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In Search of Enheduanna, the Woman Who Was History’s First Named Author

“She Who Wrote,” an exhibition at the Morgan Library, explores the
world of an ancient Mesopotamian priestess who wrote with a strikingly
personal voice.
By Jennifer Schuessler

It was a random morning in November, and Enheduanna was trending.

Suddenly, the ancient Mesopotamian priestess, who had been dead for
more than 4,000 years, was a hot topic online as word spread that the
first individually named author in human history was … a woman?

That may have been old news at the Morgan Library & Museum, where
Sidney Babcock, the longtime curator of ancient Near Eastern
antiquities, was about to offer a tour of its new exhibition “She Who
Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400-2000 B.C.”
Babcock was thrilled by the attention, if not exactly surprised by the
public’s surprise.

Ask people who the first author was, and they might say Homer, or
Herodotus. “People have no idea,” he said. “They simply don’t believe
it could be a woman” — and that she was writing more than a millennium
before either of them, in a strikingly personal voice.

Enheduanna’s work celebrates the gods and the power of the Akkadian
empire, which ruled present-day Iraq from about 2350 B.C. to 2150 B.C.
But it also describes more sordid, earthly matters, including her
abuse at the hands of a corrupt priest — the first reference to sexual
harassment in world literature, the show argues.

“It’s the first time someone steps forward and uses the first-person
singular and gives an autobiography,” Babcock said. “And it’s
profound.”

Image
A clay tablet from circa 1750 B.C., inscribed with “The Exaltation of
Inanna,” a poem attributed to Enheduanna, a priestess believed to be
the first individually named author in history.Credit...Lila Barth for
The New York Times

Enheduanna has been known since 1927, when archaeologists working at
the ancient city of Ur excavated a stone disc bearing her name
(written with a starburst symbol) and image, and identifying her as
the daughter of the king Sargon of Akkad, the wife of the moon god
Nanna, and a priestess.

In the decades that followed, her works — some 42 temple hymns and
three stand-alone poems, including “The Exaltation of Inanna” — were
pieced together from more than 100 surviving copies made on clay
tablets.

Meanwhile, Enheduanna has been repeatedly discovered, forgotten, and
then discovered again by the broader culture. Last fall, the
“Exaltation” was added to Columbia’s famous first-year Core
Curriculum. And now there’s the Morgan exhibition, which celebrates
her singularity while also embedding her in a deep history of women,
literacy and power stretching back nearly to the ancient Mesopotamian
origins of writing itself.

The exhibition, on view until Feb. 19, is also a swan song for
Babcock, who will retire next year after nearly three decades at the
Morgan. The idea began percolating about 25 years ago, he said, when
he saw Enheduanna’s name on a lapis lazuli cylinder seal belonging to
one of her scribes — one of five artifacts where her name is attested
independently of copies of her poetry.

He sees “She Who Wrote” — which assembles objects from nine
institutions around the world — as part of the Morgan’s long history
of exhibitions on women writers like Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë
and Emily Dickinson.

It’s also a tribute to a long chain of woman scholars, including his
teacher, Edith Porada, the first curator of J. Pierpont Morgan’s
celebrated collection of more than 1,000 seals.

Porada, born in Vienna, fled Europe in 1938, after Kristallnacht. One
of the few things she brought with her to New York was the plate copy
of her dissertation, complete with her drawings of seal impressions
from European collections, which she presented to Belle da Costa
Greene, the Morgan’s first director.

In ancient Mesopotamia, cylinder seals — often carved with exquisitely
detailed scenes — were used to roll the owner’s unique stamp onto a
document produced by scribes, attesting to its authenticity.

“For the first time,” Babcock said, “you have an image that represents
an individual connected with what the individual is responsible for.”

Since 2010, about 100 of the Morgan seals have been on permanent
display in Greene’s jewel-box former office, in the opulent original
library building. But for years they were stored in a gym-style steel
locker in a basement, where Porada would hold a weekly seminar.

Image
A limestone cylinder seal (ca. 2334-2154 B.C.E.), shown with a modern
impression, depicting the goddess Ishtar subduing a lion. The scene
echoes a passage in one of Enheduanna’s hymns.Credit...via the
Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago

“We would sit down, and out of her purse would come a little change
purse with a key inside,” Babcock recalled. “She would open another
locker, and inside a Sucrets tin was another key. Then we would gasp —
out of the locker would come this legendary collection.”

Babcock, to put it mildly, has a zeal for seals. And — unusually for
curators these days, he said — he rolls his own. The impressions in
the Morgan’s permanent display, as well as most of the dozens in “She
Who Wrote,” are his handiwork.

“Sometimes it takes me an hour, sometimes a minute,” he said. “It all
depends on the day and the atmospheric pressure.”

Babcock is equally passionate about the two dozen sculptures of women
that form the nucleus of the exhibition, which are all displayed
three-dimensionally, in dramatically lit cases.

Most institutions “treat this material as artifacts,” he said. “But we
believe they are part of the canon of great art.”

From left, fragment of a standing female figure, circa 2150 B.C.;
fragment of a vessel, circa 2400 B.C., showing one of the first images
of an anthropomorphic goddess created in Mesopotamia; and the head of
a high priestess, circa 2334-2154 B.C.Credit...Lila Barth for The New
York Times

Entering the gallery, Babcock (who curated the show with Erhan Tamur,
a curatorial fellow at the Metropolitan Museum) paused in front of a
tiny alabaster sculpture of a seated woman, from around 2000 B.C.
She’s wearing the same flounce garment seen in the image of Enheduanna
on the disk found in 1927, and has the same aquiline features. A
cuneiform tablet rests on her lap, as if she’s ready to write.

Is it Enheduanna?
“My colleagues won’t let me go that far,” Babcock said. But the figure
“certainly represents the idea of what she meant — women and literacy,
over successive generations.”

Many of the sculptures on display, the show argues, depict actual
individuals, not generic women. “This was the beginning of
portraiture,” Babcock said. And over the course of a nearly two-hour
tour, he repeatedly broke off his narrative to marvel at the beauty of
this or that figure, as if spotting a fashionable friend across the
room.

At the center of the gallery is an item that would spark a paparazzi
frenzy at any Met Gala: a spectacular funerary ensemble from the tomb
of Puabi, a Sumerian queen who lived around 2500 B.C., complete with
an elaborate beaten-gold headdress and cascading strands of
semiprecious stones.

But equally remarkable, for Babcock, is the gold garment pin displayed
nearby, which would have held amulets and cylinder seals, like the one
carved from lapis lazuli found on Puabi’s body.

Enheduanna lived three centuries after Puabi, following the ascendence
of the Akkadians, who united speakers of the Sumerian and Akkadian
languages. Compared with Puabi’s ensemble, her surviving remnants
might seem drab.

But Enheduanna’s glory lies in her words, some of which address
startlingly contemporary concerns.

Pausing in front of a case that held four tablets inscribed with
portions of the “Exaltation,” Babcock recited a passage in which
Enheduanna describes being driven out of office by a priest named
Lugalanne.

“He has turned that temple into a house of ill-repute,” Babcock read,
his voice filled with emotion. “Forcing his way in as if he were an
equal, he dared approach me in his lust!”

Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love and war (known to the Akkadians
as Ishtar), ultimately restored Enheduanna to her position. “To my
queen arrayed in beauty,” the “Exaltation” continues, “to Inanna be
praise!”

Some scholars have questioned whether Enheduanna wrote the poems
attributed to her. Even if she was a real person, they argue, the
works — written in Sumerian, and known only from copies made hundreds
of years after her lifetime — may have been written later and
attributed to her, as a way of bolstering the legacy of Sargon the
king.

But whether Enheduanna was an actual author or a symbol of one, she
was hardly alone. The recent anthology “Women’s Writing of Ancient
Mesopotamia” gathers nearly a hundred hymns, poems, letters,
inscriptions and other texts by female authors.

In one passage of “Exaltation” — unique in all of Mesopotamian
literature, Babcock said — Enheduanna describes herself as “giving
birth” to the poem. “That which I have sung to you at midnight,” she
wrote, “may it be repeated at noon.”

And repeated it was. While the Akkadian empire collapsed in 2137 B.C.,
Enheduanna’s poems continued to be copied for centuries, as part of
the standard training of scribes.

By about 500 B.C., Enheduanna was “completely forgotten,” Babcock
said. But until February, she and her fellow women of Mesopotamia will
command the room at the Morgan.

“Even the backs are so exquisite,” Babcock said, taking a last look at
the stone figures before returning to his office. “It can be hard to
leave.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life
and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. @jennyschuessler

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