If it is Friday then it must be time for some history.

We here on Word Press like to think of ourselves as authors….and some have succeeded in that endeavor….but do you know who the first named author was in history?

Yep another of my famous history lessons.

So with all that written….who was the first named author in history?

History’s first recorded author was a woman named Enheduanna. Born sometime in the latter half of the 23rd century BC, Enheduanna was the high priestess of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur. It was a political role as well as a religious one; as the daughter of a powerful king, Enheduanna was no stranger to affairs of the state. In her writing, she wielded her pen for peace, working to unite a fractured kingdom.

Her father was King Sargon, ruler of the Akkadians. He conquered an area in southern Iraq, Sumer, and she was put into power as a priestess of the moon god, Nanna. In her writings, she took a Sumerian goddess, Inanna, and fused her with an Akkadian goddess, Ishtar. She tried to unite these two different cultures, these two different people under her father’s reign. So she was a key political entity.

Sometimes we have these people where we know them by name and we know what their position was. But then there’s this other aspect of what was their everyday normal life, and it’s hard to grasp.

We have a representation of her on a disk where she is facilitating a ritual where a libation is being poured for the god. There’s a set of temple hymns that she wrote. And so her role has something to do with ritual and libations honoring the gods and facilitating that.

There’s something called the King’s List. It’s a list of all the kings that ruled and beside them is the list of the priestesses who were in power during their reigns. So I think that tells us a lot about the importance of the priestesses’ role within society, but also within the political atmosphere of the times.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/first-author-ever-mesopotamia-woman-enheduanna

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