| Daniela Gioseffi |
||||
Enhueduanna: First Known Poet  Of Civilization (A Woman, circa 2300 B.C.) Most of us are used to thinking of Orpheus as the first known poet of Western civilization, but actually prehistory has given us artifacts of an even earlier exponent of the shamanist lyric, one as capable of poetic enchantment as the legendary Orpheus, who according to Greek historians was a real, not a mythological figure. Such was a woman named Enhueduanna, another legendary character of actual history. Those who know their Greek mythology, know that Orpheus was believed to have received his golden lyre from, Apollo, God of Light, and his mother, was the muse of lyricism, Calliope. We know that Enhueduanna was a moon priestess, the daughter of King Sargon of Agade (2334-2279 B.C.) who reigned over the world's first empire, extending from Persia to the Mediterranean. That she likely played a lyre-- shaped like an arrow's bow with strings and a resonating gourd-- as did the far later priestess Sappho who is supposed to have inherited Orpheus lyre after it floated off to the isle of Lesbos and was rescued from the sea by her. Of Enhueduanna's lyrics we have many more than Sappho's --of which we have only about ll00 lines left to us after Church father's, scandalized by her eroticism, succeeded in destroying most of her works in order to save our dubious souls. [For their sin of burning the lyrics of what ancient Greek historians have deemed the greatest known poet of antiquity, we might hope that they are the ones in a permanent state of oxidation.] The lyrics of Enhueduanna show her to be a priestess/singer/poet very confident of her powers to effect the ruling Goddess of her day, Inanna, Sumerian deity of love and fertility, for whom her supplications were meant-- just as Sappho's, in the ancient tradition of the poet/priest, were sung to Aphrodite. We have an artifact, a stone tablet portraying a likeness of the Enhueduanna, and we have preserved on cuneiform tablets, forty-two hymns whose authorship is validated, plus a sequence from an eighteen stanza poem, and many other fragments and poems which may be hers. She was an anti war poet, quite involved in and outraged about the politics of her day, by the by--because as usual, people were hacking each other to death in xenophobic tribal wars. Here is one adaptation into American English which this writer offers of some her lyrics--with the help of English versions from the ancient Sumerian: LAMENT FOR THE SPIRIT OF WAR You hack everything down in battle... You slice away the land and charge disguised as a raging storm, growl as a roaring hurricane, yell like a tempest yells, expel evil winds! Your feet are filled with anxiety!... Like a fiery monster you fill the land with poison As a rage from the sky, you growl over the earth, and trees and bushes collapse before you You are as blood rushing from a mountain, Spirit of hate, greed and anger, dominator of heaven and earth! Your fire wafts over our tribe, mounted on a beast, with indomitable commands, you decide all fate. You triumph over all our rites. Who can fathom you? Perhaps, it is interesting for women writers, particularly the poets of our time, to know that the very first pre-historic evidence we have of lyricism, or creative writing at all, for that matter, is not--as is popularly thought--Orphean, but Enhueduannean-- if you will. The glory of that fact is for the woman poet to realize that she is writing in a tradition of women poets as old as any tradition we know. Indeed, the Japanese language was created by Japanese women who lived as slave courtesans under intervening Chinese speaking emperors. To create a private and secret language of the soul and heart and love and feeling, quite separate from the Chinese one of business and commerce of the day, these women fashioned simplified pictorial characters from the Chinese ones and thus the Japanese system of writing was inagurated by women poets. A Japanese male writer invited to the PEN International congress in l986, expounded on this, saying that he considered the very act of writing to be a feminine one-- as his very language itself is a feminine invention meant for expressing subtleties and nuances of heart and soul beyond the purely pragmatic. If man does not live by bread alone, it would seem that women never have. And so to pay homage to Calliope, who was the mother muse of Orpehus,in any case. Perhaps, poets, both women and men, will be interested to learn about the little written of, or known, first poet of civilization, Enhueduanna. More of her lyrics and biography can be found in a compendium titled, Women Poets from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Eliki Barnstone and her father, Willis Barnstone, Schocken Books,l980. Or for all her lyrics, one can attempt to find a copy of The Exaltation of Inanna, by Hallo and van Dijk, Yale Press, l968. |
||||
|
