Approximately 4,300 years ago, during the earliest known empire in history (the Akkadian ), a girl was born who would revolutionize an entire culture... Enheduanna de Akhad . She was the daughter of the founder of the empire, Sargon of Akhad , but her immortality did not come to her because she was a princess.
Her father named her Entu of the sacred precinct of Ur . That enclosure was one of the most important in Sumeria, something like Mecca or Rome at the time, and her position was equivalent to what today we would consider a kind of popess, since she was the mortal reincarnation of the goddess Ningal . The Sumerians did not care in the least that a woman held a high priestly position, quite the contrary. They were proud that women represented the gods and mocked the people who did not consent. The only thing that must have bothered them was that the little girl was only around 15 years old when she took office and, of course, that she was Akkadian (the Akkadians had conquered the Sumerians and, logically, they were not very well liked).
Not everything was a bed of roses, because the Akkadian empire was convulsive and unstable. Her brother Rimush , who had succeeded Sargon, is killed by being hit on the head with a stone seal. Her other brother, Manishtusu , also died in another coup. As soon as her nephew Naram-Sin ascended the throne , all Sumer rebels and the empire is reduced to the capital. The Governor of Ur , Lugalanne , seizes the occasion to expel Enheduanna from Ur and proclaims himself king of Ur and Uruk . Naram-Sin regained the empire after five years of bloody civil war and Enheduanna was reinstated in her former position.
But she hadn't been sitting on her hands. While the world was engaged in a terrible war, Enheduanna dedicated herself to writing religious poems. And we are, in fact, facing the first case in history in which an author signs a work with her name and makes it immortal . Several of the poems, known as The Hymns of the Temples, implied a revolution in Sumerian religion, introducing Akkadian elements into the pantheon and the mythology of the two rivers. The gods, who before Enheduanna were representations of nature, after her become human passions. The old gods that represented the sun or the wind are beginning to be replaced at the top of the pantheon by others, such as the goddess Ishtar , which personify love or sex. Enheduanna is therefore also the first known theologian and religious reformer in history.
Ishtar
And from that devotion that Enheduanna had towards the goddess Ishtar (goddess of sex, war, and protector of prostitutes and the crown), her two most important works arose:«Ishtar's Descent into Hell» , one of the most important works of Sumerian literature, and "The Exaltation of Ishtar" , a poem where, in a pioneering way for the time, the author includes autobiographical elements in the narration.
At the beginning of the Third Dynasty of Ur Some 140 years after her death, Enheduanna was already semi-deified. An Akkadian woman had just won the love and memory of a people, the Sumerian, who had previously hated her own family. Her theological system triumphed and was accepted by all, and in Babylonian times, some 1,500 years later, her literary work was still acclaimed and remembered.
I would like to recommend the book In a dark blue world by Joshua BedwyR , author of this article.
In a dark blue world
Memoirs of a priestess of the Akkadian Empire who lives in a society that looks at her, at the same time, with admiration and suspicion. It is the memory of a group of women who, in the midst of wars and death, knew how to look darkness in the face.