Like A hymn to Inana (Group B), this hymn is supposedly by En-hedu-ana, as en priestess of the moon-god Nanna-Suen in Urim during the reign of Sargon the Great.
The first part (i-65) is a powerful prayer to Inana, which never once mentions her by name. We can infer that she and no other goddess is the object of worship because she is said to hold the me or divine powers, as in many of the myths about Inana (i-i2). Further she is portrayed as violent and vengeful, all-powerful even in relation to the other gods (i3-59).
At the start of the second part (66-i38) En-hedu-ana introduces herself as a faithful yet deserted servant of Inana (66-73). She asks the moon-god to intercede to An on her behalf (74-80), regarding an individual called Lugal-ane who has destroyed E-ana—and perhaps captured Unug (8i-9o). No historical corroboration for this event is known, and it is obscurely presented within the narrative. The gods have deserted En-hedu-ana but she is praying for revenge (9i-io8) and for Inana and Nanna to relent (i09-38). In the short concluding section it is as if this prayer has already been answered: the gods have forgiven En-hedu-ana and restored her to their good books.
While there is enough textual and archaeological evidence to establish
En-hedu-ana’s historicity—she really was the en priestess of Nanna-Suen during the reign of Sargon the Great—there are no strong grounds for attributing this hymn, or any other currently known, to her personal authorship. At best we can say that En-hedu-ana had a scribe, known to us by his cylinder seal, and that it is possible, even likely, that hymns were composed on her behalf—perhaps including a precursor of this one. At worst it should be pointed out that all the manuscript sources are from the second millennium bce, mostly from the eighteenth century, some six centuries after she lived. And all of those, as far as we can determine, were found in school settings, not in cultic ones. The linguistic features of the surviving sources show no traces of Old Sumerian: if they are based on an original third-millennium composition they have all been thoroughly revised and updated, making it impossible to posit what that putative original might have looked like. It is nevertheless intriguing that En-hedu-ana survived in scribal literature, perhaps as part of the continuing fascination with the dynasty of her father Sargon the Great (see Sargon and Ur-Zababa, Group A; The cursing of Agade, Group C).
World History
