The Ancient Princess Who Crushed Enemies With Her Quick Tongue

More than 4,000 years ago, Enheduanna, high priestess of the Sumerian moon god and daughter of a king, labored over a palm-size clay tablet. Reed stylus in her hand, she pressed its tiny wedge-shaped tip into the clay to build the small, spiky characters of cuneiform. She had been driven from her temple home by a rebel leader who opposed her family’s imperial rule over the kingdoms of Ur and Uruk. Though exiled and frightened, she was far from powerless—her words were believed to influence the gods.

In her writings, Enheduanna petitioned her patron goddess—Inanna, the Mesopotamian deity of love, war and change—to rescue her from the dark fate awaiting political exiles and restore her to her rightful position as high priestess. She had spent her life composing new hymns to the gods that were renowned across the Akkadian Empire (modern-day Iraq) for their perceived ability to move divine forces in her favor. Faced with defeat, Enheduanna turned to Inanna, writing to the “Queen of All Cosmic Powers.” The hymn was so stirring that it would endure for centuries.

This work and Enheduanna’s other surviving writings are believed to be the earliest that can be attributed to a named author whose existence is attested in the archaeological record. And there’s ample evidence of her lasting impact. “Several centuries after her death, we can see she was still being remembered— the objects that commemorate her were being cared for and appreciated,” explains Assyriologist Sophus Helle, whose recent book on Enheduanna presents novel translations of her writings.

While these ancient objects transmit her image and confirm her existence, it is her hymns that tell her story. In translating them, Helle captured some of the rhythmic and lyrical qualities of the Sumerian language in which they were originally written—emphasizing that they were intended to be performed as songs, thereby reaching far larger audiences and pleasing the ears of the gods themselves.

Though scholars still debate whether the surviving poems accurately preserve Enheduanna’s voice, the fact of her existence is unquestioned. We find her deep in the archaeological record at the temple of the moon god at Ur, where she and the priestesses who followed her wielded power in ways that defied later assumptions about the role of women in one of the world’s earliest civilizations.

A high priestess, princess, and acclaimed author, Enheduanna lived around 2300 BC in the Akkadian Empire, a newly united domain of around 35 Sumerian and Akkadian city-states that her father, Sargon of Akkad, conquered and ruled. Sargon the Great wasn’t just a warrior and powerful king; he believed that he governed at the pleasure of the gods, and he understood the political power of religious belief. While strengthening his hold on the kingdom of Ur, he saw an opportunity to entwine his family with the city-state’s ancient and powerful high priestess-hood of the moon god, Nanna. The priestess-hood controlled the god’s temple, one of the most significant religious sites in ancient Sumer, along with the wealth that flowed from it: estates, herds, workshops, and the hundreds of laborers needed to run it. Beyond wealth, as the earthly bride of Nanna, the high priestess wielded vast theological power: she was uniquely positioned to sway the god with her words and rituals, and to communicate his divine will to the people.

Upon her installation in Nanna’s temple, Enheduanna received the name we know her by today, meaning “high priestess, ornament of heaven.” The name she was born with is lost to us, as are the details of her childhood—where and how she grew up, who taught her to read and write, even her exact age when she received this life-changing appointment.

But we know that she acted as high priestess for at least 30 and possibly more than 50 years, spanning the reigns of four kings—her father, two brothers, and a nephew—and stood as a true bulwark to her family’s dynasty. She is best remembered for her stirring literary compositions, at least three of which survive in some depth. Most records of Enheduanna’s writings come from clay tablets found during the excavations of Old Babylonian scribal schools that operated between 1800 and 1600 BC, when her hymns were considered an essential part of the curriculum. The latest copy of her work dates to the 14th century B.C., meaning that her words were studied and transcribed for at least a thousand years after her death.

For some scholars, however, the question of whether Enheduanna wrote the exact words she was famous for in antiquity is still up for debate. Since surviving copies of her work date from the centuries after her death, academics have theorized about whether these copies preserve her actual writing, or rather words written later under her name. Towson University’s Alhena Gadotti argues for the latter: she interprets the poems the same way scholars read the legendary heroic deeds that later generations credited to Enheduanna’s father, Sargon, and her nephew Naram-Sin—not as records of their real-life actions, but rather as stories built on memories of their achievements. In Gadotti’s view, Enheduanna’s surviving works were shaped by editors and later authors into their own compositions, albeit under the name of a celebrated historical and literary figure—though, as Gadotti notes, “this process would only have been possible if Enheduanna was indeed a renowned author.”    

Others, however, marshal a strong defense of Enheduanna’s authorship. Columbia University’s Zainab Bahrani, who literally wrote the book on the Women of Babylon, insists, “here is a situation where a woman is clearly recorded being an author, and we should not rewrite the historical record simply to fit our own preconceptions of gendered activities in antiquity.” She points out that though the 3^rd-millennium BC writings of King Shulgi of Ur are also primarily preserved in Old Babylonian copies, his authorship of those texts is rarely challenged.

For Helle’s part, he thinks that while the Babylonian copies might be “the equivalent of ancient historical fiction, it is also entirely possible that Enheduanna wrote them herself.” The long gap between Enheduanna’s lifetime and the earliest surviving copies of her work is “not as much of an argument against her as it might sound at first,” he notes, because “we have only a tiny trickle of literary texts from the third millennium, and most Sumerian poetry survives only in Old Babylonian copies.”

That’s not unusual. While written receipts and inventories abounded in administrative archives from Enheduanna’s lifetime, literary works lived differently. They were sung, recited, and memorized, spoken more often than they were written down, so early Sumerian literature has reached us almost entirely through later copies made in scribal schools. When the study of ancient Sumerian language became an essential part of scribal school curriculum during the Old Babylonian era—similar to how medieval scholars might have studied Latin—writing out ancient texts and hymns composed in Enheduanna’s fluent and mellifluous style became a cornerstone of the learning process. Excavations of these schools, particularly in the city-state of Nippur, have furnished archaeologists with scores of tablets that are, essentially, students’ homework renditions of the greatest hits of ancient Sumerian literature.

While the accurate transmission of a hymn over hundreds of years might seem hard to imagine, there is ancient precedent for it. One of the oldest pieces of Sumerian literature, the Kesh Temple Hymn, was discovered on tablets written around 2600 BC and on tablets written around 1800 BC. Created 800 years apart, both manuscripts “contain much the same text... so clearly it was possible for literary texts to pass largely unchanged through the centuries,” explains Helle.

Though the nature of Enheduanna’s authorship is contested, her real-life existence is not. She survives in the archaeological record at Ur, where Leonard Woolley’s 1922-1934 expedition unearthed her home, the apartment of the high priestess inside the moon god’s temple, as well as the tombs of her staff, whose grave goods proudly proclaimed their connections to her.

In 1927, Woolley also discovered the single depiction of her that has endured for millennia: on an alabaster disk 10 inches wide and 3 inches thick, she stands taller than the men around her, marking her as the most important person in the carving. Dressed in a flounced gown with a single lock of hair escaping her headdress, she presides over a ritual offering to the goddess Inanna. The inscription on the reverse preserved her own ordering of her titles: “priestess of Nanna, spouse of Nanna, daughter of Sargon, the king of the world.”

The world of the Akkadian Empire changed rapidly over Enheduanna’s lifetime. Her father, Sargon, whose name translates to “the king is legitimate,” hailed from the northern region of Akkad. After conquering the city-states of his home region and amassing a powerful army, he rode south and subdued the proud kingdoms of Sumer. Sargon and his dynasty maintained a tight hold on their conquests, granting lands and power to a new Akkadian elite who ruled in their service rather than as independent kings.

But city-states across the region chafed against these imperial shackles, and rebellions sparked. Battle stelae from this era record the deaths of tens of thousands of enemy soldiers and the destruction of city walls, all at the command of the Sargonic emperors. Even from her position of privilege, Enheduanna experienced the depredations of war firsthand. She describes them in her writings: “cities turn to ruins—homes for ghosts—and temples become deserts.”

Destruction was only half of the story. The plunder from sacked cities poured into the new empire, funding a golden age in the arts, trade, and religion. Advances in ceramics and metalworking allowed artists to fill the temples and palaces of the realm with delicate faience bowls and imposing bronze statues, including the lifelike sculpture of a Sargonic king still known today, while the scenes on cylinder seals, small carved stone objects used by elites as a signature, became increasingly detailed, intricate, and naturalistic.

Sargon himself boasted of the influx of exotic trade in an inscription, invoking far-off civilizations that may have flourished in the Indus Valley and present-day Oman and Bahrain: “The ships of Meluhha, the ships of Magan, [and] the ships of Dilmun [I] collected unto the quay in front of Agade.” Laden with precious stones, perfumes, textiles, and wines, and arriving alongside land-borne treasures from “the cedar forest and the silver mountains,” they brought the bounty of the hinterlands to the empire’s heart. Writing, too, benefitted from the flourishing arts, continuing its advancement from a bookkeeping tool into a record of spoken language, able to convey rich narratives instead of limited data. And changes loomed in the religious pantheon as well: Inanna rose further in religious prominence as the patron goddess of Sargon and his family.

Though Enheduanna served as the high priestess to Nanna, her personal devotion to Inanna shines through her writings. Two of her three major surviving compositions are devoted to the goddess: The “Queen of All Cosmic Powers” (also called “The Exaltation of Inanna”) and the “Queen of Vast Heart” (or “The Hymn to Inanna”). The third, a compilation known as the “Temple Hymns,” is a collection of hymns to temples from cities across Sumer and Akkad, united by Enheduanna into an integrated whole that mimics her father’s unification of separate kingdoms into a single empire. The collection was a singular literary and cultural feat.

The “Queen of All Cosmic Powers” is Enheduanna’s most copied work. The hymn crosses genres, dipping into autobiography, ritual laments, legal proceedings, songs of praise, and depictions of warfare. The opening verses exalts Inanna: “queen of all powers, downpour of daylight!... To rule is your right: you have seized the seven powers of the gods.”

Enheduanna then details the ferocity of the goddess, comparing her to a “flash flood that gushes down the mountains.” “My queen,” she writes, “hearing your battle cry the enemy bows down. Fleeing sandstorms, terror, and splendor, humanity assembled to stand before you in silence, and of all the gods’ powers, you took the most terrible.”

After Enheduanna creates the image of Inanna as a towering figure of divine wrath and power, she reveals first her own identity, and then her predicament. “I am Enheduanna, I am the high priestess,” she writes. “I carried the basket of offerings, I sang the hymns of joy. Now they bring me funeral gifts—am I no longer living? I went to the light, but the light burned me. I went to the shadow, but it was shrouded in storms.”

The source of Enheduanna’s troubles becomes clear: though her nephew Naram-Sin holds the imperial throne, an opportunistic cabal of rebels has united to challenge the Empire.

Enheduanna pits herself against rebel leader Lugal-Ane, who claims to be the new ruler of Ur, accusing him directly of defiling “the holy rites of An [the father of the gods].” Though Enheduanna implores her divine husband Nanna for his aid, he does not answer. She flees like a “swallow swooping through a window.” Her enemy “took the crown of high priestess from me, giving me a knife and dagger instead.”  

In the face of exile, Enheduanna exhorts Inanna to “let them know you crush every rebel.” Her appeal to Inanna grows increasingly violent: “Let them know you grind skulls to dust. Let them know you eat corpses like a lion... Let them know you always stand triumphant.”

In the hymn, Inanna is swayed by Enheduanna’s words. She decrees the resounding defeat of the rebel pretender to the throne and restores Enheduanna to power. Freshly blessed by the gods, Enheduanna returns triumphant to the halls of her temple home. She offers us a final benediction, evoking a blessing from Inanna while subtly nodding at the success of her own words in winning over the goddess: “What she said to her holy woman was magnificent.”

This artfully written hymn is not just about the praise of one goddess and the triumph of one high priestess; it is also a powerful piece of political propaganda. Helle explains that “there is absolutely a political context to the hymns.” Enheduanna’s writing could function as a mirror of imperial policies, “neatly reflecting, in a literary way, the political achievements of her father.” Those who rebelled against the Sargonic royal family should expect to find themselves on the wrong side of Inanna. But it wasn’t just Inanna that enemies had to fear: Enheduanna’s “honey-mouth” was powerful enough to turn multiple gods and humans to her causes.

Her second surviving work was also dedicated to Inanna. The “Queen of Vast Heart” is a hymn in praise of the goddess that illuminates the mystical paradoxes of her being. “She overturns what she has done; nobody can know her course,” Enheduanna writes; the goddess operates beyond the scope of human understanding. A long lyrical list of Inanna’s attributes spills forth in the song: “To roam, to rush, to rival, to rise, to throw down are yours, Inanna... To destroy and to create, to plant and to pluck out are yours, Inanna.”

Though there are many gaps in the surviving copies of this song, Enheduanna’s proclamation of authorship survives: “I am Enheduanna, the high priestess,” she writes again. “This is my offering to you: to proclaim your great divinity across the land. I know your great burden from my own body. Grief and evil keep my eyes open, the pain spills out. But pity, compassion, care, mercy, and grace are also yours, as is the flooding of the rivers, the breaking of hard soil, the dark turning into light.”

The third project attributed to Enheduanna is a compilation known as the “Temple Hymns,” which draws together 42 hymns to temples across Sumer and Akkad. This anthology gives a whirlwind tour of the empire’s major religious sites, acting as an ancient pilgrim’s guide that celebrated the greatest spiritual and architectural achievements of the diverse collection of city-states that made up the new Akkadian Empire.

Starting in Eridu, believed by the Sumerians to be the oldest city in the world, it introduced the spectacular complex of Enki, god of wisdom and creativity. His temple, “the foundation of heaven and earth,” featured “sacred canals” and “pure plants,” a reflection of his home in the Abzu, the mythical Deep Sea that provided all fresh water to the world. The temple of Nanna at Ur, Enheduanna’s home, is described as the “most sacred place in heaven and earth.” It “shine[s] with the light of righteous rule, of precious fates. Home of the high priestesses.” Mountain shrines and waterfront temples fill out this catalogue, which, appropriately, ends at the sanctuary of the goddess of writing, Nisaba. Described as the “righteous woman of unmatched mind,” she is the deity whose very existence made this anthology’s creation possible.

Intriguingly, Enheduanna identifies herself as “the weaver of this tablet” rather than the writer of it, perhaps because she collected and edited old hymns known from these temples and wove them into a new composition. She herself notes this originality at the work’s end: “My king! Something has been born which had not been born before.”

Though she was the first to compile and edit the Temple Hymns, she would not be the last. Scribes were still adding new temples to it two hundred years later, during the dynasty known as Ur III. These additions seem to have ended around the fall of that dynasty (around 2004 BC), after which Old Babylonian scribes kept the hymns alive in their copies for centuries more.  

Enheduanna’s writings are not her only legacy. The office of high priestess outlasted her by many centuries, and the women who held it turned it into more than just a job; they made it a dynasty. Joining the high priestess-hood and marrying the god meant forsaking a human husband and children, an extreme rarity for women in this era. In a culture where the dead depended on their living descendants for regular offerings of food and drink, a childless woman risked a miserable afterlife: thirsting, starving, forgotten. The high priestesses defied this fate and formed their own lineage. They carefully tended their predecessors’ tombs, poured out choice offerings, and were often buried in splendor beneath the floor of the temple apartment where they had once lived, so close that their successors walked above them every day.

And, like Enheduanna, they wrote, recording and preserving their own history. High Priestess Enanatuma stamped her name on the bricks used to rebuild the temple to its ancient plan after it was sacked at the end of the 3rd millennium BC, ensuring her contributions would be remembered. Her tenure as high priestess was so successful that even after her father was dethroned by a rival, the new ruler allowed her to continue in her post. Enanedu, who held the position nearly five centuries after Enheduanna, chronicled her own efforts to carefully restore and maintain the high priestess’ tombs and residence in inscriptions in her own voice. Even later in history, Ennigaldi-Nanna, the daughter of the last king of Babylon, would become Nanna’s final priestess at Ur in 547 BC. She is remembered as one of the world’s earliest museum curators, overseeing a collection of historical artifacts spanning 1800 years of Mesopotamian history, including objects from Enheduanna’s lifetime.

In this light, perhaps the idea of authorship itself is one of Enheduanna’s legacies. The women who followed her put their names on what they made, claiming their own achievements as she had. This quietly radical act has reverberated down the millennia, forcing us to reconsider what we thought we knew about the ancient world and women’s place in it.

This is one reason why her work still resonates with those who read it today. We know she was a real person. We can feel the thorns tearing at her skin as she flees political persecution. We can hear her argue with the gods, demanding a new fate. We can even explore her thoughts on the meaning of writing, the transformative power of creating something new—an act that she compares to giving birth. And finally, we can see her bold proclamations of her own authorship. “I am Enheduanna,” she wrote. More than four thousand years later, her voice cuts across the ages, a beacon from the dawn of history.