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Seshat of Ancient Egypt

Contents of this Lecture:SSeshat, the goddess of the Library

We continue with an image from the distant past, one of the first women writers, no doubt, Seshat, the consort of the God of Writing, Thoth.  Although it would appear that the occupation of the scribe was primarily a male monopoly, this image of Seshat gives us an indication that a female could, it seems, learn to write.  Seshat is wearing a headdress of a seven-pointed star has a palm branch, a writing pen and palette, papyrus scrolls and books.

Seshat was an ancient goddess of writing and measurement. She was also the patroness of mathmatics, architecture and record-keeping.  As early as the Dynasty II, Seshat was shown with the pharaoh stretching a cord to measure the dimensions of a new temple. To grant the king immortality, she recorded the name of the king of the leaves of the Tree of Life, which grew near where she lived.  Also, she calculated the days of the king's earthly life and marked the number on the notched palm branch which she carried.

Seshat was portrated as a woman wearing a dress and the priestly leopard skin.  Seshat carried many titles, such as "Lady of Builders," "Mistress of Books," and "Foremost in the Library." 

This image of Seshat brings us to the first of the questions which we may not be able to answer, at least within the confines of this course, and that is:  how much of the truth do we have about ancient women writers?  We know that the muse of History (Cleo, another woman) is a fickle Goddess.  Even a look at our own past experiences, and a comparison with the way that the media covers them later, gives us an idea of the way that information mutates in the preservation process.  This is not to say that the history of women is any different than any other history in terms of its preservation process.  But of all of the social and custom-based biases that we can trace over the time of our written history, women have been relegated to a secondary status, far from the power that has been incorporated, specifically, in the means of making the history, the written word.

En-hedu-anna

Even as Seshat was of divine origin, we also have evidence of women of antiquity who were real.  En-hedu-anna was possibly the first human woman writer, and in any case, she is the first that we have authorial evidence concerning.  

That is, despite the fact that you have probably never heard the name, En-hedu-anna is the earliest known author, male or female.

from the Women Writer's Site (no longer active) -- this summary:

Both of her parents are purported to have been born of priestess mothers. And in her Biography, Binkley relates in particular a story that includes what appears to be the precursor to the Moses story in reverse. Found on a cuneiform tablet apparently carved by Sargon himself, the story relates his secret birth to a priestly mother who sets him in an ark of bulrushes, consigning him to the river where he is found by a kind farmer who raises him as his own. His greater destiny of course (assisted by the Goddess Ishtar) is to rule.
As Sargon's daughter and as chief priestess, Enheduanna held a position of great power and prestige, and her influence determined, for example, who was appointed to positions of leadership, and her influence extended to nearly every area of life. Our own modern mathematics and astronomy have been shaped in part by the influence of this ancient priestess and others like her. Tracing a line straight back to the sacred temples of the Babylonian and Sumerian Priests and Priestesses, we learn that their work and influence "directed every essential activity of life, including trade, farming and crafts," establishing "a network of observatories to monitor the movements of the stars," an effort that resulted in a calendar we still use in part today, establishing such religious dates as Easter and Passover.

an alternate Women Writer's Project at Brown University

Disk of Enheduanna at Offering

Enheduanna (later 2300s or early 2200s BCE) was the daughter of Sargon, the ruler of Akkad - during ancient Sumerian times.
This information is from the website Other Women's Voices:  Translations of Women's writing before 1600:

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"THAT WHICH HAS BEEN CREATED, NO ONE HAS CREATED."
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We aren't sure of Enheduanna's dates because we aren't sure of her father's dates; Sargon, the ruler of Akkad, a city-state in the north of Mesopotamia, conquered the southern part, Sumer, sometime around 2350 or 2300. He installed his daughter as high-priest of the temple to Nanna, the major temple in Ur, one of the chief cities in the south. We know that she survived her father and continued as high-priest during the reign of one or more of his successors (sons and grandsons). From one of her works, we know that she was temporarily ousted from her position in Ur, perhaps by someone who had usurped power in that city, but that she returned to continue in her position.
Her extant works include a compilation of 42 brief temple hymns and three longer hymns to the Sumerian goddess Inanna (whom Sargon seems to have identified with his Akkadian goddess Ishtar). The three Inanna hymns are Inninsagura, Ninmesarra, and Inninmehusa. All of Enheduanna's known works except the last have been translated into English, as have some attributed fragments.
Hallo (1996) and others have conjectured that the temple hymns were intended to show Sargon's concern for defending the traditional religious belief of conquered Sumer as well as of his own Akkad, and that the three Inanna hymns show Sargon's inevitable triumph (since Inanna/Ishtar was his patron) over enemies in Akkad and Sumer and
on the frontiers of his empire. Whatever their political purpose, Enheduanna's hymns remained popular long after
Sargon's empire had gone. Today they let us hear a woman's voice from an unfamiliar world.

Here is a sample of her poetry: 

I, what am I among the living creatures! 
May An give over (to punishment) 
the rebellious lands that hate your (Inanna's) Nanna, 
May An split its cities asunder, 
May Enlil curse it, 
May not its tear-destined child be soothed by her mother, 
Oh, Queen who established lamentations, 
Your "boat of lamentations," has landed in an inimical land, 
There will I die, while singing the holy song. 
As for me, my Nanna watched not over me, 
I have been attacked most cruelly. 
Ashimbabbar has not spoken my verdict. 
But what matter, whether he spoke it or not! 
I, accustomed to triumph, have been driven forth from (my) house, 
Was forced to flee like the cote like a swallow, my life is devoured, 
Was made to walk among the mountain thorns, 
The life-giving tiara of En-ship was taken from me, 
Eunuchs were assigned to me - 
"These are becoming to you," it was told me. 

More on this early woman writer can be found at The En-hedu-anna's Reserach Pages.

One puzzling aspect of this hymn is the sense that Enheduanna's lament is not so much bitter because she was a woman, but because she was defeated by her enemies.  This would suggest that a daughter of a king, at least, might have learned to read and write and be admitted to the priesthood.  Throughout the early records we do have evidence of high-born women receiving an education, often quite an elaborate one, from a prominent father.  We cannot be sure, then, whether the instance of works like this is due to the fact that Enheduanna was a Princess, or if there were, in fact, other women writing in very early times whose works were not preserved.

Because of the social status of women, too, when the text is not attributed to someone whose Name is otherwise linked to the dominant history, the writing we have is often anonymous--so that the earliest voices come without names--here is a poem from the ArtGrrrrl website (no longer active) - an Inuit (Eskimo) poem from the far north:

Far Inland (Inuit)

Far inland
go my sad thoughts.
It is too much
never to leave this bench.
I want to wander
far inland.

I remember
hunting animals,
the good food.
It is too much
never to leave this bench.
I want to wander
far inland.

I hunted like men. I carried
weapons, shot reindeer,
bull, cow, and calf,
killed them with my arrows
one evening
when almost winter
twilight fell
far inland.

I remember
how I struggled
inland
under the dropping sky
of snow.
The earth is white
far inland.

Another feature of the woman writer, early and late, is the origin in some kind of specialized living situation.  Nuns of the Middle Ages were often literate, and, when they were allowed to, wrote beautiful spiritual and practical tracts.  Women in harems, too, often had the leisure, education, and means to write.  The art of poetry was seen in these situations as an attractive addition to other charms a courtesan might possess. 

As we trace the history of women writers, we will continue to find that the work we now treasure seems to have had some particular reason for preservation, that the authors might have come from exalted families, and that they often lived lives that diverged from the common patterns of womanhood.  It is only much later, when access to the very tools of writing are democratized, that we see a phenomenon such as the Bronte Sisters.

Continue with Lecture I.

Literature 45  - Women in Literature :  

Marjorie C. Luesebrink, MFA

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