Mesopotamia on Madison: The World’s First Author on View at the Morgan

“Who was the first author in history whose name we know?” This sounds like a trick question, but it is not — at least not according to the gem of a new show at the Morgan Library, “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and the Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400-2000 B.C.”One need not be an expert in aracana to be drawn in by the promise of intimacy with what the show calls “the first author of any gender to be known by name.” In just one room, the texture of lives led by women five millennia ago between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers comes into shimmering focus. The long dead breathe and write and feast and love.Writing itself in the form of cuneiform was invented in the storehouses of this Sumerian heartland. We are, all of us, back where we started, at history’s dawn. The Sumerians make the pharaohs look like historical upstarts. Enheduanna is at the center of it all. She is the daughter of King Sargon, who founded the Akkadian Empire by merging his own kingdom with that of Sumer. She would have lived around 2,300 before the common era. As a priestess of the moon goddess Nanna, Enheduanna would have led the religious rites at Ur, the city in present day Iraq from which the biblical patriarch Abraham was called by God. In the high priestess’s name we have an extended work, the “Exaltation of Inanna,” which features her as the first person narrator, as well as a clutch of works, such as the “Sumerian Temple Hymns.” Her role would have been to wed religious ritual to ascendant political power, in much the same way that the Romans conquered the Greeks only when Greek culture conquered them.Scholars tell us that Enheduanna’s name means “high priestess, ornament of heaven,” and “She Who Wrote” charts a world where the divine and human mingled. This was the milieu that gave us “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” whose protagonist is famously one-third human and the rest divine. Scenes carved on cylinder seals disclose Inanna — the Akkadians would call her Ishtar, the Canaanites Astarte — as the divinity of sex, war, and fertility. Also on display are small, poignant statues that depict female worshippers, hands clasped and knees bent. “Female Head,” from 2,500 before the common era, catches the viewer’s gaze and holds it. Like light from a distant star, it possesses posthumous charisma. “Statuette of a Female Worshiper” is all the more compelling for being cracked and broken, as if her faith were a durable and resilient thing vindicated by its wounds. The show’s visual centerpiece is “Queen Puabi’s Funeral Ensemble,” also from 2500 before the common era. On loan from the Penn Museum, it features a headdress made of 20 gold leaves, lapis, and carnelian, and a golden comb. It weighs six pounds, and was found resting on the monarch’s head. The discovery of Puabi’s tomb in 1922 was a sensation that mirrored that of Tutankhamen’s in the Valley of the Kings the same year. Queen Puabi’s funerary ensemble,Mesopotamia, Sumerian, Ur. Via Morgan Library/Courtesy of the Penn MuseumIf much of the appeal of “She Who Wrote” sounds not textual but visual, that is because the line between word and image was not nearly so bright then as it is now. The cylindrical seals that preserve so much of Mesopotamian culture show images of gods feasting, men fighting, and animals charging. They are hybrid sentences/portraits, possessing both a syntactic grammar and a visual sensibility. They anticipate emojis and memes. The casual visitor is likely to find the fragments of what is surmised to be Enheduanna’s writing difficult to parse. Formal and fragmentary, it bears the solemn weight of expired religion. At its most evocative, one can feel the presence of Ianna, the “Queen of Heaven,” as in the lines, “your base brings together heaven and ear. Your prince, the great prince Enlil, the good lord, the lord of the boundary of heaven.” There are signs that Enheduanna is having yet another moment in the cultural sun. “She Who Wrote” will run through February 19. The next month, Yale University Press is bringing out “Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author.” Translated by a Sumerian savant, Sophus Helle, Yale Press bills it as the “first complete translation of her poems.” The first writer has not yet had her last word.

Mesopotamia on Madison: The World’s First Author on View at the Morgan

Mesopotamia on Madison: The World’s First Author on View at the Morgan

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