Enheduanna, Installed

The best documented instance of an entu installation belongs to Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, who was installed as entu priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur, one of Sumer's oldest and most prestigious religious centers, in the twenty third century BCE. The appointment served an obvious political purpose, binding the newly conquering Akkadian dynasty to the religious establishment of a conquered but venerable Sumerian city through the person of the king's own daughter, but Betty De Shong Meador's translation of Enheduanna's surviving hymn compositions shows the office was lived, and written about, as a genuine and demanding religious vocation rather than only a political appointment.

Enheduanna's own poetry, particularly the hymn conventionally titled The Exaltation of Inanna, describes a period in which she was driven from her temple during unrest at Ur and pleads for restoration to her office, giving modern readers an unusually direct, first person account of what the entu's installation and standing meant to the woman who actually held it, making her very likely the earliest named author in world literature whose surviving work we can read at all.