The Sumerian Goddess Erased From Every Tablet After 2100 BC — And Why They Had to Remove Her

The Sumerian Goddess Erased From Every Tablet After 2100 BC — And Why They Had to Remove Her "You are the one who has been given all the divine powers." That line was written down. Pressed into wet clay, sign by sign, in the twenty-third century before the common era. And the person who wrote it did not write it about someone else. She wrote it in the middle of a hymn, in her own voice, addressed to the goddess Inanna — and then, in the same text, she named herself. She identified herself by title, by role, by the specific political crisis she was living through at the moment she composed it. Her name was Enheduanna. And she is the earliest named author in recorded human history. Not the earliest named Mesopotamian author. The earliest named author of anything, anywhere on earth, in any language, in any medium. Every literary tradition in the world has a beginning. This is it. And until very recently, almost no one outside a small circle of specialists knew her name.