesopotamian empire. Roberta Binkley, a lecturer at Arizona State University, asserts in her numerous publications on the subject that “her sophisticated compositions” are strongly marked by their political dimension. “She is one of the first theoreticians of rhetoric, predating the ancient Greeks by several millennia. However, her work is far less known due to her gender and geographic location. »

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In fact, studies on Enheduanna have long been limited to Near Eastern specialists. A first translation of 24 fragments, published by the Belgian archaeologist Henri Limet, will appear in 1969. The exaltation of Inanna, published in 1968 by two specialists in Assyria, the Briton William W. Hallo and the Dutchman Johannes Jacobus Adrianus van Dijk, will be translated into German by Annette Zgoll, in 1997. In 1976, Cyrus H. Gordon, American researcher and archaeologist, expert in ancient languages ​​and Near Eastern cultures, gives a lecture on the Sumerian princess, which fascinates in turn the American anthropologist Martha Weigle (1944-2018). The latter then conducts her own research and publishes an essay entitled Women as Verbal artists in which she describes Enheduanna as "the first known author in world (written) literature". The book aroused the enthusiasm and aroused the curiosity of a handful of writers and historians. Willis Barnstone, poet, professor of American literature at the University of Indiana and Aliki Barnstone, poet and critic, published, in 1980, a translation of the hymns of Enheduanna in the anthology A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now . American Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer and Diane Wolkstein, who occupies a unique place in the world of storytelling and literature playing a major role in the revival of interest in mythology, publish three years later Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth . As for Betty De Shong Meador, a member of the Jung Institute in San Francisco, she devoted two books to him in 2010. The list is still long, hymns have been published by JJ Augustin, in New York. The majority of Enheduanna's work is available in translation at the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.

The Disk of Enheduanna at the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania found in one of the rooms of the temple of Larsa. Photo Creative Commons

Feminism

"A figure of accomplishment at will... A wonderfully attractive image", as Eleanor Robson, professor of Near Eastern history at Oxford, described it, Enheduanna, which had remained unrecognized for a long time, is gradually imposing itself on the menu of the Journées of the woman. So in 2014, the British Council will mark this date by hosting a pre-launch event at the Niniti Festival of Literature in Erbil, Iraq, where writer Rachel Holmes lectures on 5,000 years of feminism, ranging from the great Sumerian poet Enheduanna to contemporary writers. In 2018, as part of International Women's Rights Day, Paris-Diderot University is interested in women forgotten in history, including Enheduanna. In homage to the poetess, one of the craters present on the surface of Mercury is even baptized Enheduanna, in 2015, by the International Astronomical Union. She also becomes the subject of the episode The Immortals, of the documentary television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (Cosmos: an odyssey through the universe), to which the flagship reporter of CNN, Christiane Amanpour, lends her voice. She is finally present in the Spirits Podcast Documents that Changed the World, in which Joe Janes, professor at the University of Washington Information School declares that "it is remarkable that we know so much about a woman who lived more than 4,000 years old, roughly mid-Bronze Age Europe,” noting that the Exaltation of Inanna is 700 years older than the Egyptian Book of the Dead, over 1,000 years older than the I Ching ( The Yi Jing, one of the Chinese classics whose title can be translated as Book of Mutations) and 1,500 years older than the Odyssey, the Iliad and the Bible. The podcast series is available on iTunes.