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language: Sumerian (English tr. Sophus Helle)
country: Old Akkadian empire
year: ca. 2300 BCE
form: poetry
dates read: 26.2.26-28.2.26
House, built amid abundance. Kish, you raise your head among the noble powers.
Steadfast city, your great foundation cannot be undone.
You stand upon a huge cloud, preeminent in heaven.
Your heart is a weapon, a club covered in . . . . . .
On your right, mountains shake, on your left, enemies wither.Your lord is mighty and magnificent, a great storm that overwhelms the earth, spreading vast and terrifying awe.
House of the Granary! Your king, the hero Zababa
has built a home in your holy court, House of Kish, and has taken his seat upon your throne.Eight lines. House of Zababa in Kish.
(Temple Hymn #35, “E-duba, the Temple of Zababa in Kish”, tr. Sophus Helle, in Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author)
“Steadfast city, your great foundation cannot be undone” —
— and yet, the original site of Kish at Tell al-Uhaymir has been abandoned since some time during the Achaemenid period (ca. 550-330 BCE) —
— and yet, Kish was inhabited from the Ubaid period (sometime between 5300 and 4300 BCE) until that point. even at the shortest possible timeline that’s almost 4,000 years of continuous existence. we are still, 2,300-2,500 years later, closer to the abandonment of Kish than the abandonment of Kish was to the city’s founding. Enheduana, too, was closer to the abandonment of Kish when she composed or compiled this poem — though she had no way of knowing this — than she was to its founding.
this is one of the things that makes ancient Mesopotamian literature both so appealing to me and so absolutely incomprehensible, the time-scales involved. Kish was already mind-bogglingly ancient when the Homeric epics were composed. Kish was already thousands of years old when the first Egyptian pyramid was built. the fact that we still have any of these people’s own words is infinitely exhilarating to me.
Sophus Helle’s Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author (I assume the cringey subtitle is Yale University Press’s fault, but I also have come to think it’s funny, since literally only one of the poems is actually “complete”) presents translations of five poems (or four poems and one compilation of poems) either attributed to or associated with Enheduana, daughter of Sargon of Akkad — who established arguably the first “empire” — and high priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur, although the devotional texts attributed to her largely center on Inana. Enheduana has the distinction of being the first (surviving) named individual author, and Helle in his introduction and in the three essays that accompany the translations spends a great deal of time thinking about how we should approach her work. what does it mean to think of someone who worked in such a radically different literary context as “an author” at all? how should we engage with Enheduana as both the first known woman writer and an apologist for empire?
part of Helle’s project — perhaps the most important part — is simply to assert that Enheduana’s poetry can (still) be as aesthetically and emotionally compelling in 2023 (when the book was published) as it was ca. 2300 BCE (Kish had already existed for 2,000+ years; Ur for at least 1,500). I think he’s right, although the emotions it evokes in me, and the aesthetic features that interest me, are very different from how an Old Akkadian reader, or an Old Babylonion reader several centuries later, would have experienced the poems.
this is, in one respect, partly in spite of rather than because of Helle’s translations. while his translations of the Temple Hymns — a collection of forty-two short hymns to the temples of various Sumerian-Akkadian cities — apparently follow the lineation of the original poems fairly closely, for the Exaltation of Inana and the Hymn to Inana Helle has tried instead to mimic the very short line-lengths of the original, even when this means that one line of Sumerian corresponds to multiple lines of English. I’m not opposed to this; what I object to is Helle’s terrible enjambment. here, for example, is the first stanza of the second section of the Exaltation:
My queen, you are
the guardian of the
gods’ great powers:
you lift them up and
grasp them in your
hand, you take them
in and clasp them
to your breast. As if
you were a basilisk,
you pour poison
upon the enemy,
as if you were the
Storm God, grain
bends before your
roar. You are like
a flash flood that
gushes down the
mountains, you
are supreme in
heaven and earth:
You are Inana.
the language is good, the pacing implied by the short lines is good, but the line breaks! are killing me! the hanging articles and relatives and prepositions! I think there must have been a better way to do this where I would not have to choose between “this is just prose with random line breaks” and “oh, god, this is so stumbling” while reading aloud.
notwithstanding the line break placement, however, I do think the short lines create an appropriate sense of frenzied desperation: the Exaltation and the Hymn are both not simply religious texts but ecstatic expressions of personal devotion, beyond Enheduana’s professional role as high priestess of the moon god Nanna (i.e., not Inana — not that this stops Enheduana from repositioning Inana as the supreme god, above her notional patron). I may not love where Helle put the line breaks, but the translations are, fundamentally, very good, achieving the kind of immediacy (or “accessibility”) that Helle was trying for: this is meant to be an Enheduana for everyone, as Emily Wilson’s translations are a Homer for everyone — though Enheduana’s work requires much more contextualization.
the contextualization, in the form of a relatively brief (but useful) introduction and three concluding essays, is as much a highlight as the poems themselves: I think an introductory literature course could do much worse than to start by assigning the Exaltation and Helle’s essay “The Honeyed Mouth” to get students thinking about how to approach literatures from distant contexts (temporally, linguistically, geographically), balancing historicization with questions about how we engage with Enheduana’s work today.
however. as much as I enjoyed the Exaltation, the Hymn, and Helle’s essays, the Temple Hymns are what I am most obsessed with here. the way they drive home the enormous span of time between 2026 and the eras in which they were composed and copied, of course, but also the way they center neither on the gods nor on humans but on cities: Kish, you raise your head among the noble powers. // Isin. City founded by An, built in an empty land, whose front soars up, whose heart is finely wrought, whose cosmic powers were fixed by An. // House of Stars. House of Lapis Lazuli, sparkling bright, you open the way to all the lands.
I am interested in the way the city in some ways transcends the god, even as the gods rule the cities, just as I am interested in the way Gilgamesh is bracketed by the walls of Uruk and the enumeration of the city’s precincts. just as the Temple Hymns as a collection encapsulate Sargon’s empire, embodying it in poetic form, so the individual hymns embody, through the temples, the cities that make up that empire. if the collection instantiates empire, the hymns each instantiate its cities. and it rules!
and then also, like Gilgamesh, the way the Temple Hymns perform their own literariness, here not through the dramatized act of reading but through their self-enumeration: Nine lines. House of Shuziana in the Gagimah. Thirteen lines. House of Ninhursanga in Kesh. and, finally, bringing them all together:
The weaver of the tablet was Enheduana.
My king! Something has been born which had not been born before.Fourteen lines. House of Nisaba in Eresh.
makes me lose my mind!!!!!!!!!
moods: emotional, hopeful, inspiring