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First named poet wrote of divine evil,
good BERKELEY, Calif., March 6 (UPI) -- The poems of the earliest
author known by name, a princess who revered a Sumerian goddess both loving
and cruel, are available for the first time in translation for a general
audience. The poet, Enheduanna, was the high priestess to the moon
god Nanna in the ancient city of Ur more than 4,000 years ago, in what
is now southern Iraq. While a few of Enheduanna's poems honor Nanna, the
priestess was far more preoccupied with Inanna, the daughter of Nanna,
whose home was the morning and evening star, Venus. "In Enheduanna's poetry, Inanna is both fierce and
cruel, loving and kind," said Betty Meador, the author of the translated
poems. "Inanna is the divine in all matter, both the harsh and the
beautiful. She is reality with a sacred order and meaning." Enheduanna was the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, who
conquered the city-state Sumer around 2,300 B.C. in the first example
of military-driven empire building. Sargon equated the Akkadian deity
Inanna with the Sumerian's Ishtar, the goddess of love and war. The modern world first learned of Enheduanna from pieces
of an alabaster disk discovered in the 1920s during Sir Leonard Woolley's
archaeological excavations of Ur. The restored disk, which is kept at
the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, depicts Enheduanna
on the front and identifies her by name on the back, as she dedicates
a dais to Inanna in her temple. Scholars have known of Enheduanna's hymns for decades,
but until now the words of this priestess were generally inaccessible,
locked away in clay tablets and academic texts largely available only
to experts. Meador, a Jungian analyst in private practice, worked
with Sumerian linguists and authorities on Mesopotamian culture and literature
to create a fresh translation of the poetry. "This is a very accurate, responsible, authoritative
translation with poetic license here and there, where ambiguities exist,"
said Anne Kilmer, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley's
department of Near Eastern studies. "The work is to be admired. Meador
has made a tremendous effort to be faithful to the original." Meador's experience with Inanna began when the goddess
appeared to her in a dream about 20 years ago. Before the dream, she said
she had never heard of Inanna. "In the dream I am with a group of women who are
preparing two graves," Meador said. "Two tall sticks that curve
into circles at the top are thrust into the soft dirt. Beside the stick
figures is a bundle of palm fronds." Meador was afterwards startled to find illustrations of
similar stick figures in books on goddesses. Further research revealed
that looped sticks represented the goddess Inanna in Sumerian iconography.
"Later I found poems to Inanna, which made it clear that palm fronds
signified the nourishing date palms gatherers offered to Inanna in her
role as goddess of the abundant harvest," Meador said. Since then, Enheduanna has come to occupy most of Meador's
spare time. The analyst spent years studying the Sumerian language with
experts at the University of California in Los Angeles and Berkeley. While
she struggled with each line, given the broken sentences, missing verses
and sometimes contradictory meanings of a word, Meador said the work for
her was also a compelling excursion into a strange and distant past. "I approached the task as though I were solving a
puzzle," Meador said. "I found that slowly the lines would come
into focus, and, in the context of the preceding text, I could grasp their
apparent meaning." In Meador's rendition, Enheduanna is filled with exaltation
and grief over her intimate, emotional connection with a deity who was
powerfully good and evil, a goddess the priestess felt was both "white-sparked,
radiant in the dark vault of evening's sky" and a "vicious dragon"
whose "venom poisons the land." In the poem, "Lady of the Largest Heart," Enheduanna
writes: I, who spread over the land "Nothing in our Western religion even touches this,"
Meador said. "Enheduanna's conception of this goddess opens the door
into a whole different way of viewing women." Meador's translations of Enheduanna's poems appear in, "Inanna, Lady of the Largest Heart." Her prior translations of Sumerian myth and poetry appear in the book "Uncursing the Dark." |