THE FIRST NAME

Enheduanna is the second life in the Ancient Civilisations series. She was the first person in history to sign her name to what she wrote. She did it four thousand years ago. The marks held.

Enheduanna was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, the king who built the first empire in human history, and at around fourteen years old, she was placed at the head of the most powerful religious office in Mesopotamia: En-Priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur. It was a political appointment. She turned it into something her father could never have imagined.

Enheduanna inherited a literary tradition in which hymns were composed and performed but never attributed: written, copied, and recited by no one in particular. She changed that. In the Exaltation of Inanna and the Temple Hymns, she wrote with a force and a theological intelligence that the existing forms could not contain, and at the end of her work, she did something no one before her had done: she named herself as its author. When political rebellion drove her from Ur into exile, she wrote her way through the loss, and when she was restored, she performed the text of her own restoration before the city that had cast her out, with her name attached to every line.

This is the story of the first writer in history to be known to us by name: a high priestess, poet, and political survivor whose hymns to the goddess Inanna are still read, translated, and performed today. It follows her from her installation in the temple at Ur, through the writing of the hymns that reshaped Mesopotamian religious literature, through exile and restoration, to the alabaster disc unearthed at Ur in 1927 that put a face to a name scholars had only found in clay. Before her, no one said who had written the hymns. After her, a name was possible.

A vivid and rigorously imagined reconstruction of the woman who invented authorship, and whose marks, pressed into wet clay on the banks of the Euphrates, have outlasted the empire she was born into by four thousand years.

The First Name is the second novel in the Ancient Civilisations series.