Charles Halton Introduces Enheduanna, 'World's First Poet'

Haven't heard of the woman believed to be the first poet? You're not the only one, writes Charles Halton. She isn't discussed in MFA workshops, nor is she a steadfast member of the poetry canon. And yet, and yet, she fascinates readers and scholars alike in a myriad of ways. "Enheduanna was born more than 4,200 years ago and became the high priestess of a temple in what we now call southern Iraq," Halton writes. Let's pick up there and learn more about her:

She wrote poems, edited hymnals, and may have taught other women at the temple how to write. Archaeologists discovered her in the 1920s and her works were published in English beginning in the 1960s. Yet, rarely if ever does she appear in history textbooks. There are almost no mentions of her within pop culture. No one namechecks her in song lyrics, she isn’t taught in MFA courses, and there are no paintings of her except for a few crudely drawn sketches that float around the outer edges of the internet.

If you have heard of Enheduanna, it was likely in one of two contexts. She made a one minute appearance in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos reboot which depicted her as a hybrid creature, part Walt-Disneyfied Native American and part Solomonic princess. After Tyson narrates a quasi-factual mini-bio, a shaman-like voiceover recites a line from one of her poems as a laser cuts the words into the night sky. The vibe is dusty Mesopotamia meets Blade Runner.

The other place you may have learned of Enheduanna is from one of Betty Meador’s books. Meador is a retired Jungian analyst who has tirelessly worked to get Enheduanna into mainstream conversation. Meador began this crusade after she, I kid you not, had a dream in which she dug a grave for two male Jungians. After tipping the bodies into the holes and replacing the dirt, she planted stick figures and palm fronds into the graves. Meador woke up and immediately plunged down the rabbit hole of figuring out what these symbols meant. Several years later she emerged, having produced a couple books about Enheduanna. Other than these two instances, however, people largely don’t talk about the world’s first author.[2]

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