Enheduanna and Gods

Image of Enheduanna on a clay tablet.
(Image from a Wikipedia page on Enheduanna).

It is often difficult for historians of pre-modern eras to study the lives of women. Within the small number of sources that have survived, few discuss the lives of women and even fewer were written by women. For this reason, highly value those sources that shed light on or were written by Enheduanna (2285–2250 BCE), who was the daughter of Sargon the Great (c. 2334–2279 BCE), high priestess of the Nanna temple complex in the city of Ur, and a renowned poet.

With few exceptions, women were not permitted to fill political roles within Mesopotamian cities. However, we can see with Enheduanna that women occupied important religious roles, through which they influenced the social, cultural, and political life of a city. Enheduanna exhibited her influence in her city through her administering the temple and its personnel as well as by carrying out rituals in Ur's major temple that celebrated the gods and asked for their favor. 

She also had an impact on other temples by writing poems that were recited throughout Akkad. Indeed, enough of her poetry survives to permit us to see that her petitionary poems greatly influenced this genre for thousands of years throughout Mesopotamia, Israel and Judea, and Greece. 

For this reason, discussion of Enheduanna permits an investigation into Mesopotamian belief systems. For example, each city’s main temple was dedicated to a different deity. In Ur, the patron god was Nanna, who represented the moon and wisdom. Other cities focused on Enlil, Itu, Inanna, and so on. Whenever the Sumerian city-states went into battle, their patron god fought alongside them against their enemies.

Despite the adoption of patron gods, the people in each city worshiped all of the gods. While Nanna might protect the city and residents of Ur, Innana or Ninsurhag were called upon in matters of love, lust, and reproduction. When people were worried about water for their crops, they could call upon Enlil, the god of wind and storms, or Enki, the god of water. And Utu was a favorite in matters of justice.

In these ways, the gods represented nature and the elements that affected daily and seasonal life: the weather, water for drinking and crops or the sun that helped crops grow and or killed humans, animals, and plants with its heat. The gods also stood in for such concepts as reproduction, justice, warfare, and so on. There was a god for anything that affected the ability to survive or interactions between individuals. Indeed, peoples around the world worshiped very similar gods, sometimes differing only in name, but often adding or subtracting one or more attributes.

Bronze Age survival depended on many factors that were outside human control. Belief in these gods provided people with a way to concentrate their wishes and fears into prayers that they hoped would sway chance to their benefit. 

With the poem The Exaltation of Inanna, in which Enheduanna asks the goddess of love Inanna, for help, the text can be broken down into several parts. The first 65 lines recount Inanna's power and relationships with the other gods, often whether she is beloved or feared by them. For example, the first few lines state:

Lady of all the divine powers, resplendent light, righteous woman clothed in radiance, beloved of An and Urac! Mistress of heaven, with the great pectoral jewels, who loves the good headdress befitting the office of en priestess, who has seized all seven of its divine powers! My lady, you are the guardian of the great divine powers!

These relationships are important, because they highlight that the gods work through their own powers or by getting the other gods to do favors for them. This reliance on relationships in turn reflects the manner in which people in Sumerian and Akkadian societies were able to accomplish things. 

If someone needed something or to have something done, he or she would approach and petition the individual in a position of authority that he or she felt would most likely hear and help her or him, even if that item or task were not within that individual's authority. That individual in a position of authority would then use his or her relationships with others to accomplish the goal of the petitioner. This web of relationships in Sumerian/Akkadian society has been mapped onto how the gods interact, because this methodology is familiar to humans. In this case, Enheduanna is in a sense reminding Inanna about her relationships to these other gods so that she can more quickly aid the high priestess.

It is with lines 66–73 that Enheduanna turns the poem to her problems and the reason for her petition: she is unable to carry out her role as high priestess to the Sumerian gods.

I, En-hedu-ana the en priestess, entered my holy jipar in your service. I carried the ritual basket, and intoned the song of joy. But funeral offerings were brought, as if I had never lived there. I approached the light, but the light was scorching hot to me. I approached that shade, but I was covered with a storm. My honeyed mouth became venomous. My ability to soothe moods vanished.

We then learn more about the cause of her problems in lines 74–90. As part of his rebellion against Sargon, Lugal-Ane forced Enheduanna into exile. 

Suen, tell An about Lugal-ane and my fate! May An undo it for me! As soon as you tell An about it, An will release me. The woman will take the destiny away from Lugal-ane . . . . In connection with the purification rites of holy An, Lugal-ane has altered everything of his, and has stripped An of the E-ana. 

Enheduanna also makes clear that Lugal-Ane is an enemy of the gods, since he does not fear or worship the gods and has destroyed their temples. 

He has not stood in awe of the greatest deity. He has turned that temple, whose attractions were inexhaustible, whose beauty was endless, into a destroyed temple.

The rest of the poem recounts the resolution that Enheduanna would like to receive from the gods, reassurances that she has remained faithful to them and has protected their secrets, and reminders of the gods' awesome fury and power to their foes as well as their love for humanity.

As this one poem shows, we can learn a lot about Sumerian and Akkadian society from Enheduanna's writings. For example, they suggest how the city-states were ordered politically, how human—and godly—relationships worked, political events as they unfolded, and the religious rites conducted within the temples. It is through analysis of these poems that we can learn more about ancient societies as well as about ourselves.

The Ancient History Encyclopedia contains more context about Enheduanna as well as an example of her poetry. More Sumerian literature, including more of Enheduann's poems, can be found on The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.