A Mesopotamian princess considered history's first author for her religious poems, known as Enheduanna, also wrote about sexual harassment in verse unprecedented in literature dating back 4,300 years and preserved by scribes for centuries.
"I am Enheduanna, let me speak to you with my prayer, my tears flow like an intoxicating sweet", the author begins to relate in a work written in cuneiform alphabet on several clay tablets; These words are the highlight of a recently opened exhibition in New York on the role of women in ancient Mesopotamia.
The building that was once the library of the financier John Pierpont Morgan (J.P. Morgan), today converted into a museum, houses dozens of valuable antiquities from the third and fourth millennium BC that came from institutions around the world, including those tables, statuettes or seals cylindrical with engraved scenes.
The pieces shed light on the little-known poet, who was made a high priestess by her father, King Sargon, to consolidate the then-nascent Akkadian Empire and who came to have great influence beyond a time and place that coincided with the birth of civilization and writing.
Much of Mesopotamian literature is anonymous, but Enheduanna (2300 BC), who wrote in the Sumerian language, is the first known author with a proper name, a name that appears directly linked to her compositions, in which she also included some autobiographical references.
Devoted to the goddess of war and fertility called Inanna in Sumerian and Ishtar in Akkadian, the priestess addressed the long narrative poem "The Exaltation of Inanna" to the goddess, asking for her help in confronting Lugalanne, a rebel who not only defiled a temple, but also forcibly removed her from there and sexually harassed her.
Lugalanne turns the temple "into a house of ill repute, forcing his way inside as if he were an equal", and adds: "He has dared to approach me in his lust!", something that the organizers of the exhibition consider a "vivid" and unprecedented expression of sexual harassment, about which it seems to give more clues.
Enheduanna's anguish has transcended to the present thanks to the meticulous copies made by scribes over the centuries and that have allowed her legacy to be preserved, since the variegated tablets exhibited in the Morgan museum date from around 1,750 BC, 500 years after the author's death.
Despite the episode described in that poem, the poet remained as high priestess during the mandates of four kings of the Akkadian Empire and had the opportunity to write dozens of short hymns for prayer in sanctuaries and another long poem about the destruction of a mountain by part of Inanna.
According to experts, her texts contributed to shaping the anthropomorphic aspect of the goddess in the collective imagination of the time, who appears represented in many scenes, and the author herself was the subject of works of art, since she appears sculpted, with a band in the hair and long dress, in some statues.
"Enheduanna is nothing less than the first known female author in history. That she is not better known is something this exhibition hopes to remedy," curator Disney Babcock said in a note, noting that the images of Mesopotamian women, gathered for the first once there, they have often been overlooked.
In this sense, women are presented as essential members of that incipient patriarchal society in the religious, economic, social and political spheres, from their roles as goddesses, priestesses, devotees, mothers, workers and leaders, as Enheduanna or as the queen Puabi, before her.
