Exaltation of Inanna

Nin-me-sara, the Exaltation of Inanna, is attributed to Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad and high priestess of the moon god at Ur, active around 2300 BCE. If the attribution holds, she is the earliest author in world literature whose name is attached to their own work, roughly a thousand years before Homer.

The hymn is not a decorous liturgy. It is a first-person plea in which the speaker names herself, describes being driven from her office by a usurper, complains that her prayers to the moon god have gone unanswered, and turns to Inanna instead, praising her power at length and asking for restoration. The composition includes the famous line in which the speaker says she gave birth to the hymn during the night. It is also a piece of theological politics, elevating Inanna to a position at the head of the pantheon in a way that served her father's unification of Sumer and Akkad.

The attribution is contested, and on reasonable grounds. The hymn survives in over a hundred copies, and they are Old Babylonian school tablets from roughly five centuries after her lifetime, made by trainee scribes. No third-millennium copy exists. Some Assyriologists therefore treat the ascription as a later tradition attaching a text to a famous historical figure, which was a normal ancient practice.

That Enheduanna existed is not in doubt: a calcite disc bearing her name and image was excavated at Ur, and administrative texts refer to her office.

The scholarly and the popular receptions of this text have run on different tracks, and the gap between them is instructive.

The Sumerian hymns attributed to Enheduanna were edited and published in a scholarly edition in 1968 by William Hallo and J. J. A. van Dijk, which is when the material became usable. For two decades the attribution question was discussed within Assyriology in the ordinary way.

From the 1980s the figure was taken up outside the field, in feminist history, in poetry, and in popular writing about goddess religion, where she is regularly introduced as the world's first named author with the qualifications dropped. Anthologies of women's writing open with her. A crater on Mercury is named for her. Exhibitions have been mounted around her. The reception is not baseless, the case for the attribution is respectable, and the disc from Ur is real, but it has generally passed over the fact that the manuscripts are half a millennium later than the person.

Both things can be held at once, and the honest formulation is available: a body of Sumerian hymnic poetry ascribed in antiquity to a historical high priestess, preserved in copies from centuries afterward, whose authorship is probable to some specialists and doubtful to others.

The reason to be careful is not that the claim is grand. It is that the same evidentiary standard, applied to a male figure, would produce the same caveat, and applying it unevenly does the subject no favours.

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.