The tradition's earliest named author of religious literature is a woman — Enheduanna, high priestess at Ur (fl. c. 2300 BCE)
The earliest individual to whom the literary tradition itself attributes authorship of religious texts is Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad and entu-priestess of Nanna at Ur (fl. c. 2300 BCE) — credited with the cycle of Sumerian Temple Hymns and the Inanna poems, foremost Nin-me-šara ("The Exaltation of Inanna"). This makes the named origin point of authored sacred literature a woman, and documents religion being deliberately edited by an identifiable theological voice rather than transmitted anonymously.
1. Nin-me-šara contains an explicit self-naming ("I, Enheduanna") embedded in a first-person narrative of the priestess's expulsion during a revolt and her restoration by Inanna's favour — first-person religious authorship attached to a historically attested individual, without earlier precedent. enheduanna-temple-hymns-exaltation-inanna
2. The Temple Hymns close with an ancient ascription line naming Enheduanna as compiler/author — the tradition's own authorship claim, the feature that makes the attribution discussable at all. enheduanna-temple-hymns-exaltation-inanna
3. The Exaltation performs a datable theological act: elevating Inanna above the sky-god An and transferring the cosmic powers (me) to her, in step with the Sargonic program of fusing Sumerian Inanna with Akkadian Ištar — religion being actively reshaped by a named agent in dynastic service. sumerian-religion
The authorship is genuinely contested (AGENTS §1.3). No autograph survives; every witness is an Old Babylonian school copy from ~500 years later, so the evidence is that the Old Babylonian tradition credited a Sargonic-era priestess with these works and read them in her voice — not that she demonstrably wrote the surviving wording. Delnero and Rubio treat the first-person voice as a possible literary persona and the corpus as potentially pseudepigraphic. The gender claim is robust to this doubt either way: the earliest figure the tradition names as author of religious literature is, on any reading, a woman; only the biographical-composition link is medium-confidence.
- Emic (Mesopotamian account): Enheduanna is remembered as the priestess whose poems exalted Inanna and praised the temples of the land; her voice and her crisis are presented as her own, and the works are read as hers across the scribal curriculum.
- Etic (scholarly analysis): the earliest attributed authorship in the literary record, surviving only in later copies; securely evidence of how early the tradition personalised and gendered religious authorship, less securely evidence of a specific woman's hand on specific lines — a composition-vs-attestation gap of the kind the vault flags throughout (cf. Q21, Q20 on the Sumerian record).