The First Named Writer in History: Enheduanna (2334–2279 BC)

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I first met Enheduanna in 2023 at the Morgan Library in New York at “She Who Wrote,” a major exhibition centered around her writing. I will never forget the moment I walked through the door into a gallery filled with beautiful objects representing Mesopotamian women who lived and breathed before most of the history I am familiar with. The Morgan Library and Museum’s notable collection of cuneiform seals and clay tablets from Mesopotamia formed the core of the exhibition, enhanced by exhibits loaned from museums worldwide. The principal writer featured in the exhibition was Enheduanna—a Mesopotamian princess, priestess, and author. I walked through the exhibit as if I were in a dream. Could this be true? The first named writer in human history was a woman? I felt unsteady, my views of ancient women breaking and reforming right there in the grand rooms of the Morgan. For me, in the annals of ancient history, the words “woman” and “writer” had never belonged together before.

The question of whether ancient women were writing and communicating within their cultures’ forms of publication and distribution is a high-stakes one, with implications for women’s written, spoken, and editorial contributions from the time of Enheduanna, through the writing of the books of the Bible, to the early church, and especially for contemporary Christian women who write, speak, or teach.

Enheduanna and Her Writing

The compiler of the tablet [is] Enheduanna.
My lord, that which has been created [here] no one has created [before].¹

(concluding lines of The Temple Hymns)

Enheduanna (2334–2279 BC) was a Mesopotamian princess and high priestess, the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, also known as Sargon the Great. She lived, worshiped, and wrote over 4,200 years ago, well before other ancients such as Hammurabi, Pharaoh Tut, or the biblical Moses. She left behind a literary legacy of poetry, prayers, hymns, and a personal narrative that in places reads like a memoir. Enheduanna’s writing is emotional, engaging, and intense, rich with vivid imagery and metaphor. The quality of her work and the effect it had on me as I stood in the exhibition reading translated passages was unexpected, to say the least. At times I was moved to tears.

Enheduanna, whose name means “high priestess, ornament of heaven” in Sumerian, was in a long line of priestesses both before and after her tenure, and she served at the temple of the moon god Nanna in the powerful and prosperous southern Mesopotamian city of Ur, familiar to Christians as the home of Abram and Sarai, who lived much later, (about 300 years after the dynasty of King Sargon the Great, Enheduanna’s father). Before Sargon’s reign, Mesopotamia was populated both by the Sumerians, who lived in independent settlements in southern Mesopotamia along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and by the Akkadians in mountainous northern Mesopotamia. The land of the Sumerians eventually became known as Babylonia, while that of the Akkadians was later known as Assyria. Two of the most prominent Sumerian city-states were Ur, which was watched over by Nanna, god of the moon, and Uruk, watched over by Inanna, goddess of love and war. By contrast, the Akkadians “believed that gods and goddesses were as numerous as the stars, and that they could change which deity they worshipped at any time.”²

Enheduanna’s father Sargon united most of Mesopotamia under his authority and established the world’s first empire, ruling it for fifty-six years. He appointed his daughter to oversee the temples and cults in the web of sixty-five city-states under his rule. Enheduanna wielded significant religious, political, and economic power as her father’s representative in the newly minted empire.

Enheduanna composed and edited hymns and poems to the Sumerian Inanna and the Akkadian Ishtar. She merged the two goddesses and thereby assimilated the two religions into one, furthering the unity of the kingdom. As a result of her literary work and privileged status, “Sargon’s conquered cities echoed morning, noon, and night with the chanting of Enheduanna’s sacred songs.”³  Her “Hymn to Inanna” reads something like a biblical psalm, elevating Inanna over and above any other god: “Queen of vast heart, wild lady . . . Lady of glory, who reaps the powers of heaven and earth . . . It is she who rules the gods . . . She has seized the shepherd’s staff and become their great leader” (lines 1–10).⁴

Enheduanna portrays the goddess as active, powerful, emotional, and in charge of the elements:

She whirls chaos and confusion at those who disobey her, hurrying havoc, hastening the flood, dressed in a dreadful gleam . . . she splits the blazing, furious storm, the whirlwind billows around her as if it were a dress . . . sitting on leashed lions, Inana rips apart those who feel no fear of her . . . she is a pit for the wayward, a trap for the wicked, a snare for the enemy.(lines 15–22)⁵

She also holds Inanna up as wise, watchful, and the perfect ruler:

You rule to perfection in heaven and earth, holding all things in your hand: Queen! You are mighty, no one can pass ahead of you . . . is there any god like you? You reap the harvest of heaven and earth. You are might, your name is sacred, you alone are mighty. (lines 212–18)⁶

Significantly, in line 219 the poet claims authorship, which she does also in “The Exaltation of Inanna”: “I am Enheduanna, the high priestess.”

The Temple Hymns is the longest work we have from Enheduanna, a collection of forty-two hymns dedicated to the greatness of the temples of Sumer. The hymns are brief, invoking each temple by name as a holy site and describing the features of the temple in rich metaphorical language. The Temple Hymns feature deities and cities we know next to nothing about, so this work of literature serves as something of a time capsule. An example is Enheduanna’s hymn dedicated to the Temple of Nanna in Ur, where she served as high priestess:

Shrine, most sacred place in heaven and earth.
House of Nanna. Your front is a king, your rear is a throne, your feast is a song, and your great holy halls are the sacred drums.
You shine with the light of righteous rule, of precious fates.
Home of high priestesses. Noble shrine of holy powers.
(lines 105–110)⁷             

“The Exaltation of Inanna” is Enheduanna’s masterpiece. Translator Sophus Helle calls this poem her most complex. Of interest to us is that this is the composition in which Enheduanna tells her own story, starting halfway through the hymn. She tells how she served as high priestess faithfully, but after King Sargon died, violence increased. Sargon’s son Rimush took the throne and faced the same challenges as his father, with multiple insurrections challenging the legitimacy of his rule and destabilizing the empire.  

One rebel named Lugal-Ane invaded and ransacked the temple, killing the attendants before threatening Enheduanna. She describes her emotions at being beaten, stripped of her titles as princess and priestess, and sent into exile:

I am Enheduanna, I
Am the high priestess.
I carried the basket of offerings, I sang
The hymns of joy . . .
Lugal-Ane⁸ stood in
Triumph, he stepped
Out from the temple.
I felt like a swallow
Swooping through a
Window—my life is
All spent . . .
He took the crown of the high priestess from me, giving me
A knife and dagger instead. “These suit
You better,” he said. (lines 67–108)⁹

As Enheduanna recounts the story in verse form, including what is perhaps a metaphorical account of her rape—“giving me a knife and dagger”—she presents the deadly conflict with her attacker like a court case, with the gods as judges deciding her fate. She prays to the moon god Nanna. Then she turns to Inanna herself, asking the goddess to rule in her favor, to take up her power and reclaim her greatness. And then she beseeches the other gods to recognize Inanna’s might. Enheduanna’s words eventually fail her: “My honey-mouth is full of froth, my soothing words are turned to dust” (lines 72–73).¹⁰

Figure 1. Tablet inscribed with “The Exaltation of Inanna.” Mesopotamia, possibly Larsa (modern Tell Senkereh). Old Babylonian period, ca. 1750 BC. Yale Babylonian Collection.

Photo by Susy Flory.

Lugal-Ane was eventually defeated by Enheduanna’s nephew Naram-Sin, who regained control over Ur. He restored his aunt to her position in the temple, and she served for a short time before she died. Enheduanna’s legacy grew with succeeding priestesses living and working in the same temple, singing her psalms and reciting her poems for well over a thousand years. Later, her work was used in schools to train scribes (1894–1525 BC) who left behind hundreds of clay practice tablets reproducing her words.¹¹  Eventually, Enheduanna disappeared from history—from schools and from literary memory.

Archeological Discovery and Historical Perspective

Scholars now call Enheduanna “.‘the Sumerian Shakespeare’ because of her monumental impact on the history of writing,”¹² though she was not discovered until the British archeologist Leonard Wooley’s excavacation of Ur in the 1920s. In 1927, archaeological work in Iraq uncovered figurines depicting her, along with her words and her name, on tablets, sacred objects, and cylinder seals.

Figure 2. Seated female figure with tablet on lap. Mesopotamia, Neo-Sumerian, Ur Ill period (ca. 2112–2004 BC). Alabaster. Staatliche Museen Zu Berlin.

Photo by Susy Flory.

The Morgan exhibition featured representations of Enheduanna and other Mesopotamian priestesses in the form of carved stone figurines and finely carved cylinder seals. Unique among them was an alabaster disk about the circumference of a dinner plate, bearing both her carved image and her name. One unforgettable figurine,  thought to be Enheduanna herself, is of a woman sitting on what appears to be a throne. She is dressed and styled like a high priestess of that era, a circlet on her head, hands clasped in devotion, and on her lap a flat rectangular object with incised columns. This representation of a columnar clay tablet used for cuneiform writing associates the priestess with educated status and with influence. As a votive, the object bears a written text as her offering.

Figure 2. Front view.

Photo by Susy Flory.

There are four existing statues like this depicting enthroned women with tablets on their laps, all dating from the Akkadian period, late third and early second millennia BC.¹³ These figurines are part of a larger group from the same era and location in Iraq depicting high status women on thrones with ornate long dresses, featuring intricate hairstyles and wearing the circlets associated with high priestesses. At the time of their discovery, what little interest they garnered seemed to focus on particularities of clothing, posture, and facial expressions. The tablets in their laps were almost entirely ignored by those who uncovered them, along with the possibility that these women were holding an important symbol that might identify them as scribes, poets, administrators, or other categories of writers.

The prominent tablets on the laps of these carved figures must be interpreted in the context of persons occupying high-ranking public offices, running businesses, working as scribes, and “engaging in poetic and literary production, all of which either depended on or actively engaged with writing.”¹⁴ But since the lives and work of women in the ancient world have been conceptualized as almost wholly in the domestic sphere, these material examples of women communicators and influencers have been almost entirely overlooked.

Yet archeologists uncovered, and scholars have accepted, the fact that the largest known Sumerian administrative archive of 1,600 cuneiform tablets was run by two women named Dimtur and Baranamtara, wives of the rulers of Sumerian city-states, who were recorded as taking an active role in “running the institution,” which, as of the twenty-fourth century BC, included agriculture, bread and beer production, textiles and trade.¹⁵ These two women administrators and supervisors were among many educated and capable women who served prominent roles in Mesopotamian society, business, and religion.

Enheduanna, too, must have supervised hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in her role as head priestess. What is more, she had her own scribes, Sagadu and [x]-kitus-du, identified on two cylinder seals belonging to Enheduanna’s estate supervisor, named Adda.¹⁶ Enheduanna and her contemporaries were professionals. They retained power as public influencers and communicators, and some of them as writers. Examples of female scribes include Princess Simatum in northern Mesopotamia, whose dowry included a female scribe, and a noblewoman and high priestess named Princess Ninshatapada, who introduced herself in a document as a “woman-scribe.”¹⁷

In Enheduanna’s case, her identification as a writer is affirmed and authenticated by her historical identity as high priestess of the power center of her father King Sargon’s far-reaching empire; by her appointment to oversee all of the cultic centers and temples of the city-states; by the statues, cylinder seals, and other material evidence portraying Enheduanna in her role as priestess or holding a writing tablet; by the personal details and self-proclaimed authorship in her literary works; and by the use of her work to train an untold number of scribes in scribal schools over a period of centuries. The evidence is a form of testimony; Enheduanna could read, and she could write.

Her literary work was not translated into English until the 1960s, when William Hallo, assisted by J. J. A. van Dijk, made a detailed scholarly study of Enheduanna’s poem, “The Exaltation of Inanna.” Translation proved difficult, for the longer Sumerian works are often incomplete, although new or more complete manuscripts are still being discovered, “filling these holes one by one.”¹⁸ Each Sumerian work or fragment discovered furthers our knowledge and understanding of the Sumerian language and its literature. But what has been discovered so far of Enheduanna’s work displays notable style and substance, along with a personal and emotionally charged relationship with the deities she served. What is more, some scholars have argued for the possibility of her literary influence on “Old Testament psalms and lamentations, Homeric poetry, [and] the sacred oratorios.”¹⁹ Today Enheduanna is being called the first named writer in human history.

Writing in the Ancient World

Authorship is fairly clear in our world—all we have to do to determine authorship of a literary work is look at the name or names underneath the title. On occasion, a pseudonym or ghostwriter complicates the attribution, but with a little research the names of the author and collaborator are available. Authorship in the ancient world was not as clear, however. There are many reasons for this, including that there were no publishing companies and no copyright laws to define and confirm author names and identities. In addition, many ancient writings are in fragments today, with authors, dates, and complete tablets or manuscripts unavailable. Thus, even though there is material evidence for Enheduanna’s authorship, some dissenting voices have argued for her as an author in name only.

The word “writer” means something different today than in the ancient world. We would typically think of a writer as someone who composes and writes down a literary work and then finds some sort of publishing system to get that work into the hands of as many readers as possible.

In the ancient world, because writing and oration were so closely related, a writer would often speak their ideas or stories out loud, or perhaps gather up others’ spoken and remembered ideas and stories and retell those. Then, if they had the resources, they might have that content written down by a trained secretary (often called a scribe. Enheduanna had her own scribe, which increases the probability that she was, in fact, the author of her works.) Lastly, these literary works were typically distributed on a limited basis to friends and family, and rarely beyond. While Enheduanna’s elite literary talent might have been an exception, her literacy itself and her public influence on the affairs of the Mesopotamian city-states was not, for women contributed to public life in that era. To be sure, there was a high level of writing collaboration. Various people were involved in contributing source material and stories, along with brainstorming, shaping, writing, editing, and distributing. Collections of stories or other kinds of content (many the result of oral transmission) were sometimes gathered, “published,” and attributed to a certain author though that person did not create all of the content. That could be the case here, with Enheduanna’s associates, whether priests or priestesses, scribes or secretaries, collaborating at different levels on some of the work. This would not detract from her as the primary author, however, just as the contributions of one of Paul’s associates as coauthor, amanuensis, or presenter would not detract from his primary authorship of his epistles.

It is difficult to know how widespread the ability to read or write was in the ancient world. Because no statistics were kept on literacy, no one knows the precise education levels and literacy rates for women in the ancient world. But only an elite percentage of the population was literate. A writer was more likely a person of status such as an orator or philosopher, a teacher or rabbi, a ruler or monarch, or some other wise or powerful person. It was much harder for an ordinary person to get the education and practice needed, along with opportunities to be “published.”²⁰ This is somewhat like the challenge of publishing today, with publishing and distribution slots often going to the highly educated and well-connected writer, rather than a hobbyist. Enheduanna fits into this privileged category.

There is emerging evidence—both textual and archeological—of female orators, philosophers, teachers, and scribes from the Mesopotamian world up into the biblical world, the early church, and beyond. While Enheduanna did not serve the God of the Bible, her life and work do show that religious women in her era and part of the world could not only be literate, but could produce stunning works of literature. Later, in the Greco-Roman world and beyond, women increasingly became prolific producers and consumers of books, right up until today, when the majority of Christian books are purchased and read by women.²¹

The Mechanisms of Silence

The first eyes to alight upon Mesopotamian statues of women did not see the writing tablet on the lap, the throne chair, the clothing and headdress for what they actually were—important clues to who these women were and what roles they inhabited. Women of this time period are often conceptualized as confined to domestic duties—cooking, cleaning, and raising babies—securely under the thumbs of fathers, husbands, or owners. Women are also thought of as uneducated and illiterate, capable perhaps of running a market stall. The thought of women in the ancient world as storytellers, writers, and speakers is beyond the realm of imagination for most. The assumption is that men wrote but women did not. Unfortunately, this construct has long endured. Today, however, scholars are finally beginning to see these figurines as evidence for women writers and communicators in the ancient world.

Because academia has been primarily made up of male scholars with their own biases and interests, women have been viewed through the lens of either the virtuous wife or the scheming temptress. Neither image makes space for a woman gifted with words, ideas, and stories, including inside the pages of the Bible. Is it possible the writings and communications of women in the ancient world have been in plain sight, but overlooked? What led to this lack of attention to the evidence for women who told their stories? How can we uncover these women and what they wrote? If women were writing and communicating during the Mesopotamian era, is it possible women later were talking and writing about what they saw and experienced in and around the time of Jesus and the early church? If so, where did their writings end up? Are some of them evident, but uncredited, in portions of the Bible?

Women authors are interested in and write about, among other things, the detailed thoughts, emotions, and experiences of women, or of a particular woman, as Enheduanna did. Compared to male authors, women typically treat women with more sympathy in their works.²² Thus, when looking at ancient literature, including biblical texts, paying attention to the depictions of women—especially when they include intimate details, thoughts, and emotions—can provide clues to authorship. Did women writers contribute to biblical texts?²³ Enheduanna was an established author millennia before the Bible was written and put together. Why could not women communicators and writers have contributed to the Bible?

A Modern Example

Women writers in the ancient world were active communicators who wrote, but the evidence has been overlooked, misinterpreted, and even discarded. Here is a quick case study: Hedy Lamarr (1914–2000), who appeared in dozens of movies and was known to some as “the most beautiful woman in the world” during Hollywood’s Golden Age, was also a lifelong inventor. As a young girl, Lamarr repeatedly took apart and reassembled an intricate music box to understand the machine. Later, at the height of her stardom and concerned about the outcome of World War II, she developed a concept for radio waves, called “frequency hopping,” to make Allied torpedoes untraceable by the Nazis. She shared the design with the U.S. Navy, filing for a patent with a co-inventor in 1941. Her brilliant and innovative work was summarily dismissed at the time, with no credit or remuneration. Much later, she found out the invention was used without her knowledge. Today, however, her work has finally been recognized, and she is often called “the mother of Wi-Fi,” her invention and her brilliance acknowledged. Quite unexpectedly, Lamarr’s work has helped make possible global wireless communication technologies such as Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth.²⁴ But because her beauty and sex appeal was captured and amplified on the big screen, many people—even highly intelligent people—could not reconcile that a brilliant mind crackling with fiery energy, innovative problem-solving, and a passionate imagination resided inside the body of a woman who looked and performed like Lamarr.

Words written down have a way of traveling beyond our smaller circles of conversation and living beyond us. “Writing is the way the dead talk to the living,” musician and artist Laurie Anderson said.²⁵ One of the psalmists expressed this: “Let this be written for a future generation, that a people not yet created may praise the LORD” (Psalm 102:18 NIV). So why have we not heard much about Enheduanna? When it comes to ancient women’s lived experience, all we have are fragments—scraps of letters, poetry, and songs. There is not as much existing evidence for ancient women who wrote as there is for men. But women did write, and read, and compose, and create, and we have Enheduanna’s work as a key example. We have her own words. So, we must bring to the table our historical imagination to recover the stories of this woman, and of many others, who wrote long ago. The implications for biblical studies are exciting, and the newer scholarship around Enheduanna and her writing legacy challenges the narrative of widespread illiteracy among women of the later Greco-Roman world.

Conclusion

As a writer, speaker and teacher who grew up in churches that did not encourage women to lead, for most of my life I did not know that women have been speaking, teaching, and writing for thousands of years—since the church began and well before. For women gifted with words, for writers and speakers, for communicators and influencers who want to follow God, serve the church, and spread the gospel message, knowing that women did this before us is liberating. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the U. S. Congress, was famously quoted as saying: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring in a folding chair.”²⁶ For many thousands of years, uncredited storytelling, writing, and speaking have been for women a folding chair at the dinner table of ideas, religion, and influence. As far as we know, Enheduanna was the first.

Notes 

1. Sidney Babcock, Erhan Tamur, and Pierpont Morgan Library, eds., She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400–2000 BC (Morgan Library & Museum, 2022), 18.
2. Kate Ravilious, “Priestess, Poet, Politician,” Archaeology: A Publication of the Archaeological Institute of America (Nov/Dec 2022).
3. Babcock and Tamur, She Who Wrote, 28.
4. Sophus Helle, Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author (Yale University Press, 2023), 23. (“Enheduanna” is sometimes instead spelled with one “n.”)
5. Helle, Enheduana, 24–25.
6. Helle, Enheduana, 46.
7. Helle, Enheduana, 64.
8. The attacker’s name has also been translated as Lugalanne, a military general who led the cities of Ur and Uruk in an uprising.
9. Helle, Enheduana, 12–15.
10. Helle, Enheduana, 4.
11. Babcock and Tamur, She Who Wrote, 178.
12. Babcock and Tamur, She Who Wrote, 30.
13. Babcock and Tamur, She Who Wrote, 65. All four figures were at the exhibition, on loan from the Louvre, the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient, and the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin.
14. Babcock and Tamur, She Who Wrote, 77.
15. Babcock and Tamur, She Who Wrote, 77.
16. Babcock and Tamur, She Who Wrote, 77.
17. Babcock and Tamur, She Who Wrote, 78.
18. Helle, Enheduana, xviii.
19. Babcock and Tamur She Who Wrote, 30.
20. Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (Yale University Press, 1995) 82.
21. Nielsen Books and Consumers, “Onward and Upward: Christian Book Titles See Sales Rise Higher and Higher” (Aug, 2015).
22. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church, 82.
23. CBE’s resources exploring this question include Timothy Paul Erdel, “Exploring the Garden of Feminine Motifs in Song of Songs,” Priscilla Papers 34/2 (Spring 2020): 3–9, esp. endnote 13; Mimi Haddad, “Priscilla, Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews?,” Priscilla Papers 7/1 (Winter 1993): 8–10; Ruth Hoppin, “The Book of Hebrews Revisited: Is Priscilla the Author? And How Does this Epistle’s Theology Relate to Gender Equality?,” Priscilla Papers 17/1 (Winter 2003): 11–14; Jeff Miller, “Who First Told the Bible’s Stories and Why It Matters,” Mutuality Blog + Magazine (May 13, 2020).
24. National Women’s History Museum.
25. “By the Book: Laurie Anderson Needs Your Help Finding an Image From Balzac,” New York Times (online Jan 30, 2020; print Feb 2, 2020).
26. “Tribute: Shirley Chisholm 1924–2005, A Political Trailblazer, She Made History as the First Black Woman in Congress.” People, Time Inc., New York, January 17, 2005.
27. nn