Sunday, March 6, 2022

Monica Louise Phillips on Enheduana: The World’s First Named Author

  

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)