The Mesopotamian high priestess Enheduana lived over 4,000 years ago, but her words ring down to the present: “I am Enheduana.”
She was the world’s first author according to her translator Sophus Helle. But for such ancient literature, caveats of course arise. The earliest extant clay tablets transmitting her poems date to the Babylonian period, hundreds of years after Enheduana lived. Philological debates about dating and authorship have contributed to the obscurity of the poems. “This must stop,” writes Helle, who has also translated Gilgamesh. He gives the non-specialist permission to set aside academic controversies to encounter “a stunning poetic achievement.”
Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author includes a short introduction, followed by the translations, followed by three essays. The Exaltation of Inana is Enheduana’s best known work. Inana, also known as Ishtar, was preeminent among all goddesses of ancient Iraq. From the Exaltation, one might surmise that she was preeminent amongst gods and goddesses alike, for the poem’s main function is to praise, to exalt, and in doing so, to empower the goddess, and by extension, her priestess.
My queen, you are
the guardian of the
gods’ great powers:
you lift them up
and grasp them in your
hand, you take them
in and clasp them
to your breast. As if
you were a basilisk,
you pour poison
upon the enemy,
as if you were the
Storm God, grain
bends before your
roar.
Most of the 155-line poem is solely focused on Inana. But the poem develops in a more complicated direction almost halfway through, after the first-person voice appears.
I am Enheduana. I
will pray to you, holy
Inana: I will let my
tears stream free to
soften your heart, as
if they were beer.
Not only is the author now present in the poem, but the reason for the poem’s creation becomes part of its subject. Enheduana’s status as high priestess was threatened by a usurper. After the moon god, Nanna, failed to intervene, Enheduana turned to the god’s daughter, Inana.
Nanna has said nothing,
so he has left it up to
you. My queen! This
has made you even
greater, this has made
you the greatest.
The poem dramatizes the dialogic process that empowers one to speak, to act, and to author.
The Hymn to Inana, offers up even “wilder” praise of the goddess. It has been passed down in a fragmentary state, and the many ellipses that indicate missing or indecipherable text makes for a disjointed reading experience that initially slows the reader down. But this only serves to further invigorate what Helle, in one of his many colloquialisms, calls the poem’s “set piece”, a list of Inana’s attributes, presented in a parallel structure that comes across as more ecstatic than repetitive. One is almost compelled to read out loud.
To step, to stride,
to strive, to arrive
are yours, Inana.
To turn brutes
into weaklings
and to make the
powerful puny
are yours, Inana.
To reverse peaks
and plains, to raise
up and to reduce
are yours, Inana.
To assign and allot
the crown, throne,
and staff of kings
are yours, Inana.
Over ten lines of ellipses follow, but when the poem resumes, it is still enumerating Inana’s myriad powers, which ultimately comprise one power: that of change.
If Inana is celebrated as a powerful, praise-worthy, and terrifying agent of change, in the Temple Hymns, Enheduana praises the temples of gods and goddesses as sites as enduring as heaven and earth. These poems are less wild and more formulaic, but still rich in evocative imagery. The location of the temple of Ningishzida, a god associated with the underworld is described as “a chain, a snare, a shackle of the mighty underworld that no foot escapes.” The temple of Enlil, a god also called Great Mountain, is itself mountainous: “The beam above your door is the peak of a mountaintop / the pilasters at your sides are proud pinnacles.”
Enlil’s temple was in Nippur, a religious center in ancient Iraq. Generations after Enheduana’s lifetime, the temple remained, and in its vicinity was a school that trained Babylonian students to read, write, and recite Sumerian, a language no longer used in everyday life. The excavated site of this school yielded up three dozen copies of the Exaltation and nine copies of the Hymn to Inana. Enheduana, the author, is inextricably tied to the reproduction of texts associated with her in later times. Her poems communicate the concerns of her day—empire building above all—while also speaking to the perspectives of the Babylonians, who regarded the Akkadian Empire of Enhedana’s lifetime as “a golden age” of “larger-than-life conquest and drama.”
In a sense, Babylonian students and scribes co-authored her poems through the process of transmission. Ultimately, Helle finds the authorship debate not only distracting but also anachronistic. Enheduana and those who reproduced her poetry were like weavers who fabricated textiles out of preexisting threads (textile and text have a shared etymology, as noted by Helle). Even if one could somehow prove that the historical Enheduana authored the Exaltation, this proof of authorship would ignore the premise embedded in the poem: the poem exists because of reciprocal action on the part of the priestess and the goddess, Inana. An insistence on a one-to-one correspondence between person and text misses the point. Authorship is a many-threaded fabric, and insofar as we can identify an author in the singular, it is an attribution, not an achievement.
Helle’s translations are gorgeously rendered, and his essays are incisive and wide-ranging. Translations and essays alike are written in an accessible and inviting style. Some readers will be put off by certain choices, as when Helle calls Enheduana “a ‘woman of color’—to use a deliberately anachronistic phrase.” But Helle knows exactly what he is doing. He is not out to provoke scholars, but to engage an audience beyond them. At the end of the book, he predicts that Enheduana is due for a popular rediscovery. If he is right, he can take a good share of the credit.