Abstract
The first known author, Enheduana, gained a central place in the literary culture of ancient Iraq long after the death of Sumerian, the language in which her poems were written. The essay argues that her authorship served to depict the Sumerian literary heritage as a tangible object that could be acquired by people who did not speak Sumerian as their native language, since Enheduana’s poems condensed a cacophony of independent traditions into a single entity. The process primarily took place in the city of Nippur in the troubled decades after 1740 BC, as the ancient scholars desperately needed to assert their importance. They did so by claiming special access to Sumerian literature, and authorship served as an ideal vehicle to represent that literature and that access. In short, Enheduana became a body and a bridge for Sumerian literature, condensing it into a single object and allowing it to move into a new cultural context.
Highlights
I suggest that the Temple Hymns gathered the local traditions of Sumerian city states into a single text, turning a mishmash of local traditions into a composite but still coherent cultural identity
The argument presented by Rubio, Veldhuis, and Cooper, that Old Babylonian schools constructed an ideal of a single Sumerian heritage, may still apply, but only in the limited context of Nippur
Amid the narrator’s boasts about her “honeyed mouth”, it is easy for modern readers to forget that Enheduana was presumably not a native speaker of Sumerian, but the princess of an Akkadian-speaking dynasty. Sargon and his heirs introduced the use of Akkadian as a language of administration and public discourse on par with Sumerian (Foster Agade 213–14), and though the historical Enheduana could have grown up fluent in Sumerian, the Old Babylonian pupils copying her works would likely have associated her with an Akkadian-speaking empire
Summary
I suggest that the Temple Hymns gathered the local traditions of Sumerian city states into a single text, turning a mishmash of local traditions into a composite but still coherent cultural identity. It is in the Old Babylonian schools that authorship makes its first appearance in the historical record, as Enheduana’s works gained a central place in their curriculum.
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