From "Inanna, Lady of the Largest Heart," by Betty De Shong Meador. Chapter 5: Enheduanna's Life Story
Enheduanna's story begins before she was born. She became a princess, and eventually high priestess, by virtue of her father's rise to power as he conquered and claimed kingship over all Mesopotamia. To place Enheduanna in history, we must first understand her relationship to her father.
In the Akkadian version of the Sargon legend, Sargon was born in a town on the Euphrates, Azupiranu, "Saffron Town," an ancient center for the harvesting of the tiny orange stigma of the
Crocus sativus that yields the pungent spice, saffron, and forms the basis for the rich yellow and burnt orange dye. Sargon's father has been identified variously over the centuries, as a man named La'ibum, or as gardener, or as a person unknown even to Sargon.
1 According to legend, Sargon's mother was a priestess who bore her child in secret.
2 She placed her baby in a reed basket lined with pitch and pushed the little boat out onto the river.
3 A gardener, drawing water from the river to irrigate his date palm trees, pulled the basket ashore. This man, Aqqi, raised the boy as his own and taught him the gardening profession.
4 As a young man Sargon claimed to have won the favor of the goddess Ishtar, the Semitic name for Inanna. Perhaps because of this divine intercession or through the influence of a priestess to Ishtar, he became a servant in the household of the Sumerian king, Ur-Zababa of Kish. Kish was the capital of Sumer about sixty miles south of the present city of Baghdad. Kish was a prominent city in the five hundred-year Early Dynastic period that saw a succession of kings rule over Sumer. Inanna, in her large temple, was tutelary deity of Kish. She gave her chosen kings the title, "King of Kish," and they, in turn, called themselves "spouse of Inanna."
Sargon soon obtained the position of cup-bearer to the king, putting him in charge of drink offerings to the gods. Later, refusing Ur-Zababa's order to "change the drink offering of E-sagila,"
5 a libation to the god, Sargon broke with the king. According to tradition, Enlil, the great god of the spring wind and storm, and the god whose approval was necessary to legitimate the earthly kingdom, was disturbed by a cultic offense, perhaps Ur-Zababa's insistence on changing the traditional drink offering. Enlil then bestowed his divine blessing upon Sargon, leaving the old king without legitimacy.
In the Sumerian version of the Sargon legend, the gods An and Enlil decree the end of the reign of Ur-Zababa and make way for Sargon, cup-bearer to the king, to replace him.
6 The Sumerian tale is vivid and dramatic. With "Holy Inanna unceasingly working behind the scenes,"
7 Sargon plots Ur-Zababa's death. The king "knows it in his heart," and is terrified.
8Like a lion sprinkling the inside of his legs with urine in which there was plenty of fresh blood he moaned and gasped like a struggling salt-water fish.9The frightened king lays a trap for Sargon, but to no avail. "(D)estiny determined by the gods is unavoidable and not to be resisted."
10After leaving the king's service, Sargon began to develop a following of his own. In a location archaeologists have yet to discover, he established a city on the Euphrates, not far from Kish, which he named Agade (or Akkad).
Legend interweaves with history. At some point Sargon conferred on himself the name "Sharruken," which means "the king is legitimate, the legitimate king."
11 This name declared to all that he, and no one else, occupied the center of power.
From the stronghold of Akkad, Sargon lead his armies to conquer all the city-states of Mesopotamia, and he was the first to unite the southern cities under one central rule.
12 He defeated Lugalzaggesi of Umma, who had made his own attempt to unite the southern cities. Lugalzaggesi, a particularly destructive ruler, had "burned, looted, and destroyed practically all the holy places of Lagash,"
13 behavior the Sumerians associated only with barbarians. The Sumerians may have welcomed their new king, if only temporarily.
After securing the Mesopotamian cities, Sargon ventured beyond the traditional borders into present-day Syria traveling all the way to the Taurus Mountains in Turkey. He controlled northern Mesopotamia, including the mountain borders to the north and east. His ships docked in the Persian Gulf at its many ports. He may have established outposts in Egypt, Ethiopia, and India. The Sumerian cities were garrisoned with Akkadian troops. He boasted that fifty-four hundred men ate daily before him.
14 At one point his kingdom included most of the known world.
Enheduanna was born into the household of this ambitious, charismatic man, the only daughter among Sargon's five children. Although Sargon was married to a Semitic-speaking Akkadian, Tashlutum, she may not have been Enheduanna's mother. Sargon probably had other wives, and he certainly kept concubines. Some scholars believed Enheduanna's mother was Sumerian, judging from the poet's elegant use of that language.
15Enheduanna grew to maturity in the palace at the time of Sargon's expanding political power. Her father's return from victory in a foreign land was a commonplace scene for her as a young girl. She witnessed the Akkadian people's adulation of her father and the triumphant celebrations in the palace. She knew that her uncles and cousins governed the cities her father had conquered. She heard about Uruk, Ur, and Umma, cities to the south, whose king, Lugalzaggesi, fought against her father's army. She knew these people were Sumerians and she was Akkadian.
Enheduanna grew up in the midst of a creative evolution of some of the most basic cultural constructs of her society. For the five hundred years before Sargon came to power, Sumerians had dominated the region. Sumerian was the principle language spoken, and Sumerians had invented and developed the pictographic script that was the basis for cuneiform. This script represented the first known successful attempt at writing a language used in all areas of common life, economic, political, literary, and religious.
16 A powerful, creative energy drove Sumerian culture. In these five hundred years before Sargon the Sumerian influence spread throughout Mesopotamia and into bordering lands. People in this area worshiped the Sumerian gods and built the traditional ziggurat temples. The Sumerians developed a body of myth, song, and story, mostly tales of the gods. Such powerful cities as Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Kish, and Nippur in the south engaged in extensive trade with cities in the midsection of the country and in the north and with settlements in present-day Turkey, Iran, the Persian Gulf region, east to the Indus basin, and west to the Mediterranean.
When Sargon came to power he ushered in a series of cultural changes that altered the traditional Sumerian way of life and brought this Sumerian-dominated period, the Early Dynastic, to an end. Akkadian replaced Sumerian as the primary spoken language, and for the first time, a Semitic language, Old Akkadian, was written using the cuneiform script invented by the Sumerians. The traditional Sumerian city-states in the south lost power and influence as Sargon moved the center of power to the midsection of the country, to Akkad.
Now the creative energy was in the hands of the Semites. The written tablets of this period used the new script in a form J.N. Postgate describes "of great regularity and formality."
17 C.J. Gadd recounts that the scribes, using a fine clay, wrote the cuneiform signs "with a care and beauty which were not matched again until the Assyrian caligraphers were set to work upon the library tablets of Ahurbanipal."
18 Another striking change took place, according to Postgate, in the system of weights and measures that in the past had differed from city to city. Now, "measures of length, area, dry and liquid capacity, and probably also weight were integrated into a single logical system which remained the standard for a thousand years or more."
19 These changes were made possible by the new centralized government.
The world depicted in Akkadian art had a new cast,. In the carved reliefs of this era, individual soldiers fashioned with a freedom of movement, are slim, well balanced, and realistically portrayed. Crowds of the enemy are no longer aligned in identical repetition; rather, individual are posed in various attitude of fear, anguish, and subjugation. The Semitic artists, energized by their king's elevation of the Akkadians to the pinnacle of power, were inspired to create new cultural expressions that depicted the individual.
In the midst of these exciting changes the princess Enheduanna grew into womanhood. Enheduanna's life began in privilege and wealth. As daughter of the king, she haad a part to play in implementing the enormous changes her father had initiated. In time, Enheduanna's father appointed her high priestess of the moon god Nanna at the temple in Ur, far to the south of her home in Akkad. During her long life a close family member ruled as king. According to Maisels, Sargon set an example his successors would follow: maintaining power and thriving "by monopolizing exchange and extracting tribute."
20 Enheduanna's brother Rimush, who succeeded Sargon, left inscriptions declaring victory over an uprising of southern cities as well as over the eastern province of Elam and Tell Brak in present-day Syria. Rimush may have been murdered by his older brother and successor Manishtushu, who struggled with many of the same problems of rebellion in the homeland and preservation of hegemony over the foreign territories. Manishtushu was also murdered.
Manishtushu's son Naram-Sin was the true progeny of his grandfather Sargon, culminating his extraordinary reign of power by declaring himself a god. Gadd notes that documents from Agade do not provide evidence of dominance of the former Sumerian temple economy.
21 Along with Naram-Sin's deification, this political shift pits the traditional role of the temple against the secular rule of the king. By calling himself "god of Akkad," Naram-Sin claimed for himself the city-god's land and possessions, traditionally the property of the temple.Complicating this picture is the fact that the patron deity of the dynasty was the goddess Ishtar, the Akkadian Inanna. This struggle between the religious sphere, its temples and personnel, and that of the secular rulers, now boasting some fifty years of dynastic power, is further evidence of the cultural change in institutions and the consciousness of the period.
22 It may be that Enheduanna's elevation of Inanna in her poems to a central position among the gods was a dissident act protesting the intrusion of the king into the domain of the religion.
Finally Enheduanna took the new consciousness of the individual, which we see in Akkadian art, and wrote about herself. "I, I am Enheduanna," she says. Her poetry was inspired by the most intimate nuances of feeling. She explored the transformative role emotion plays in the individual. Now at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we are only beginning to understand the full weight emotion and image carry in the human psyche. Enheduanna opened herself to these insights over four thousand years ago.
Chapter 6 discusses Enheduanna's functions as high priestess at Ur, but that chapter is four times longer than this one, and it took me way too long to type this up. If the information in this chapter was interesting to you, I'd recommend renting the book or buying a used copy. The majority of the book consists of translations and analyses of Enheduanna's three epic poems to Inanna, but the first seven chapters discuss Enheduanna, her life, political and religious deeds, and the influence of her poetry on future literature. Betty De Shong Meador (the author) has a follow-up book, analyzing Enheduanna's Temple Hymns, which also contains more biographical information on her. Links to both books (via Amazon) are below:
Lady of the Largest HeartPrincess, Priestess, PoetMods, feel free to edit the post if typing up a complete chapter goes against any of the forum rules!
- Noco