MEWS Review Articles Peter S. Allen reviews Vol.xvi Nos. 3/4 Fall 2001/Winter 2002 Inanna  Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna by Betty De Shong Meador Austin:  University of Texas Press, 2000                   This is a book about three women:  Enheduanna, Inanna and Betty De Shong Meador.  Enheduanna was a Sumerian priestess and poet who lived around 2300 BCE.   Inanna is the goddess whose cult she helped create and spread and whom she celebrated in valedictory poems, three of which have survived.  Meador is a scholar who before the late 1970s had heard of neither Enheduanna nor Inanna, but when she discovered them, in part as a result of a dream, she devoted most of the next 20 years to their study and to learning Sumerian in order to gain better access to these women and the worlds they inhabited. It is Meador’s intention with this book to elevate Enheduanna to her rightful place as possibly the first individual for whom we have a corpus of comprehensible literary work and most certainly the first female “poet of record.”  At the very least, her poetry is “among the first known literary works of history.”  Meador views the poetry of Enheduanna as a signal feminist landmark:  “The poems …portray what so many women long for, a spirituality grounded in the reflection of a divine woman, offering a full sense of foundation and legitimacy as females” (p. 9).  Using the limited means at her disposal, Meador also delves deeply into the persona of Inanna who was wildly popular during Enheduanna’s lifetime, largely, it would seem, as a result of her efforts on the goddess’s behalf, chief of which may have been her poetry.                  Enheduanna was no ordinary priestess.  She was almost certainly the biological daughter of Sargon, creator and ruler of the first empire known to humankind.  For many years she reigned as the high priestess of Nanna, the Moon God of Ur, overseeing his  large temple in the central city of the empire.  This was an itinerant position that took her to the major cities of the empire where she promoted the cult of Inanna, the daughter of Nanna, and encouraged the building of temples devoted to her worship. Despite a period of decline at the end of Enheduanna’s life, the cult of Inanna established by her endured for perhaps 500 years, usually directed by the king’s daughter.  By examining the archaeological and historical records, Meador is able to develop a credible profile of Enheduanna as well as reconstruct critical aspects of her life, occasionally engaging in speculation where the record is fuzzy.  In spite of the dangers inherent in such an exercise, there is nothing egregious here and what Meador suggests sounds logical and plausible.                 Inanna was a highly complex and paradoxical figure with multiple and contradictory aspects.  Meador observes that “we have nothing in the western pantheon of goddess that even approaches her variety and dominion.  Inanna is a unique outbreak of a particular consciousness attempting to embody and define itself.  She is an expression of the Mesopotamian psyche that manifested itself in this paradoxical, complex, divine woman” (p. 17).  In fact, according to Meador’s account, Inanna must have been all things to all people, a kind of pantheon unto herself, especially in Ur.  She is depicted as alternatively peaceful and warlike, comforting and threatening, healing and vengeful, cruel and forgiving, destructive and creative, physical and mystical, sensuous and steely.  She was the goddess of love and patron of prostitutes and most likely bisexual or even androgynous.  At times she seemed to glorify in chaos and at others in stability and order.  Meador does her best to place Inanna and her contrasting aspects in their proper and logical context in the Sumerian pantheon, but only partially succeeds in this endeavor.  In the end, Inanna remains an enigma.                  Inanna is divided into two parts.  Part I comprises seven chapters:  the first is an introduction to the subject and its main characters.  The second focuses on Inanna and the cult devoted to her worship. In Chapter Three, Meador reviews the history of goddess worship in the ancient world, linking the cult of Inanna to Neolithic and even earlier beliefs and practices putatively associated with goddess veneration as evidenced by figurines and other representations.  She also maintains that Inanna survived as the Semitic Ishtar and all her derivative incarnations and deities.  A summary of Sumerian history in this chapter provides further contextualization for Inanna.                 Chapters Four, Five and Six are devoted to Enheduanna and her life.  They contain a review of the evidence for her existence and an attempt to reconstruct her life and the peregrinations entailed by her itinerant position.  She suggests that her appointment was in part a political act by Sargon to help consolidate control over his empire, but she does not explore this idea very far. This is followed, in Chapter Seven, by an introduction to the poems featured in Part II.  Here Meador calls Enheduanna a “theologian” and details her contributions through poetry to the creation of the cult of Inanna and her “images and emotions.”  Meador notes the parallelism of the two figures, one the high priestess of heaven, the other of earthly things.  Pages 137-8 also contain a brief and insightful exegesis of the translation process.                 Part II contains Meador’s translations of the three extant poems of Enheduanna along with some explanatory commentary.  These poems celebrate both the positive and negative sides of Inanna’s nature and Meador presents them in uncompromising language.  One example of an unattributed fragment should suffice:               peg my vulva               my star-sketched horn of the dipper               moor my slender boat of heaven               my new moon crescent cunt beauty (p. 11) She admits to aspiring to provide an alternative to the canonical translations of Noah Kramer and to employing a certain degree of poetic license.  I am not in a position to judge the validity or accuracy of her translations, but they are certainly more lively and evocative than Kramer’s and come with the additional cachet of having been done with the assistance of Daniel Foxvog, an accomplished Sumerologist and linguistic scholar.  There is, however, at least one unfortunate and inacurate rendering here:  “…iron cold ax…” (p. 95).  These poems date to c. 2300 BCE. in the Bronze Age, several centuries before the use or even knowledge of iron.  Otherwise, these translations are compelling, evocative and dynamic.                 One possibly productive avenue that Meador hints at, but does not explore very extensively is that Inanna and her worship constituted an outlet for Sumerian women repressed by a male dominated society.  Nor does she pay much attention to the political aspects of this cult.  She notes that “Enheduanna’s elevation of Inanna in her poems to a central position among the gods was a dissident act protesting the intrusion of the king into the domain of religion” (p. 48), but it is difficult to believe that Sargon and his successors would have tolerated such subversive activity unless they derived some political advantage from Enheduanna’s devotion.  In any case, Meador does not address this apparent contradiction and is content to deal with these ideas in a cursory fashion.  Instead, she focuses on aspects of Enheduanna’s relationship with the goddess, stressing the primacy and importance of her literary output.                 Furthermore, Meador has a rather one dimensional view of the history of the sexes and sees the reign of Inanna as representing a transition from an ancient age when feminine figures and feminine principles dominated religious belief and practice to a more male- oriented world.  The demise of goddess worship is linked to the emergence of a masculine, male dominated religion that ultimately found its expression in the patriarchal Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions.  Appealing as this may be, it is a bit too simplistic and overlooks a variety of relevant and contradictory factors such as Marianism (the cult of Mary) in both Orthodox and Catholic Christianity.   Meador’s whole discussion of masculinity and femininity on pages 184-186 is outdated and reflects scholarship that has long since been revised and modified.                 Meador also attempts to link the Enheduanna/Inanna phenomenon to major developments in the human psyche, maintaining, among other things, that Enheduanna’s efforts contributed to or perhaps just reflected an emerging sense of self and individuality, especially for women, at a time when humankind was just breaking free from a more communal consciousness and orientation.  This strikes me as a bit overly ambitious and not well supported by comparative evidence.  Nevertheless, like several other pronouncements of cosmic proportions in this book, it is thoughtful and provocative.                  Meador is quite involved with her subjects and thus suffers from a lack of scholarly detachment, but surprisingly this is not as distracting as it might be.  Moreover, in several places she relates and discusses various theories without endorsing one or the other, a commendable practice in this case.  On the other hand, her glib linkages of goddess worship throughout the ancient world and beyond and across long stretches of time is a bit highhanded and will probably not stand up to scholarly scrutiny.  Also, oddly enough, the high priestess of goddess scholarship, the late Marija Gimbutas, barely warrants mention in this otherwise expansive tome.                 This book is a valiant effort and the author achieves some degree of success.  But the subject still remains elusive. Throughout, Meador has viewed these enigmatic figures and the poetry through the lens of modern western scholarship which results in exposing the extreme alterity of Enheduanna and Inanna and their times and culture.  Meador has done a remarkable job of identifying and exploring the universal themes and emotions expressed in this poetry, but in the end one is still left with the slightly uneasy feeling that there is a great deal here that transcends our modern Western sensibilities and possibly even our ability to grasp the true meaning of these poems. *Peter S. Allen is a professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island, USA.   Home | About | Committees |Publications| Activities | Alerts | Pedagogy Corner || | Links | How to Join | Questions about the site? Email the webmaster.