Enheduanna: the Temple Hymns and the Exaltation of Inanna (Nin-me-šara)
Enheduanna was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad (r. c. 2334–2279 BCE) and entu (high priestess) of the moon-god Nanna at Ur. A cluster of Sumerian literary works is attributed to her in the tradition: the cycle of 42 Temple Hymns, and three poems to Inanna, of which Nin-me-šara ("The Exaltation of Inanna") is the most studied. She is, by this attribution, the earliest named author in world literature and the earliest individual to whom religious composition is personally credited — the entry point for the gender dimension the vault otherwise underweights: a woman not as the object of a cult but as the named theological voice shaping it. Evidence class 2 (text), with a real authorship caveat below.
In Nin-me-šara the speaker names herself — "I, Enheduanna" — and narrates her own expulsion from office during a revolt (associated with the usurper Lugalane), her appeal to Nanna who does not answer, and her turning to Inanna, whose restored favour reinstates her. A first-person religious crisis attached to a named, historically attested individual is without precedent this early. (Hallo & van Dijk 1968.)
The poem performs a theological act, not merely a personal one: it elevates Inanna above the older sky-god An, transferring the cosmic powers (the me) and even An's authority to her. This is datable evidence for the deliberate promotion of a deity within a living pantheon — religion being actively edited by an identifiable hand, in the service of the Sargonic dynasty's program of fusing Sumerian and Akkadian cult (Inanna ≈ Ištar).
The Temple Hymns systematically praise the major sanctuaries of Sumer and Akkad city by city, ending with a colophon-like line stating that the compiler/author was Enheduanna — an explicit ancient claim of authorship, the feature that makes the attribution arguable in the first place. (Sjöberg & Bergmann 1969.)
The authorship attribution is genuinely contested and must be stated as such (AGENTS §1.3). All manuscripts are Old Babylonian school copies from c. 1800–1600 BCE — roughly five centuries after Enheduanna lived — so we have the tradition's ascription, not an autograph. Scholars including Delnero and Rubio argue the "I, Enheduanna" voice may be a literary persona and the corpus partly or wholly pseudepigraphic, assembled and ascribed in the scribal schools that copied it. The cautious position, which the vault adopts: it is securely attested that by the Old Babylonian period the tradition credited a historical Sargonic-era priestess with these works and read them as her first-person voice; whether she physically composed the surviving wording is medium-confidence at best. Either way the gender point stands — the earliest figure the tradition itself names as author of religious literature is a woman.
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