A Text Copied for Centuries in Scribal Schools

The Exaltation of Inanna survives today in more than one hundred separate copies dating to the Old Babylonian period, several centuries after Enheduanna's own lifetime around 2300 BCE, evidence that Mesopotamian scribal schools used the composition as a standard text for training scribes long after its original composition, likely valued both for its literary and theological sophistication and for the prestige of its already legendary author, a status Enheduanna appears to have achieved within Mesopotamian cultural memory relatively soon after her own time. This sustained use in scribal education, comparable in kind to how certain other ancient religious and literary texts achieved a kind of canonical status within their own culture's educational systems, gives modern scholars an unusually well attested textual history for this specific Sumerian composition compared to many other Mesopotamian religious texts that survive in only one or a small handful of copies.

The composition's combination of lament, describing Enheduanna's distress at her expulsion, and petition, calling on Inanna for restoration and vengeance, situates it within a broader Mesopotamian genre of city and personal laments that also produced other significant surviving texts, though few combine this genre so directly with an identifiable individual author's own documented political crisis.