You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones.

Today I'm joined by Anna Dela Subin, the author of

Accidental Gods, a history of men inadvertently turned into deities. She has a piece in the latest

issue of the paper on the ancient Sumerian poet, princess and priestess, Enheduana. It's a review of

Enheduana, the complete poems of the world's first author by Sofus Heller.

Hello, Annadela, and thank you very much for talking with me today.

Hi, Tom. It's great to be on the podcast.

So the subtitle of the book under review of Sofis Heller's book describes Enheduana,

if I'm pronouncing any of those words correctly, as the world's first author.

But before we get on to what that means precisely, perhaps you could just tell us a bit about

what we know of her life, who was Enheduana, and when and where did she live?

So Enhadwana was a Sumerian princess who lived around 2,300 BCE. She was the daughter of Sargon of

Akkad who was said to have created the world's first empire when he forced dozens of city-states

stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean to acquiesce to his rule. And so acts of empire building and colonization so often play out not just at the level of land and

territory and politics, but also in the space of what we would call religion or divinity.

And so as an imperialist act, Sargon installed his daughter and Enhedwana, as high priestess over the temple

to the moon god in the city of Orr, which is one of the city states he was trying to subdue

in what is now southern Iraq. And so temples then, as now, were institutions of great power

and wealth,

and Edwana took control over the community as a usurper.

So she managed the daily affairs of the temple,

and she also wrote poems which attempted to accomplish and verse

...