About 4,200 years in the past, the realm we now name southern Iraq was rocked by revolts. The once-independent Sumerian metropolis states had been introduced beneath one rule by the legendary king Sargon of Akkad. Over the course of what trendy historians name the Outdated Akkadian interval, the reign of Sargon and his successors reshaped the newly conquered cities in numerous methods: outdated nobles have been demoted and new males dropped at energy, outdated enemies have been defeated and new requirements of statecraft imposed. The Sumerian world grew a lot greater and richer, but additionally extra unstable. Discontent with the brand new empire festered, frightening a gentle stream of uprisings because the cities tried to regain their independence.
One such revolt is depicted in a captivating poem often called ‘The Exaltation of Inana’. Apart from being a poetic masterpiece in its personal proper, ‘The Exaltation’ bears the excellence of being the primary identified work of literature that was attributed to an writer whom we will determine within the historic document, moderately than to an nameless custom or a fictional narrator. The narrator of the poem is Enheduana, the excessive priestess of town of Ur and the daughter of Sargon. In keeping with ‘The Exaltation’, she was solid into exile by one of many many revolts that plagued the Outdated Akkadian Empire.
Tablets inscribed with The Exaltation of Inana in three elements. Outdated Babylonian interval, c1750 BCE. Courtesy of the Yale Babylonian Collection
We have no idea for positive whether or not the poem was written by the historic Enheduana herself, as a literary retelling of an actual occasion, or by a later poet writing in her identify, within the historical model of a historic fiction that was meant to have fun the well-known excessive priestess. What we do know is that the poem conveys a way of what it might have been wish to dwell by way of a interval of profound turbulence, whether or not as a private account or an echo preserved within the cultural reminiscence of later durations.
That’s one cause why the works attributed to Enheduana – which, moreover ‘The Exaltation’, comprise 4 different poems – proceed to talk to us, millennia after their composition. Because the world grows more and more unstable, we’ve a lot to study from this historical priestess. The poems don’t merely register the truth of an historic upheaval – they go one step additional by turning that instability right into a cosmic perception, an event to mirror on what the world is basically like. They include, compressed inside their often-cryptic verses, the germ of an historical philosophy of change.
If the poems search to show radical change from a transient political phenomenon right into a common precept, they achieve this primarily by exalting the goddess Inana, higher identified by her Babylonian and Assyrian identify Ishtar. Two of the poems attributed to Enheduana, ‘The Exaltation’ and ‘The Hymn to Inana’, search to raise Inana to the pinnacle of the Sumerian pantheon, eclipsing the older male gods, Enlil and An, who rule the cosmos in accordance with most different Sumerian texts.
Pill inscribed with The Hymn to Inana. Courtesy the British Museum, London
Inana is commonly described because the patron deity of warfare and love, and that’s arguably true. However in Enheduana’s poems, she seems extra exactly because the goddess of change. The destruction of warfare and the eagerness of affection are alike in that they’re each highly effective forces that overwhelm and rework human lives, and it’s this sense of sweep that defines Inana in all her manifestations. To explain the power of this sweep, Enheduana’s poems usually recruit metaphors from the pure world, corresponding to storms and wild animals. In ‘The Exaltation’, she is instructed:
You might be like
a flash flood that
gushes down the
mountains …
In the meantime, ‘The Hymn’ describes her as a hawk that swoops to feed on different gods.
One other frequent supply of metaphors in these poems is warfare, however this isn’t warfare because the playground of heroes that we all know from the epic style. For Enheduana, the battleground just isn’t a spot the place males could show their may: people seem in her poems not because the brokers however solely because the victims of warfare, as when the poet sings of the troopers who’re led away in chains
whereas
the wind fills the
squares the place they
danced …
Battle is depicted as an impersonal power that’s powered by Inana’s cruel will:
hatches crush heads,
spears eat flesh, and
axes are drenched in
blood …
However the savage warrior who grinds the skulls of her enemies to mud is only one of Inana’s personas. In different texts, she seems as an harmless younger lady pining for her lover, the shepherd god Dumuzi. One other of the poems attributed to Enheduana known as ‘The Temple Hymns’, and it’s a assortment of 42 brief odes to the Sumerian gods, temples and cities. Right here, we discover two hymns to Inana in her sensuous guise, because the goddess of want and bodily delight, in addition to one hymn to Inana in her guise as a terrifying warrior who ‘washes her weapons for battle’.
This cut up in Inana’s persona is neatly captured within the planet that served as her signal within the skies: Venus. As a result of it’s so near the Solar, Venus could be seen by the human eye solely simply earlier than the daybreak, when it rises earlier than the Solar on the jap horizon, and at nightfall, when it lingers after the Solar on the western horizon. One can’t comply with the planet’s path by way of the heavens, solely observe it in these two reverse positions: east and west, dawn and sundown. That sense of whole contradiction is an ideal astronomical metaphor for Inana’s character.
The hymnic reward of Inana was a venue for fascinated with the instability of the Outdated Akkadian interval for 2 causes. One was political. Inana was the patron deity of Sargon’s empire, so Enheduana’s devotion to the goddess carries a transparent political overtone: in elevating Inana, the poems are additionally implicitly elevating the imperial regime that Inana was thought to help. The opposite has to do with the goddess’s character. Identical to Inana, the Outdated Akkadian interval got here to be related in Sumerian and Babylonian tradition with fixed upheavals and alter.
Not simply in Enheduana’s poems, however throughout a variety of different historical sources, the Outdated Akkadian interval is depicted as a time of legends and larger-than-life drama, not in contrast to the particular place held by the Viking raids or the Golden Age of Piracy within the Western historic imaginary. Sargon and his grandson Naram-Sîn, who succeeded to the throne in 2254 BCE and introduced the empire to its zenith, have been remembered for millennia as near-mythical figures: Sargon as a paragon of energy, Naram-Sîn as a hubristic despot who introduced catastrophe upon his individuals.
These depictions are sometimes dismissed by trendy historians because the mythmaking of later durations, however nobody would doubt that the Outdated Akkadian interval was a time of nice change. Because the early third millennium BCE, the realm that’s now southern Iraq had been dotted by dozens of metropolis states, every with its personal native deity, dialect and administration, and, although the cities have been a part of a wider community of commerce, battle and cultural trade, they remained separate statelets.
The king needed to suppress 9 uprisings in a single 12 months
Sargon’s military swept by way of the cities: Kish, Uruk, Eridu, Nippur, Larsa, Umma, Lagash, Girsu, Isin, Eshnunna, Sippar, Eresh, and lots of extra moreover. Over the next century, the Outdated Akkadian kings labored laborious to carry the cities into line, suppressing native variations to determine an imperial commonplace of administration. The nobles who had dominated the cities for hundreds of years have been changed by new elites, drawn from the military and propelled to beforehand unknown heights of energy.
The world should have felt bigger than ever earlier than. Troopers from the flatlands of Iraq made their means into the mountains of Turkey and Iran, merchants journeyed so far as Afghanistan to fetch treasured stones, and the artwork of the time reveals the affect of Egyptian kinds. The ports of Ur would have witnessed the arrival of thrilling, unique wares corresponding to lapis lazuli, ivory, carnelian, cat’s eye, jasper, diorite and serpentine. And these are simply the objects that survive within the archaeological document. There have been additionally the international foodstuffs, drinks, garments and perfumes that the residents of Ur had by no means seen earlier than. The inflow of wealth and supplies in flip allowed for main advances in expertise and artwork. The perfect-known instance of each these developments is a bronze statue, historically thought to depict Sargon, that vividly shows the sophistication of the court docket’s artists in addition to the technical talent of its smiths.
Masks of Sargon of Akkad. From Ninevah, c2250 BCE. Courtesy Wikipedia
The newly empowered particularly favored to fee cylinder seals, which have been used as a type of private identification, very similar to a signature at this time: one would roll one’s seal over a doc to signal it. However the seals additionally turned markers of status, as their intricate patterns mirrored the standing of their house owners. The Outdated Akkadian stonecutters have been pushed laborious to fulfill their new patrons: the seals of this era are tiny, attractive works of sculpture.
Akkadian cylinder seal depicting the goddess Inana resting her foot on the again of a lion, whereas Ninshubur stands in entrance of her paying obeisance, c2350-2150 BCE. Courtesy Wikipedia
However all this energy, wealth and inventive expression was tightly concentrated across the king’s court docket. Dissatisfaction among the many outdated elites was large, as proven by the fixed revolts of the interval. This resistance reached a pitch beneath Naram-Sîn, in what is named the Nice Revolt, when the king needed to suppress 9 uprisings in a single 12 months. On doing so efficiently, Naram-Sîn declared himself a dwelling god – the primary king in historical Close to Japanese historical past to take action. No surprise, then, that he gained a popularity for hubris. Later poets would flip his declare the other way up: the story of his 9 victories turned the story of his 9 defeats.
Naram-Sîn’s kingdom additionally needed to cope with a slower, however in the end deadlier menace. The local weather was altering. For causes that stay unclear to geologists, a lot of the world went by way of a extreme drought presently, in what is named the ‘4.2-kiloyear occasion’ (that’s, an occasion of unsure nature that occurred 4,200 years in the past). No matter its precise trigger, the drought hit particularly laborious within the Outdated Akkadian Empire, inflicting famine and waves of migration.
Ultimately, the hard-pressed state may bear no extra: beneath Naram-Sîn’s son Shar-kali-sharri, the Outdated Akkadian Empire collapsed, forsaking a posh legacy of legends and adjustments. It’s a excellent metaphor for the interval’s place in historical past that, throughout this time, the indicators of the cuneiform script turned 90 levels anticlockwise, as they turned extra summary and simpler to write down. Even writing underwent its personal literal revolution.
We can solely guess at what a median smith in Ur or a shepherd in Akkad felt in regards to the Outdated Akkadian Empire’s rise and fall. Even for the elites, their lives are most frequently captured solely by temporary snapshots, such because the cylinder seals that attest to their existence and little else. That’s a part of the intrigue that adheres to Enheduana’s poems. ‘The Exaltation’ appears to supply a private account of the political drama of the Outdated Akkadian interval, instructed by the daughter of the emperor herself. Enheduana was not a lot an eyewitness to the rebel as the attention of its storm.
Nonetheless, we should keep in mind that the poem is, at greatest, a literary transforming of an actual expertise (if it was written by Enheduana herself), and at worst a reconstruction by a lot later writers of what the riot might need been like (if it was written by others in her identify). The story of Naram-Sîn’s 9 victories that have been changed into 9 defeats by later poets ought to remind us that cultural reminiscence just isn’t a dependable information to what really occurred.
Nonetheless, the poems are clearly a literary response to the Outdated Akkadian interval, written both within the thick of it or as a later meditation on its legacy and, as famous, that legacy lasted for hundreds of years. Sargon and Naram-Sîn have been nonetheless very a lot alive in Babylonian reminiscence when cuneiform tradition died out within the final centuries BCE. That will be sufficient to make them a captivating supply for understanding this turbulent interval, however I might argue that ‘The Exaltation’ and ‘The Hymn’ go on to make the turbulence they’re describing the inspiration of a particular form of cosmic perception.
Change, even catastrophic change, was an event to see the world extra clearly
When confronted with social disturbance, one can select to intellectually suppress it, explaining it away as a momentary aberration of a steady world order, or one can flip it into the inspiration for a brand new worldview. I consider that, in Enheduana’s poems, we see the later technique pursued with placing insistence: ‘The Exaltation’ and ‘The Hymn’ are devoted to a goddess whom she portrays as:
… a raging,
speeding flood that
sweeps throughout the
land and leaves
nothing behind.
In making this declare, I’m impressed by the Popol Vuh, the parable of creation of the Okay’iche’ Mayans, which was put down in writing across the 12 months 1550, within the wake of the arrival of European colonisers that introduced the Indigenous populations to the brink of annihilation. In Emergency (2022), his fascinating study of the Popol Vuh, the poet and literary critic Edgar Garcia reveals that, moderately than providing a resistance to, or a condemnation of, the Western violence, the textual content appears to do one thing rather more delicate: it folds the expertise of colonialism right into a cosmic rhythm of disaster and creation, of emergencies resulting in the emergence of latest potentialities.
The cataclysmic transformation that the Mayan peoples underwent through the sixteenth century is thus solid as a part of a common precept of repetitions and interruptions that, so far as we will inform from the Popol Vuh, already structured the Okay’iche’ worldview. Change, even catastrophic change, was not seen as a conceptual menace that wanted to be overcome, however as an event to see the world extra clearly. And the identical is true of Enheduana’s poems.
In elevating Inana, ‘The Hymn’ makes two factors. The primary is that Inana controls every thing round her. That is conveyed by three myths that the poem relays in a miniature format. It tells of how Inana destroyed Ebih, a mountain that did not pay respect; of how she terrified the god An into sharing his temple together with her; and of how she modified the gender of her ritual devotees, turning males into ladies and ladies into males. Folks, gods, even the panorama: all are topic to Inana’s powers of transformation.
The second level is that Inana is topic to no management however her personal. Because the poem repeatedly stresses, no order could be imposed on her actions:
She overturns what
she has finished; no person
can know her course.
Even her fellow deities don’t have any hope of predicting her choices:
She confounds the
meeting of the nice
gods together with her recommendation,
no person is aware of why.
Change emanates outwards from Inana, however she herself stays untouched by the makes an attempt of others to alter her.
Having established these two factors, ‘The Hymn’ breaks into an extended litany that outlines Inana’s contradictory attributes:
To destroy and
to create, to plant
and to pluck out
are yours, Inana
…
To show brutes
into weaklings
and to make the
highly effective puny
are yours, Inana.
To reverse peaks
and plains, to lift
up and to cut back
are yours, Inana
…
To make small or
majestic, weak or
large, to withhold
and to provide freely
are yours, Inana.
To bestow the
rituals of kings
and gods, to obey
and to mislead,
to talk slander,
to lie, to gaud,
and to overstate
are yours, Inana.
The record goes on for some 60 strains, stretching our minds with its size and lots of contradictions to provide us a glimpse of what a divine power of fixed change may appear to be.
‘The Hymn’ and ‘The Exaltation’ search to raise Inana to the pinnacle of the pantheon, over and above the normal rulers of the gods, An and Enlil. However, in so doing, they don’t seem to be simply making some extent about faith, they’re additionally making a declare about cosmology. If the world is dominated by this type of goddess, what does that inform us in regards to the world? What wouldn’t it imply to dwell in a universe ruled by the embodiment of capriciousness, battle, contradiction, chaos and complexity?
Enheduana’s poems summon a world of radical impermanence, by which nothing round us – neither the mountains on the horizons nor the genders of our personal our bodies – could be taken as a right. In these poems, confusion just isn’t an mental failure to understand the world, however an acceptable response to the world because it actually is: if the determine of Inana ought to encourage something in us, it’s mental humility. The character of the universe is neither single nor predictable, for the reason that universe is dominated by a goddess who’s herself deeply divided and consistently changeable.
Many religions have sought to depict the realm of expertise as a changeable floor past which lies a transcendent, everlasting reality by which we could discover consolation. However no such transcendence or psychological tranquillity is to be discovered within the poems attributed to Enheduana. The one reality established in ‘The Hymn’ and ‘The Exaltation’ is that change, as personified by Inana, is supreme. To dwell on this world, in accordance with Enheduana, is to dwell with the information that the long run could differ radically from the current, simply as the current of the Outdated Akkadian interval differed radically from its previous.
This imaginative and prescient of the world could appear a far cry from how we largely make sense of it in our trendy age. Teachers of all stripes are united of their seek for regularities that assist clarify the world we see round us, from chemical legal guidelines by way of psychological patterns to social programs corresponding to capitalism or the patriarchy. In different phrases, after we attempt to perceive a given phenomenon at this time, we most frequently achieve this by exploring the buildings that form it, which means that the change and confusion embodied by Inana can seem to be a moderately naive means of explaining the world.
However there are indicators that our more and more changeable instances are being met with an rising curiosity in change as a technique for understanding the world. Of their book Impermanence (2022), a crew of British, Danish and Australian anthropologists promote what they see as an emergent concept of flux inside the social sciences. This budding physique of analysis attracts inspiration from non-Western philosophies corresponding to Buddhism – which has mirrored on the importance of change and radical impermanence for millennia – to reframe acquainted subjects inside anthropology and sociology.
The query that propels that guide, and the tutorial motion behind it, could be summarised as follows: how does a deal with change have an effect on our notion of our objects of enquiry? Do social phenomena (the guide explores examples corresponding to migration, museums and alcoholism) look totally different when they’re seen as being in a steady state of flux moderately than as decided by semi-static social buildings?
How does one keep sane at a time like this? How does one dwell at a time like this?
In fact, one swallow doesn’t make a tutorial summer season. However, even in in style tradition, one can detect a rising curiosity in philosophies that explicitly base their worldview on fixed change. A key instance is Stoicism, which promotes detachment and equanimity within the face of a world that it sees as inconstant and chaotic. In keeping with Google Trends and Google Ngram – which monitor the mentions of a given phrase in, respectively, Google searches and texts uploaded to Google Books – curiosity in Stoicism is on a gentle rise, which can sign that individuals world wide really feel a rising want for intellectual guides to turbulent instances.
And who can blame them? I grew up in what now looks as if a historic bubble of relative calm. The Western world across the flip of the millennium was sufficiently free from warfare, ideological conflicts and world pandemics for pundits to talk confidently of a long-lasting world order. Francis Fukuyama declared ‘the top of historical past’ and, whereas I used to be painfully conscious of the injustices that plagued a lot of the globe, my nook of it, at the very least, felt protected.
Now, having simply turned 30, I confront a really totally different actuality. Earlier than me, earlier than us, lie the catastrophes of the local weather disaster and the social upheavals required to cut back emissions and modify to excessive climate. Then there may be COVID-19, which is unlikely to be the final world pandemic of this century, as no severe measures have been put in place to forestall a recurrence of comparable illnesses. Then there may be the warfare in Ukraine, and the financial turbulence it has introduced; and the continuing divisions that plague Western democracies and appear to develop deeper with every passing 12 months. And so forth. The record is acquainted, nearly clichéd, however every entry in it accommodates actual horror.
By the top of my lifetime, the world is overwhelmingly more likely to look much more unstable than it does at this time. Collectively, we could have gone by way of a interval of transformation that’s all however unmatched in human historical past. I have no idea the right way to really feel about that, as a result of it isn’t the form of factor I used to be raised to really feel any means about. How does one keep sane at a time like this? How does one dwell at a time like this?
Enheduana doesn’t supply clear solutions to those questions, and I might not maintain her up as a mannequin for good dwelling in troublesome instances. However her poems fascinate me partly as a result of they describe, with dazzling depth, a world the place change is the norm. These are poems from, and about, unstable instances. That’s one cause I’m drawn to them: I need to perceive what it means to dwell in such a world, as a result of I’ll in all probability must.
