March, as most of you probably already know, is Women’s History Month. In honor of this month, I thought I would write a series of articles about famous women from the ancient world. Unfortunately, this idea has been greatly hindered by the extreme rarity of such women. In fact, the ancient world was so overwhelmingly male-dominated that only a tiny handful of women’s names have even been recorded. Fortunately, however, there are a few famous women from the ancient world whose achievements truly stand out; finding them is just more difficult. Many of these famous ancient women were poets since poetry-writing was one of the few career options that was open to them.
In fact, the very first poet whose name has been recorded was actually a woman. Her name was Enheduanna and she was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad.
Enheduanna’s name literally means “High Priestess of Heaven.” She received this name because, when she was a young woman, her father appointed her as the High Priestess of Nanna, the Sumerian god of the Moon, in the city of Uruk, which was renowned throughout the Mesopotamian world for its great cultural achievements.
The newly conquered Sumerians were at first unwilling to submit to the authority of a foreign power, especially since the Akkadian culture was so different from that of the Sumerians. The appointment of Sargon’s own daughter as High Priestess was a carefully calculated political move intended to help subdue the Sumerians and prevent them from rebelling against their new ruler.
Nonetheless, Enheduanna’s appointment was still a risky move; as far as historians are aware, no woman had ever held the office of High Priest in Uruk before. Furthermore, there was no telling how the Sumerian might respond to being led in their worship by an Akkadian princess.
Enheduanna’s prime responsibility as High Priestess was to integrate the culture of the conquered Sumerians into the culture of the conquering Akkadians. She accomplished this by successfully initiating the syncretism of all Sumerian deities with their respective Akkadian equivalents. The city of Uruk was sacred to An, the Sumerian god of the heavens, and Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love and war. Due in part to Enheduanna’s efforts, An became syncretized with the Akkadian god Anu and Inanna became syncretized with the Akkadian goddess Ishtar.
Enheduanna wrote numerous hymns and poems. Unlike earlier poets whose names have not been recorded, Enheduanna put her own voice and her own feelings into her poems. Her poetry often radiates with raw, human emotion. Her most famous poems include “The Great-Hearted Mistress,” “The Exaltation of Inanna,” and “Goddess of the Fearsome Powers,” which is otherwise known as “Inanna and Ebih.” These three poems are among the most famous works of all Sumerian literature.
In “Inanna and Ebih,” Enheduanna retells one of the most famous myths involving the goddess Inanna. The poem begins when Inanna sees Mount Ebih in the Zagros Mountain Range and becomes infuriated by it, interpreting its natural beauty as a direct challenge to her own authority. She attacks the mountain. In Sumerian, however, the word kur can mean “mountain,” but it can also mean “dragon.” The mountain, therefore, battles back against Inanna in the form of a dragon. In the end, Inanna slays the dragon and completely destroys the mountain, reducing it to nothing but rubble. The poem ends with Inanna explaining to the rubble why the mountain needed to be destroyed.
She was also the probable inventor of the standard poetic paradigms that continued to be used for formal prayers, psalms, and petitions for hundreds of years thereafter. Later, her poetic paradigms were adopted by the Babylonians and spread throughout the Near-Eastern world, possibly influencing the poetic format of the Psalms of the Old Testament and even the Homeric Hymns of ancient Greece.
In fact, Enheduanna’s contributions to the poetic genre are so significant that, in many ways, she can accurately be described as the “Mother of Modern Poetry.”
Nonetheless, not everything was sunshine and rainbows; at some point early in the reign of her brother Rimush, Enheduanna seems to have gotten entangled in some form of political mishap, which resulted in her removal from office and banishment from Uruk. Her experiences in exile, however, only provided her with more material for her poems, which often reflect on the anguish of her condition and plead the gods for aid and assistance.
Eventually, Enheduanna seems to have been reinstated as High Priestess. This is known because several of her poems are celebratory hymns in honor of this restoration to her original position.
Long after Enheduanna’s death, her hymns continued to be copied and held in especially high esteem. Eventually, however, they were forgotten. It was only in the early twentieth century that her writings were rediscovered by archaeologists. Though recognition of her achievements is growing, she still has not yet been awarded the full recognition she deserves.
SOURCES
http://www.ancient.eu/Enheduanna/
http://www.transoxiana.org/0108/roberts-enheduanna.html
IMAGE CREDITS
The featured image for this article is an ancient Akkadian disk inscribed with a portrait of Enheduanna. This image was retrieved from Wikimedia Commons. This image is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Attribution: Zunkir.
Fascinating!
Thank you! I am glad you think so! I was originally planning to do a whole series of articles about famous women from the ancient world, but I never got around to it.