Days after I arrived in America as a lone teenager, the identical age Mary Shelley was when she wrote Frankenstein, not but realizing I too was to change into a author, I discovered myself wandering the huge cool halls of the Penn Museum. There among the many hundreds of historic artifacts was one to which I might owe my future life — an alabaster disk from Bronze Age Mesopotamia, inscribed in Cuneiform with the title of the world’s first recognized writer: Enheduanna.
Born in present-day Iraq with a Semitic title misplaced to historical past, the daughter of the Sumerian king Sargon of Akkad named herself en (“excessive priestess”) hedu (“decoration”) an (the Sumerian sky god) na: excessive priestess of the decoration of the sky, our Moon. Her father — himself the son of a priestess single mom, who had borne him in secret, then solid the toddler on the Euphrates river in a straw basket right into a life as an orphan — had conquered the most important Sumerian metropolis of Ur in 2334 B.C.E. and got down to unify the tessellation of warring city-states that was then Mesopotamia, creating the world’s first multinational empire.
He did all the sensible issues that assist folks cohere right into a folks — fostered a standard language, standardized weights and measures, launched taxes to help troopers and artists — however he got here to see what all leaders ultimately see: that nothing binds human beings extra powerfully than concepts. His residents needed to imagine in a single factor to change into one folks.
Sargon employed the most effective man for the job: his daughter; she anchored her technique in what Margaret Fuller known as “that best fact, the Moon.”
Enheduanna, whose story is woven into Rebecca Boyle’s altogether fascinating ebook Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are (public library), took it upon herself to unify the Akkadian and Sumerian religions, utilizing the Moon because the unifying drive and poetry partway between prayer and propaganda because the fulcrum.
Over the course of her forty-year reign, Enheduanna composed a whole bunch, maybe hundreds of poems, passionate and playful, unafraid of the sensuous that’s the human within the divine and the divine within the human — poems by way of which, as Boyle writes, “humanity tried to make connections between heaven and Earth for the primary time”; poems that, in bringing the gods all the way down to Earth, made them equally excited about all human life, Akkadian or Sumerian. Her crowning achievement of unification had been her forty-two verses about completely different holy locations throughout the empire, referred to as the Sumerian Temple Hymns and inscribed with the world’s first byline:
The compiler of the tablets was Enheduanna. My King, one thing has been created right here that nobody has ever created earlier than.
Enheduanna has been known as the Shakespeare of the traditional Center East. Like Shakespeare’s, her authorship is disputed. However, like Shakespeare, with out counterproof she stays the best poet of her time and place — doubly so for turning even her ache and loneliness into sacred artwork: When Sargon’s grandson turned king and a rise up broke out, Enheduanna was exiled to the desert; there, as civil unrest was rupturing the empire, she wrote in verse about her struggling, which was the struggling of many. I’m reminded of James Baldwin’s definition of an awesome poet: “The best poet within the English language,” he wrote of Shakespeare, “discovered his poetry the place poetry is discovered: within the lives of the folks. He might have finished this solely by way of love — by realizing, which isn’t the identical factor as understanding, that no matter was taking place to anybody was taking place to him.”
Complement with the story of the first surviving photograph of the Moon, which helped humanity bridge immortality and impermanence — these previous issues of faith — by way of a younger science.
