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4,300 years ago in ancient Sumer, the most powerful person in the city of Ur was banished to wander the vast desert.
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Her name was Enheduanna.
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She was the high priestess of the moon god and history's first known author.
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By the time of her exile, she had written 42 hymns and three epic poems, and Sumer hadn't heard the last of her.
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Enheduanna lived 1,700 years before Sappho, 1,500 years before Homer, and about 500 years before the Biblical patriarch Abraham.
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She was born in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and the birthplace of the first cities and high cultures.
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Her father was King Sargon the Great, history's first empire builder, who conquered the independent city-states of Mesopotamia under a unified banner.
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Sargon was a northern Semite who spoke Akkadian, and the older Sumerian cities in the south viewed him as a foreign invader.
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They frequently revolted to regain their independence, fracturing his new dynasty.
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To bridge the gap between cultures, Sargon appointed his only daughter, Enheduanna, as high priestess in the empire's most important temple.
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Female royalty traditionally served religious roles, and she was educated to read and write in both Sumerian and Akkadian, and make mathematical calculations.
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The world's first writing started in Sumer as a system of accounting, allowing merchants to communicate over long distances with traders abroad.
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Their pictogram system of record keeping developed into a script about 300 years before Enheduanna's birth.
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This early writing style, called cuneiform, was written with a reed stylus pressed into soft clay to make wedge-shaped marks.
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But until Enheduanna, this writing mostly took the form of record keeping and transcription, rather than original works attributable to individual writers.
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Enheduanna's Ur was a city of 34,000 people with narrow streets, multi-storied brick homes, granaries, and irrigation.
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As high priestess, Enheduanna managed grain storage for the city, oversaw hundreds of temple workers, interpreted sacred dreams, and presided over the monthly new moon festival and rituals celebrating the equinoxes.
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Enheduanna set about unifying the older Sumerian culture with the newer Akkadian civilization.
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To accomplish this, she wrote 42 religious hymns that combined both mythologies.
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Each Mesopotamian city was ruled by a patron deity, so her hymns were dedicated to the ruling god of each major city.
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She praised the city's temple, glorified the god's attributes, and explained the god's relationship to other deities within the pantheon.
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In her writing, she humanized the once aloof gods: now they suffered, fought, loved, and responded to human pleading.
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Enheduanna's most valuable literary contribution was the poetry she wrote to Inanna, goddess of war and desire, the divinely chaotic energy that gives spark to the universe.
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Inanna delighted in all forms of sexual expression and was considered so powerful that she transcended gender boundaries, as did her earthly attendants, who could be prostitutes, eunuchs, or cross-dressers.
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Enheduanna placed Inanna at the top of the pantheon as the most powerful deity.
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Her odes to Inanna mark the first time an author writes using the pronoun "I," and the first time writing is used to explore deep, private emotions.
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After the death of Enheduanna's father, King Sargon, a general took advantage of the power vacuum and staged a coup.
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As a powerful member of the ruling family, Enheduanna was a target, and the general exiled her from Ur.
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Her nephew, the legendary Sumerian king Naram-Sin, ultimately crushed the uprising and restored his aunt as high priestess.
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In total, Enheduanna served as high priestess for 40 years.
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After her death, she became a minor deity, and her poetry was copied, studied, and performed throughout the empire for over 500 years.
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Her poems influenced the Hebrew Old Testament, the epics of Homer, and Christian hymns.
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Today, Enheduanna's legacy still exists, on clay tablets that have stood the test of time.
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Enheduanna wasn't the only literary princess of old.
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Take a look at the life and work of Anna Kom nini, a historian torn between loyalty to her controversial family and loyalty to the truth.