Overview

Inanna: The First Goddess presents the most complete, rigorous, and contextually grounded edition of the Enheduanna corpus ever assembled. Composed in ancient Sumer more than four thousand years ago, the hymns and temple texts attributed to Enheduanna-daughter of Sargon of Akkad and en-priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur-stand at the threshold of recorded religious history. In these works, divine power is not abstracted into doctrine but encountered through address, ritual speech, political crisis, exile, and restoration. The goddess Inanna emerges not as a symbolic principle, but as a volatile, embodied force whose authority spans love and warfare, sovereignty and devastation, intimacy and annihilation. This volume brings together The Exaltation of Inanna, Inanna and Ebiḫ, The Temple Hymns, and related compositions, presented with new translations that prioritize fidelity to the surviving Sumerian while remaining readable to modern audiences. Extensive introductions situate the texts within their historical, political, and ritual contexts, reexamining questions of authorship, compilation, gendered religious authority, and scribal transmission. Rather than treating Enheduanna as either a mythic figure or a modern-style author, this study restores her more accurate role as compiler, custodian, and authorized religious voice operating within the institutional world of early Mesopotamian temple culture. Drawing on the earliest critical editions and manuscript evidence, Inanna: The First Goddess offers both a scholarly resource and a landmark reconstruction of humanity's earliest preserved theology. These texts do not systematize belief or resolve contradiction. They preserve encounter. They name power. And they record, for the first time in human history, a divine presence addressed in a voice that still speaks.

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