![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kestrellDecades ago, archeologists discovered the work of Enheduanna, an ancient priestess who seemed to alter the story of literature. Why hasn’t her claim been affirmed?
By Elizabeth Winkler
November 19, 2022
Full article at
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-struggle-to-unearth-the-worlds-first-author
Excerpt:
While Hallo and van Dijk were noting that Enheduanna might have written more than had been uncovered—Akkad, the capital of Sargon’s empire, has yet to be excavated—others were downplaying her claim. The British scholar W. G. Lambert raised the possibility of a ghostwriter, suggesting that at least one of Enheduanna’s texts could have been authored by a scribe. (Sumerian kings often had scribes compose for them.) “Our emotional response to ancient texts is not necessarily the best criterion of judgment,” he later wrote, in 2001. Other scholars questioned Enheduanna on the grounds that the surviving versions of her work, copied out by the students of the edubbas, date to five hundred years after her death; no copies from her own time survive, and, in a few instances, the texts contain place names and vocabulary that postdate her era. This could simply be the result of changes made in the process of scribal transmission—alterations commonly attend the reproduction of old narratives—but some see it as reason for skepticism. “She speaks in the first person, but that’s not the same as being the author,” Paul Delnero, a professor of Assyriology at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Enheduanna could be a cultic figure honored by later writers, her name invoked in the works to lend them authority.
For some in the field, these claims are quite a stretch. “Why would the scribes look back and find a high priestess and say she wrote the texts?” Benjamin Foster, a professor of Assyriology at Yale, asked me. “There were lots of high priestesses. Why choose her?” Foster is impatient with the skeptics. “There’s a tendency in our field to regard it as a sign of wisdom not to take ancient texts at their word,” he said. “It’s not cool to be excited and emotional. You should keep a detached skepticism. But we have more evidence for her than we have for any other author in ancient Mesopotamia.” Foster, who has “no doubt” about Enheduanna’s authorship, cites the autobiographical content of the poems, the deeply intimate quality of the narrative voice. And then there are the peculiarly female markers of “The Exaltation”—the language of sexual violation, the metaphor of writing as childbirth, even the preference for the goddess rather than the god.
In many ways, the debate has become a battleground for competing theoretical paradigms. In the seventies, when second-wave feminism was booming, there was a push to affirm Enheduanna’s authorship; a similar movement occurred in the nineties. (Erhan Tamur, a co-curator of the Morgan exhibit, told me that doubts about Enheduanna’s achievement flowed from the “patriarchal nature of modern scholarship.”) Meanwhile, postmodern thinking encouraged skepticism, uncertainty, and the irrelevance of the author. Consensus was never reached. Today, many see the priestess not as a vital female poet but, as the British Assyriologist Eleanor Robson has called her, a “wish-fulfillment figure.”
The Morgan exhibition presents Enheduanna without the shadow of these doubts. Specifically, it places her in the context of other Mesopotamian women of the late fourth and third millennia B.C.: workers, rulers, priestesses, scribes, and the female deities to which they all prayed. No major exhibition has focussed on women’s lives in ancient Mesopotamia, and the artworks gathered—from London, Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere—build a picture of the economic,
By Elizabeth Winkler
November 19, 2022
Full article at
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-struggle-to-unearth-the-worlds-first-author
Excerpt:
While Hallo and van Dijk were noting that Enheduanna might have written more than had been uncovered—Akkad, the capital of Sargon’s empire, has yet to be excavated—others were downplaying her claim. The British scholar W. G. Lambert raised the possibility of a ghostwriter, suggesting that at least one of Enheduanna’s texts could have been authored by a scribe. (Sumerian kings often had scribes compose for them.) “Our emotional response to ancient texts is not necessarily the best criterion of judgment,” he later wrote, in 2001. Other scholars questioned Enheduanna on the grounds that the surviving versions of her work, copied out by the students of the edubbas, date to five hundred years after her death; no copies from her own time survive, and, in a few instances, the texts contain place names and vocabulary that postdate her era. This could simply be the result of changes made in the process of scribal transmission—alterations commonly attend the reproduction of old narratives—but some see it as reason for skepticism. “She speaks in the first person, but that’s not the same as being the author,” Paul Delnero, a professor of Assyriology at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Enheduanna could be a cultic figure honored by later writers, her name invoked in the works to lend them authority.
For some in the field, these claims are quite a stretch. “Why would the scribes look back and find a high priestess and say she wrote the texts?” Benjamin Foster, a professor of Assyriology at Yale, asked me. “There were lots of high priestesses. Why choose her?” Foster is impatient with the skeptics. “There’s a tendency in our field to regard it as a sign of wisdom not to take ancient texts at their word,” he said. “It’s not cool to be excited and emotional. You should keep a detached skepticism. But we have more evidence for her than we have for any other author in ancient Mesopotamia.” Foster, who has “no doubt” about Enheduanna’s authorship, cites the autobiographical content of the poems, the deeply intimate quality of the narrative voice. And then there are the peculiarly female markers of “The Exaltation”—the language of sexual violation, the metaphor of writing as childbirth, even the preference for the goddess rather than the god.
In many ways, the debate has become a battleground for competing theoretical paradigms. In the seventies, when second-wave feminism was booming, there was a push to affirm Enheduanna’s authorship; a similar movement occurred in the nineties. (Erhan Tamur, a co-curator of the Morgan exhibit, told me that doubts about Enheduanna’s achievement flowed from the “patriarchal nature of modern scholarship.”) Meanwhile, postmodern thinking encouraged skepticism, uncertainty, and the irrelevance of the author. Consensus was never reached. Today, many see the priestess not as a vital female poet but, as the British Assyriologist Eleanor Robson has called her, a “wish-fulfillment figure.”
The Morgan exhibition presents Enheduanna without the shadow of these doubts. Specifically, it places her in the context of other Mesopotamian women of the late fourth and third millennia B.C.: workers, rulers, priestesses, scribes, and the female deities to which they all prayed. No major exhibition has focussed on women’s lives in ancient Mesopotamia, and the artworks gathered—from London, Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere—build a picture of the economic,
