Knowledge is Female
Once, I can’t remember exactly where — documentary, book, Youtube, social network? — I heard that in evolutionary terms the male gender had greater facilities for exploration — due to the hundreds of thousands of years that our species lived in tribal societies of hunters and gatherers — while women were more inclined to contemplation — since in those societies their tasks revolved around the care of food, children and the maintenance of the tribe itself. Thinking now, numerous reservations should be made to this assumption if it is taken seriously by the scientific community, but from another perspective such information hides an interesting fact.
For while warrior kings expanded the first empires in history, some female figures stood out in the cultural and symbolic maintenance of these great civilizations now lost from us, in the sands of time. Specifically, I speak of the first figure registered in history — of both genders — as an author. Or rather; authoress!
Enheduanna is her name, and she was a princess of ancient Acadia; a civilization that flourished between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers around the 24th century B.C., being known as one of the first empires on record. Much of this fame came with Enheduana’s father, King Sargon, who was responsible for conquering and unifying the cities that were then distributed around the above mentioned rivers. It is said that Sargon appointed his daughter as High Priestess and sent her to the temple in Ur — capital of an even older civilization, in fact, the oldest to date: Sumeria — in a political movement, aiming to maintain control of that region of extreme political importance, then recently conquered. With this, the role of Inanna’s priestess assumes even more prominence, since the subsequent religious unification of the Sumerian and Akkadian peoples is credited to her work in the temple.
In fact, her hymns, poems and psalms would spread to the various points of the Akkadian, coming, according to some scholars, to influence later mythologies, such as that of the Bible, in addition to the epics attributed to Homer in Hellenistic culture, ashistorian Paul Kriwaczek states in the book Babylon: Mesopotamia and the birth of civilization, crediting Enheduana to the creation
of paradigms of poetry, psalms and prayers throughout the ancient world… Their compositions, although rediscovered only in modern times, remained models. Through the Babylonians, they influenced the inspiration of prayers and psalms from the Hebrew Bible and the homeric hymns of Greece. Through them, echoes of Enheduanna, the first literary author in history, can be heard even in the hymnology of the early Christian church.
Thus, it is known that Enheduanna enjoyed great influence and political power, even during the reign of her brother, Rimush. At that time the high priestess seems to have been included in the political turmoil that led to her banishment from the temple at first. With regard to the exile, she is attributed the following lines:
I was at your service
When I first entered the holy temple.
I, Enheduanna,
The highest princess.
He carried the ritual basket.
I sang his praise.
Now I’ve been sent
To the lepers’ place.
The day arrives
And my luminosity is hidden around me.
Shadows cover the light,
Covering it in sandstorms.
My beautiful mouth only knows confusion.
Even my sex is grey.
Eventually, her position in the temple at Ur was restored and Enheduanna represented the gods until her death, when she was succeeded by his daughters, but not without first being elevated to a semi-divine category — made relatively common in the ancient world. Proof of the permanence of her figure can be affirmed by statues in her honor, carved centuries after her death. And despite the fact that Enheduana was a wealthy figure and endowed with many social privileges, historians and archaeologists still debate the literacy of women in ancient Mesopotamia, a society whose mythology even indicates a female deity responsible for writing: Nidaba.
Bibliographic sources:
KRIWACZEK, Paul. Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization
LETTERS: The World’s Oldest Writer. Available in: http://www.folha1.com.br/_conteudo/2019/04/cultura_e_lazer/1247309-a-mais-antiga-escritora-do-mundo.html
