NEW YORK, United States —
It was a random morning in November, and Enheduanna was trending.
اضافة اعلان
Suddenly, the ancient
Mesopotamian priestess, who
had been dead for more than 4,000 years, was a hot topic online as word spread
that the first individually named author in human history was … a woman?
That may have been old news at the Morgan Library
& Museum, where Sidney Babcock, the longtime curator of ancient Near
Eastern antiquities, was about to offer a tour of its new exhibition “She Who
Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400–2000 BC”. Babcock was
thrilled by the attention, if not exactly surprised by the public’s surprise.
Ask people who the first author was, and they might
say Homer, or Herodotus. “People have no idea,” he said. “They simply don’t
believe it could be a woman” — and that she was writing more than a millennium
before either of them, in a strikingly personal voice.
Enheduanna’s work celebrates the gods and the power
of the
Akkadian empire, which ruled present-day Iraq from about 2350 BC to 2150
BC. But it also describes more sordid, earthly matters, including her abuse at
the hands of a corrupt priest — the first reference to sexual harassment in
world literature, the show argues.
“It’s the first time someone steps forward and uses
the first-person singular and gives an autobiography,” Babcock said. “And it’s
profound.”
Enheduanna has been known since 1927, when
archaeologists working at the ancient city of Ur excavated a stone disc bearing
her name (written with a starburst symbol) and image and identifying her as the
daughter of the king Sargon of Akkad, the wife of the moon god Nanna, and a
priestess.
In the decades that followed, her works — some 42
temple hymns and three stand-alone poems, including “The Exaltation of Inanna”
— were pieced together from more than 100 surviving copies made on clay
tablets.
Meanwhile, Enheduanna has been repeatedly
discovered, forgotten, and then discovered again by the broader culture. Last
fall, the “Exaltation” was added to
Columbia University’s famous first-year
Core Curriculum. And now there is the Morgan exhibition, which celebrates her
singularity while also embedding her in a deep history of women, literacy, and
power stretching back nearly to the ancient Mesopotamian origins of writing
itself.
The exhibition, on view until February 19, is also a
swan song for Babcock, who will retire next year after nearly three decades at
the Morgan. The idea began percolating about 25 years ago, he said, when he saw
Enheduanna’s name on a lapis lazuli cylinder seal belonging to one of her
scribes — one of five artifacts where her name is attested independently of
copies of her poetry.
He sees “She Who Wrote” — which assembles objects
from nine institutions around the world — as part of the Morgan’s long history
of exhibitions on female writers like Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, and Emily
Dickinson.
It is also a tribute to a long chain of female
scholars, including his teacher, Edith Porada, the first curator of J. Pierpont
Morgan’s celebrated collection of more than 1,000 seals.
Porada, born in
Vienna, fled Europe in 1938 after
Kristallnacht. One of the few things she brought with her to New York was the
plate copy of her dissertation, complete with her drawings of seal impressions
from European collections, which she presented to Belle da Costa Greene, the
Morgan’s first director.
A clay tablet from ca. 1750 BC, inscribed with ‘The Exaltation of Inanna’, a poem attributed to Enheduanna, included in ‘She Who Wrote’, an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, on November 7, 2022.
In ancient Mesopotamia, cylinder seals — often
carved with exquisitely detailed scenes — were used to roll the owner’s unique
stamp onto a document produced by scribes, attesting to its authenticity.
“For the first time”, Babcock said, “you have an
image that represents an individual connected with what the individual is
responsible for”.
Since 2010, about 100 of the Morgan seals have been
on permanent display in Greene’s jewel-box former office, in the opulent
original library building. But for years they were stored in a gym-style steel
locker in a basement, where Porada would hold a weekly seminar.
“We would sit down, and out of her purse would come
a little change purse with a key inside,” Babcock recalled. “She would open
another locker, and inside a Sucrets tin was another key. Then we would gasp —
out of the locker would come this legendary collection.”
Entering the gallery, Babcock (who curated the show
with Erhan Tamur, a curatorial fellow at the Metropolitan Museum) paused in
front of a tiny alabaster sculpture of a seated woman, from around 2000BC. She
is wearing the same flounce garment seen in the image of Enheduanna on the disk
found in 1927 and has the same aquiline features. A cuneiform tablet rests on
her lap, as if she is ready to write.
Is it Enheduanna?
“My colleagues won’t let me go that far,” Babcock
said. But the figure “certainly represents the idea of what she meant — women
and literacy, over successive generations.”
Many of the sculptures on display, the show argues,
depict actual individuals, not generic women. “This was the beginning of
portraiture,” Babcock said. And over the course of a nearly two-hour tour, he
repeatedly broke off his narrative to marvel at the beauty of this or that
figure, as if spotting a fashionable friend across the room.
At the center of the gallery is an item that would
spark a paparazzi frenzy at any
Met Gala: a spectacular funerary ensemble from
the tomb of Puabi, a Sumerian queen who lived around 2500BC, complete with an
elaborate beaten-gold headdress and cascading strands of semiprecious stones.
But equally remarkable, for Babcock, is the gold
garment pin displayed nearby, which would have held amulets and cylinder seals,
like the one carved from lapis lazuli found on Puabi’s body.
Enheduanna lived three centuries after Puabi,
following the ascendance of the Akkadians, who united speakers of the Sumerian
and Akkadian languages. Compared with Puabi’s ensemble, her surviving remnants
might seem drab.
But Enheduanna’s glory lies in her words, some of
which address startlingly contemporary concerns.
Some scholars have questioned whether Enheduanna
wrote the poems attributed to her. Even if she was a real person, they argue,
the works — written in Sumerian, and known only from copies made hundreds of
years after her lifetime — may have been written later and attributed to her,
as a way of bolstering the legacy of Sargon the king.
But whether Enheduanna was an actual author or a
symbol of one, she was hardly alone. The recent anthology “Women’s Writing of
Ancient Mesopotamia” gathers nearly 100 hymns, poems, letters, inscriptions,
and other texts by female authors.
In one passage of “Exaltation” — unique in all of
Mesopotamian literature, Babcock said — Enheduanna describes herself as “giving
birth” to the poem. “That which I have sung to you at midnight”, she wrote,
“may it be repeated at noon”.
And repeated it was. While the Akkadian empire
collapsed in 2137BC, Enheduanna’s poems continued to be copied for centuries,
as part of the standard training of scribes.
By about 500BC,
Enheduanna was “completely forgotten”, Babcock said. But until February, she
and her fellow women of Mesopotamia will command the room at the Morgan.
“Even the backs are so exquisite,” Babcock said, taking a
last look at the stone figures before returning to his office. “It can be hard
to leave.”
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