FIRST NAMED FEMALE AUTHOR IN HISTORY

Ehnaduanna might not ring a bell to any but the most fevered readers of history books. Yet, almost four and a half thousand years ago, she was one of the most influential people in Mesopotamia when the Sumerian and Akkadian kingdoms began to cast their sight at neighbouring regions. Daughter of the famed Sargon of Akkad, considered today to be the first Emperor in history (also known as the 'King of the Universe' in his time - I am guessing he was a single child), priestess of the Sumerian moon god Nanna and the first female author to be recorded in history. However, that last title comes with a little twist, too.

She is not only the first female author to be named in the world but also the first author to be named in general.

To be sure, it's no small list of accolades, yet what she did with her writing and the change she brought on might be of even greater importance than all of those titles combined. The star of today's blog, Ehnaduanna, was one helluva lady. Thus, it only stands to reason that I should cover her most important work and see how exactly she influenced history.

To spend time with her, we must travel back in time, back to 2300 BC. Ehnaduanna helped her father bind the northern region of Mesopotamia, Akkad, to the region we know today as Sumeria. But how could she do so single-handedly without actually conquering the region herself? Ehnaduanna was no warrior, but she was something, most probably, even worse...

A poet.

She wrote hymns that detailed the links in practices between the Sumerian goddess Innana and the Akkadian goddess Ishtar. This spread a common, shared system of beliefs across the region, which was preached through forty-two Mesopotamian temples. The poems themselves were kept within those temples upon clay tablets. Those same hymns were copied for centuries after her death.

Now, those among you familiar with art, history, or, God forbid, archaeology will be punching the screen at this blatant example of syncretism. For those with established social lives, syncretism is an amalgamation of different religions and cultures. Be it into one religion, belief, or practice or simply borrowing certain aspects. Ehnaduanna was smart, coy, or sly enough to use this system to show the people of late third-millennium Mesopotamia that they were not, in fact, that different.

Thus, by the time her father had begun his conquest of the Universe or Mesopotamia, he was not seen as a conqueror most of the time but as a unifier. Call it propaganda because it is propaganda, first and foremost. Still, her intelligence is one of the best and oldest examples of how women directly affected history. They needed not to be rulers, warriors, or anything of the like to leave a lasting mark upon the world.

Her poems affected the spread of the cult of Ishtar, a goddess of war and sexual love. I dare you to find someone who hasn't heard of Ishtar today.

However, there is one single nugget we do need to question regarding Ehnaduanna: the original texts of her poems do not exist anymore. They have been lost to history and time, and the earliest texts that mention her as their author are from just about six centuries later. With anything separated by time of this length, there needs to be a question mark above her writing these texts in person.

It is plausible that she formed the genesis of this idea, which would not be any less impressive, mind you, but others actually wrote it and later attributed it to her by scribes of the Fifth Babylonian Empire.

Be that as it may, for me at least, she is a very interesting historical figure who used her wit and intelligence instead of a sword to carve her place in history—something which is rarely celebrated in history books. Thankfully, Sir Leonard Wooley, in 1927, discovered an alabaster disk mentioning her name. Afterward, dozens of other texts were discovered mentioning her feats.

And the rest, as they say, is history.