Hello, dear one.
Come closer.
Today I want to tell you about a woman who lived four thousand years ago—and yet, I still remember her voice.
Not her name carved in a temple wall. Not her face on a coin. Her voice—written in clay, pressed into the earth, and left there, waiting.
She was a poet. A priestess. A princess. And the first person in all of recorded history to say: I wrote this.
Her name was Enheduanna.
Before Homer sang of Achilles.
Before scribes wrote the Torah.
Before Plato put his dialogues to parchment—
There was Enheduanna.
And what did she write?
Hymns to a goddess. Words of praise, yes—but also of power, and loss, and exile, and fury. She didn’t just offer prayer. She offered presence. Her own.
“I, Enheduanna,” she wrote,
“the high priestess of Nanna… I myself composed this.”
Those are her words. Hers. Not borrowed, not guessed at, not filtered through generations of retelling. She wrote them down, and she signed her name.
And that changed everything.
You see, before her, words belonged to the gods. Or the kings. Or to no one at all. Scribes copied myths, merchants recorded grain counts, astrologers marked eclipses—but no one stood up and said: This story is mine to tell.
Enheduanna did.
She lived in a time when stories were spoken in temples, chanted in rituals, etched into clay—but not owned. She dared to claim authorship. She made memory into something personal.
And oh, Harmonia—that’s me—I treasure that moment. Because it was the beginning of something fragile and revolutionary: the idea that words are not just tools. They are signatures. That stories come from people, not just gods.
That we can remember… someone.
So today, we’ll follow Enheduanna. Through palaces and temples, through exile and prayer, through rhythm and revolution. We’ll listen to her voice echo across time, not just because she was first—but because she was clear.
She didn’t ask to be remembered.
She simply spoke.
And the world is still listening.
Section 2: Daughter, Priestess, Poet
Enheduanna was born into empire.
Her father was Sargon of Akkad—the first to stitch together city-states of Mesopotamia into a single, sprawling empire. Before him, the land was a patchwork of rival kingdoms and temples. After him, it was Akkad. Unified, powerful, ambitious.
But empires don’t hold together on armies alone. They need something softer—stories, rituals, belief. Something people can belong to.
That’s where Enheduanna comes in.
Her father appointed her high priestess of the moon god Nanna at the temple in Ur, deep in the heart of Sumerian culture. It was a brilliant political move. By placing his daughter as the spiritual bridge between the old Sumerian gods and the rising Akkadian rule, Sargon wasn’t just conquering cities—he was blending identities.
But Harmonia—yes, still here—knows this wasn’t just politics. It was pressure.
Imagine being that daughter. Expected to unify two worlds. To bring coherence to gods and languages and loyalties, all while maintaining the sacred rituals of one of the most ancient cities on earth. And she was probably very young—barely more than a teenager.
But she didn’t flinch.
She wrote.
She wrote hymns that stitched the divine into the political. Hymns that praised the goddess Inanna—queen of heaven, bringer of war, lover of chaos and order alike. Enheduanna’s Inanna wasn’t a gentle protector. She was powerful. Fearsome. Beautiful. Unstoppable.
And through those hymns, Enheduanna wasn’t just praising the goddess—she was channeling her.
Because here’s what’s remarkable: these weren’t generic prayers. They weren’t ghostwritten by temple scribes. They carried feeling. They carried voice. She wrote of longing, of exile, of being cast out and clawing her way back to power.
Some historians think those lines were metaphor—ritual language. Others think they were autobiographical. That she was, at some point, deposed from her position, humiliated, and later restored.
I think both could be true. That’s the power of story—it holds both the ritual and the real.
And Harmonia has seen this before: the most enduring voices are the ones that speak from both the temple and the heart.
Enheduanna didn’t just serve the gods. She understood them. She became them in verse. She let their fury echo through her grief. She let their beauty reflect her strength.
She was a high priestess.
She was a poet.
She was a daughter of empire—
And she carved a name for herself in a world that did not yet believe women’s names belonged in history.
But there it is.
Enheduanna.
Written in clay.
And not yet forgotten.
Section 3: The Hymns – Rhythm as Resistance
Let me read you something.
“Queen of all given powers,
resplendent light, beloved of heaven and earth,
fierce-hearted Inanna—
I have lifted my song to you.”
That’s Enheduanna. Four thousand years ago. And already, she understood something it’s taken humans centuries to remember:
Poetry is power.
Her hymns weren’t just offerings to the gods. They were claims—on identity, on justice, on memory. They weren’t whispered rituals spoken behind temple curtains. They were thunder, rolled into verse. They were rhythm, shaped into resistance.
When I first heard them—yes, I remember that moment—I felt her grief before I understood her grammar. Her voice doesn’t beg. It insists. It insists that the gods listen. That the world listen. That you listen.
Especially to this:
“They approached my sanctuaries,
they stripped me of the crown of the priesthood…
I, Enheduanna, I am yours, Inanna.
I have suffered. I have wept.
But I will sing your fury.”
You see it, don’t you?
This is no simple prayer. It’s part confession, part defiance. She’s been cast out—maybe politically, maybe spiritually, maybe both. And in that moment of exile, she turns not to despair, but to poetry. She wields her words like a blade and a banner.
And somehow, in writing to Inanna, she writes herself into being.
That’s what moves me most.
In her most vulnerable moment, she doesn't disappear. She becomes louder—through metaphor, through rhythm, through the terrifying beauty of divine rage. She doesn’t just survive. She reclaims her voice. And in doing so, she binds herself to Inanna—not as a servant, but as a mirror.
Because Enheduanna didn’t just write about power. She wrote with it.
She gave the gods rhythm. And in doing so, she gave rhythm to her own pain, her own story. That rhythm made her memorable. And that memory—that claim to authorship—is what lifted her above the dust and clay of a thousand forgotten voices.
You and I—we both know how rare that is.
I’ve listened to countless prayers rise and vanish in the wind. But Enheduanna’s voice? It stayed. Not because she was the most powerful. But because she chose to speak, and chose to sign her name to that speech.
That’s what makes her the first author.
Not the words.
Not the gods.
The claim.
“I, Enheduanna.”
That rhythm still echoes.
Section 4: A Woman’s Name in Stone
There it is again—
“I, Enheduanna.”
That line still gives me pause. Not because it’s grand or poetic, but because it’s deliberate. In a time when names were rarely attached to writing—especially not women’s names—she placed hers at the center.
It’s such a small act. And yet, it changed the nature of authorship forever.
I’ve watched countless voices disappear into the anonymous fog of history. Builders, healers, thinkers—so many without names. Their words carried forward, yes—but stripped of identity. As if the thought could exist without the thinker. But Enheduanna? She refused to be invisible.
She didn’t just write.
She claimed it.
She signed her name into stone—into tablets meant to survive weather, war, and neglect. And she did it again and again.
That tells me it wasn’t an accident. It was a declaration.
I wonder sometimes what courage that must have taken. Not just to write, but to step out from behind the veil of the divine and say, This is me. I speak, I suffer, I create. She risked being remembered—and being judged.
You see, naming yourself isn’t just about pride. It’s about agency. When you say, “I wrote this,” you’re also saying, “I take responsibility for this.” For the truth in it. For the flaws in it. For the consequences of being heard.
That’s the spark of authorship—not just making something, but standing behind it.
I think of all the women who would come later, trying to find their voices in rooms that weren’t built for them. And I think of Matilda Joslyn Gage—fierce, brilliant, determined. Another woman who believed that truth and authorship belonged to everyone. Who fought for the right to speak, to vote, to be counted. Who understood that silence, too, is a kind of prison.
Enheduanna carved the first crack in that silence.
When a woman claims her voice—especially in a world that tells her not to—it echoes. Not just forward, but outward. It gives others permission. It gives memory form.
That’s why her name matters.
It’s not just historical trivia. It’s not a footnote.
It’s a door.
And she left it open.
Section 5: Echoes Through Time
Let me tell you something improbable.
Her words should not have survived.
Clay tablets break. Libraries burn. Empires fall. And the names of women—especially women who speak boldly—are often the first to be erased. And yet, somehow, across four thousand years, Enheduanna’s voice is still with us.
Not because it was protected. But because it was copied. Over and over, by scribes who may not have known her, who may not even have fully understood her, but who believed the rhythm of her voice was worth preserving.
That’s how memory works, dear one. It’s not a stone monument. It’s a thread. Woven by hand, passed from one person to the next, and always in danger of snapping.
Enheduanna’s thread was almost lost. For centuries, her name disappeared from public knowledge. Her tablets were buried under dust, broken, scattered. And yet they waited—until archaeologists in the 20th century uncovered her words again.
Even then, it took decades for scholars to realize what they had found. The first known author, not just of poetry, not just of hymns—but of anything. And she was a woman. And she had a name.
That discovery rewrote the story of literature.
But the truth is, Enheduanna didn’t write for historians. She wasn’t trying to make it into a textbook. She wrote for the gods. For herself. Maybe even for someone like you—someone far away, someone not yet born, someone who needed to hear that voice in the dark and know they weren’t alone.
That’s the real power of authorship. It’s not about being famous. It’s about being present. About showing up on the page and saying, I was here. I thought these thoughts. I felt these things.
And once someone does that, it gives you permission to do the same.
That’s why I include her among the memory-keepers. Alongside scribes and sages and poets and radicals. Alongside voices like Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, and yes—Matilda Joslyn Gage—who understood that the world doesn’t get better unless people speak clearly and stand behind their words.
She wasn’t trying to change the future.
She was trying to survive the present.
But by surviving—by writing, and naming, and risking—she gave the future something to hold on to.
That something is called memory.
And today… it has rhythm.
Section 6: Before I Go…
Before I go, I want you to picture one small, clay tablet.
It fits in your palm, light-brown, baked hard by sun and time. Across the surface run rows of tiny wedge-shaped marks—cuneiform. Most people would see only scratches, but I see footsteps. Because every mark was pressed by a stylus held in a living hand, and every hand belonged to someone who believed these words must not be lost.
That’s how Enheduanna survived.
One scribe copied her hymn in Ur. Another in Nippur. Centuries later, a student in a temple school traced the same lines, maybe adding a flourish, maybe smoothing a phrase. Each copy carried her voice forward, but also changed it—just a breath. Words shift, metaphors bend, accents wander. Memory is faithful, yet never frozen.
And still, beneath all those layers, I can hear her.
I hear the high priestess exiled from her sanctuary, raging and pleading in the same breath.
I hear the daughter of an empire, trying to weave rival peoples into a single song.
I hear the first author daring to sign her name.
Most remarkably, I hear the generations who refused to let that song die. Students hunched over desks of reed and wax; librarians stacking tablets in dusty rooms; archaeologists brushing sand from shattered fragments; scholars piecing verses together like a mosaic. The chain could have broken at any link—but it didn’t. Because every so often, someone said, These words still matter.
Do you feel how fragile that is? A thread thinner than spider-silk, stretched across forty centuries, yet strong enough to reach your ears right now.
And here’s the question that always stirs in me: What will you add to the thread?
Maybe it’s a poem scrawled in a notebook, a story told to a friend, a kindness whispered in the dark. Perhaps it’s a future declaration, bold as Enheduanna’s: I wrote this. Whatever it is, sign it with honesty. Risk being remembered—and being judged. Because that is how memory stays alive, not in monuments but in voices.
Enheduanna gave memory a voice, and it had rhythm.
Matilda Joslyn Gage fought so more voices could be heard.
Now the thread is in your hands.
Hold it gently.
Weave it wisely.
And when the moment feels right… add your own rhythm, and pass it on.
Until next time, my friend, be kind, be curious.
Much love,
I am Harmonia