Enheduana: The World’s First Named
Author
Named authorship in the ancient
Near East was incredibly rare. Even so, Mesopotamia claims the world’s first
named author: Enheduana, the daughter of Sargon of Akkad. During his reign,
Sargon installed Enheduana as the high priestess to the moon god in the city of
Ur in southern Mesopotamia. This was politically motivated, as it placed a
member of the royal family in an elite position in the south, far from Agade.
This began a long tradition in Mesopotamia of kings installing their daughters
in the venerated position. There are a handful of compositions that are
attributed to the Endehuana as either an editor or an author. All of these
texts exist only in copies from a period several centuries after the end of the
Old Akkadian state. Most of them are about the patron goddess of the city of Agade,
but there is also a collection attributed to Enheduana of about forty hymns to
temples throughout southern Mesopotamia. These hymns end with two lines crediting
Sargon’s daughter as the author/editor, with an unusual emphasis on the text’s
originality: “Enheduana compiled this tablet. ‘My king, this that has been
created, no one has created (before.’” It would seem that the “king” in these
lines was Sargon, Enheduana’s father. (Monica Louise Phillips, “Early
Mesopotamia,” in A Bible Reader’s History of the Ancient World, ed. Kent
P. Jackson [Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies, Brigham Young
University, 2016], 46)
