Sargon’s daughter may be literature’s earliest named author
Enheduanna, high priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur around 2300 BCE, appears as narrator in Sumerian hymns and is often called the first named author. Assyriologists still argue whether she wrote the poems later scribes copied—or only lent them a royal voice.
Her father Sargon of Akkad appointed her entu priestess at Ur, likely to bind Akkadian rule to Sumerian cult. Irene Winter argues the post already existed and that tying her to Nanna helped fuse traditions. Toward the end of grandson Narām-Sîn’s reign, rebel Lugal-Ane seized Ur; the Exaltation of Inanna seems to voice her expulsion and later restoration. Sargon himself, founder of the Akkadian Empire, styled himself overseer of Inanna and anointed of Anu, and boasted in an inscription of defeating Lugal-zage-si, taking Uruk and Ur, and conquering at least 34 cities.
Memory vanished after the First Babylonian Empire until 1927, when Leonard Woolley dug an alabaster disk at Ur naming her Sargon’s daughter and Nanna’s wife, with a libation scene on the front. Servant seals from the Giparu also bear her name. Adam Falkenstein linked the finds to Temple Hymns and Inanna songs that mention her. Since her rediscovery she has drawn feminist interest, and the hymns have been studied as a forerunner of classical rhetoric and have inspired modern literary adaptations.
Those hymns survive mainly on Old Babylonian tablets centuries later; some entered the scribal Decad curriculum. Authorship is debated on linguistic and archaeological grounds. Those copies were made about six centuries after her lifetime, in a later dialect of Sumerian than she would have spoken, and the scribes may have credited her as part of legends about Sargon's dynasty.
Source: Enheduanna
