It was a random morning in November, and Enheduanna was trending.
All of a sudden, the traditional Mesopotamian priestess, who had been lifeless for greater than 4,000 years, was a scorching subject on-line as phrase unfold that the primary individually named creator in human historical past was … a girl?
That will have been outdated information on the Morgan Library & Museum, the place Sidney Babcock, the longtime curator of historical Close to Japanese antiquities, was about to supply a tour of its new exhibition “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Ladies of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400-2000 B.C.” Babcock was thrilled by the eye, if not precisely shocked by the general public’s shock.
Ask individuals who the primary creator was, and so they may say Homer, or Herodotus. “Individuals do not know,” he stated. “They merely don’t consider it may very well be a girl” — and that she was writing greater than a millennium earlier than both of them, in a strikingly private voice.
Enheduanna’s work celebrates the gods and the ability of the Akkadian empire, which dominated present-day Iraq from about 2350 B.C. to 2150 B.C. Nevertheless it additionally describes extra sordid, earthly issues, together with her abuse by the hands of a corrupt priest — the primary reference to sexual harassment in world literature, the present argues.
“It’s the primary time somebody steps ahead and makes use of the first-person singular and provides an autobiography,” Babcock stated. “And it’s profound.”
Enheduanna has been recognized since 1927, when archaeologists working on the historical metropolis of Ur excavated a stone disc bearing her identify (written with a starburst image) and picture, and figuring out her because the daughter of the king Sargon of Akkad, the spouse of the moon god Nanna, and a priestess.
Within the many years that adopted, her works — some 42 temple hymns and three stand-alone poems, together with “The Exaltation of Inanna” — have been pieced together from greater than 100 surviving copies made on clay tablets.
In the meantime, Enheduanna has been repeatedly found, forgotten, after which found once more by the broader tradition. Final fall, the “Exaltation” was added to Columbia’s well-known first-year Core Curriculum. And now there’s the Morgan exhibition, which celebrates her singularity whereas additionally embedding her in a deep historical past of ladies, literacy and energy stretching again almost to the traditional Mesopotamian origins of writing itself.
The exhibition, on view till Feb. 19, can be a swan track for Babcock, who will retire subsequent 12 months after almost three many years on the Morgan. The concept started percolating about 25 years in the past, he stated, when he noticed Enheduanna’s identify on a lapis lazuli cylinder seal belonging to one in all her scribes — one in all 5 artifacts the place her identify is attested independently of copies of her poetry.
He sees “She Who Wrote” — which assembles objects from 9 establishments world wide — as a part of the Morgan’s lengthy historical past of exhibitions on ladies writers like Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson.
It’s additionally a tribute to an extended chain of lady students, together with his instructor, Edith Porada, the primary curator of J. Pierpont Morgan’s celebrated assortment of greater than 1,000 seals.
Porada, born in Vienna, fled Europe in 1938, after Kristallnacht. One of many few issues she introduced together with her to New York was the plate copy of her dissertation, full together with her drawings of seal impressions from European collections, which she offered to Belle da Costa Greene, the Morgan’s first director.
In historical Mesopotamia, cylinder seals — typically carved with exquisitely detailed scenes — have been used to roll the proprietor’s distinctive stamp onto a doc produced by scribes, testifying to its authenticity.
“For the primary time,” Babcock stated, “you could have a picture that represents a person related with what the person is liable for.”
Since 2010, about 100 of the Morgan seals have been on everlasting show in Greene’s jewel-box former workplace, within the opulent unique library constructing. However for years they have been saved in a gym-style metal locker in a basement, the place Porada would maintain a weekly seminar.
“We’d sit down, and out of her purse would come just a little change purse with a key inside,” Babcock recalled. “She would open one other locker, and inside a Sucrets tin was one other key. Then we’d gasp — out of the locker would come this legendary assortment.”
Babcock, to place it mildly, has a zeal for seals. And — unusually for curators today, he stated — he rolls his personal. The impressions within the Morgan’s everlasting show, in addition to many of the dozens in “She Who Wrote,” are his handiwork.
“Generally it takes me an hour, generally a minute,” he stated. “All of it will depend on the day and the atmospheric stress.”
Babcock is equally passionate concerning the two dozen sculptures of ladies that kind the nucleus of the exhibition, that are all displayed three-dimensionally, in dramatically lit instances.
Most establishments “deal with this materials as artifacts,” he stated. “However we consider they’re a part of the canon of nice artwork.”
Getting into the gallery, Babcock (who curated the present with Erhan Tamur, a curatorial fellow on the Metropolitan Museum) paused in entrance of a tiny alabaster sculpture of a seated lady, from round 2000 B.C. She’s carrying the identical flounce garment seen within the picture of Enheduanna on the disk present in 1927, and has the identical aquiline options. A cuneiform pill rests on her lap, as if she’s prepared to write down.
Is it Enheduanna?
“My colleagues received’t let me go that far,” Babcock stated. However the determine “definitely represents the thought of what she meant — ladies and literacy, over successive generations.”
Lots of the sculptures on show, the present argues, depict precise people, not generic ladies. “This was the start of portraiture,” Babcock stated. And over the course of an almost two-hour tour, he repeatedly broke off his narrative to marvel at the great thing about this or that determine, as if recognizing a trendy buddy throughout the room.
On the heart of the gallery is an merchandise that will spark a paparazzi frenzy at any Met Gala: a spectacular funerary ensemble from the tomb of Puabi, a Sumerian queen who lived round 2500 B.C., full with an elaborate beaten-gold headdress and cascading strands of semiprecious stones.
However equally exceptional, for Babcock, is the gold garment pin displayed close by, which might have held amulets and cylinder seals, just like the one carved from lapis lazuli discovered on Puabi’s physique.
Enheduanna lived three centuries after Puabi, following the ascendence of the Akkadians, who united audio system of the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. In contrast with Puabi’s ensemble, her surviving remnants might sound drab.
However Enheduanna’s glory lies in her phrases, a few of which handle startlingly modern issues.
Pausing in entrance of a case that held 4 tablets inscribed with parts of the “Exaltation,” Babcock recited a passage during which Enheduanna describes being pushed out of workplace by a priest named Lugalanne.
“He has turned that temple right into a home of ill-repute,” Babcock learn, his voice full of emotion. “Forcing his manner in as if he have been an equal, he dared method me in his lust!”
Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of affection and warfare (recognized to the Akkadians as Ishtar), finally restored Enheduanna to her place. “To my queen arrayed in magnificence,” the “Exaltation” continues, “to Inanna be reward!”
Some students have questioned whether or not Enheduanna wrote the poems attributed to her. Even when she was an actual individual, they argue, the works — written in Sumerian, and recognized solely from copies made tons of of years after her lifetime — might have been written later and attributed to her, as a manner of bolstering the legacy of Sargon the king.
However whether or not Enheduanna was an precise creator or a logo of 1, she was hardly alone. The current anthology “Ladies’s Writing of Historic Mesopotamia” gathers almost 100 hymns, poems, letters, inscriptions and different texts by feminine authors.
In a single passage of “Exaltation” — distinctive in all of Mesopotamian literature, Babcock stated — Enheduanna describes herself as “giving delivery” to the poem. “That which I’ve sung to you at midnight,” she wrote, “might or not it’s repeated at midday.”
And repeated it was. Whereas the Akkadian empire collapsed in 2137 B.C., Enheduanna’s poems continued to be copied for hundreds of years, as a part of the usual coaching of scribes.
By about 500 B.C., Enheduanna was “utterly forgotten,” Babcock stated. However till February, she and her fellow ladies of Mesopotamia will command the room on the Morgan.
“Even the backs are so beautiful,” Babcock stated, taking a final have a look at the stone figures earlier than returning to his workplace. “It may be arduous to depart.”
Supply: NY Times