The Struggle to Unearth the World’s First Author | The New Yorker

A clay tablet preserves the words of a long narrative poem: “I took up my place in the sanctuary dwelling, / I was high priestess, I, Enheduanna.”)

If Enheduanna wrote those words, then she marks the beginning of authorship, the beginning of rhetoric, even the beginning of autobiography.)

she lived fifteen hundred years before Homer, seventeen hundred years before Sappho, and two thousand years before Aristotle, who is traditionally credited as the father of the rhetorical tradition.)

Enheduanna’s father, Sargon, united Mesopotamia’s city-states to create what is sometimes called history’s first empire.)

“All of the evidence is there,” Zainab Bahrani, a professor of ancient Near Eastern art and archeology at Columbia University, told me, ticking off the various records that support Enheduanna’s authorship. “If you think about it, it makes perfect sense that an élite woman would be the first poet. She had a comfortable life, space to read and think, a place to write. She didn’t have to work in the fields or fight wars. Why wouldn’t she have been able to write?”)

Virginia Woolf published her essay “A Room of One’s Own.” Searching her shelves for books by and about women—books that were not there—she observed that history “seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided. . . . history is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.”)