Every summer I have a quest – what is the best coffee ice cream (Talenti cold brew sorbetto) or the perfect lobster roll (TBD). This summer my quest developed differently. It came in the form of a question, posed in and by a book, that set me off on a season of reading to explore an answer.
Right away I knew it was not a research project, although I would be doing research. I am a trained academic, after all. I love research, but the question requires more creativity, more ambition. The answer, if there is one, will not exist in what is already written, but in the pieces I capture and bring back to my personal idea-horde. Or, put another way, I will read backwards into the past in order to imagine forward into the future.
So what is the question?
First, some context. And here is the first stepping stone in the quest.
Somewhere around 2300 BC, in the city of Ur, in Mesopotamia, there lived a high priestess named Enheduana, who served Nanna, the moon god and patron of Ur. Nanna governed all those things that keep a city going – cattle, fertility, agriculture. This was not a time of peace and prosperity in Ur, however, but of profound unrest. During one of many revolts, Enheduana was cast out of her position as high priestess and she did not take the loss quietly. She appealed to Nanna, the god she had served so faithfully, but he did not respond to her pleas. Perhaps what she wanted was not part of his brief or it was above his pay grade. For whatever reason he “ignored” her.
So Enheduana sought someone fiercer, someone who would support the righteousness of her claim. She found her champion in Nanna’s daughter Inana (Ishtar), the goddess of creation and destruction, sex and war. First, though, Enheduana had to convince Inana to take her case.
Inana was unpredictable, capricious, the very embodiment of contradiction, paradox, and chaos, but this did not deter Enheduana. She composed a hymn, known to us as “The Exaltation of Inana,” and the text has survived. The hymn is a complex tour de force, designed to appease, to flatter, and to invoke a goddess who was not particularly approachable.
Enheduana was in a tricky position because Inana was, technically, not all-powerful but was second to Nanna in the pantheon. So Enheduana had to appeal to Inana’s ambition and join herself to it in such a way that the people would accept the result should she succeed.
She did succeed. Not only did Enheduana convince Inana to take her case, rule in her favor, and assume the ensuing glory, she also named herself as the author of the hymn, claiming that her fate and that of the goddess were bound together. This was not a simple praise-poem, then, but a sophisticated use of language to invoke and manipulate divine and earthly forces.
I learned about Enheduana at exactly the moment that I had been thinking about the Western canon and chafing (again) over the fact that it consists almost entirely of white men. I came across a review of Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author translated and with essays by Sophus Helle. In his introduction, Helle asks –
What would the history of Western literature look like if it began not with Homer and his war-hungry heroes
but with a woman from ancient Iraq who sang her hymns to the goddess of chaos and change?
And there was my quest. I wanted at least to try out, as a thought experiment, what it would be like to think of the ancestry of whatever I decided to read as deriving from this fierce and determined woman living long ago in the Mesopotamian desert.
Would we, now, be better equipped to deal with our own times of chaos and change if we had had such a history? Could we recover that history, even now? What would happen if we did?
So that is now my quest, but it is intentionally not systematic. I intend to just “mess around,” read the thing that seems to come next. See where it takes me. I expect that, for most of the time, it will seem as though my path is aimless, the stepping stones less like marking a path than as leaping wildly through time and space.
But I also expect that … something will happen.
___
“I, Enheduanna,” MINERVA, 2026
Enheduana: the complete poems of the world’s first author, Sophus Helle, translation.