Video: Enheduanna: Voicing the Feminine Divine Presentation and Musical Performance
Enheduanna: Voicing the Feminine Divine Presentation and Musical Performance
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Enheduanna, Voicing the Feminine Divine. December 12, 2023.
CHARLES STANG: Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome. My name is Charles Stang, and I serve as the Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School, and I am delighted to welcome you to this very, very special event, Enheduanna, Voicing the-- [CLEARS THROAT] Pardon me. I wanted to say "divine feminine--" Voicing the Feminine Divine.
I confess that until last year, "Enheduanna" was a name unknown to me. It was Anne Harley who first brought her to my attention. I will introduce Anne properly later in the program. Suffice for now to say that Anne is currently a visiting scholar at the Center and part of our Transcendence and Transformation Initiative.
It was Anne who first told me of Enheduanna and encouraged me to go to New York City in February of this year to see the Morgan Library and Museum's exhibition entitled She Who Wrote-- Enheduanna and the Women of Mesopotamia, 3,400 to 2000 BC. It was brilliantly curated by Sydney Babcock. We'd hoped to have Sydney with us this evening, but alas, life intervened and he could not make it.
So who is Enheduanna? Simply put, as the Morgan exhibition put it, "she who wrote." She, who wrote centuries before Homer, the blind poet whom scholars typically acknowledge as the father of Western literature. You might say, then, that Enheduanna is the mother of literature straddling East and West. And she's much, much older than the father. She lived around 2,300 BC. She was the daughter of King Sargon, who founded the world's first empire, the Akkadian Empire, which united the city-states of ancient Sumeria. She was the high priestess of the moon God Nanna in the City of Ur and an apologist for her father's empire.
She was a personal devotee of the goddess Inanna, later Ishtar, the patron deity of war, sex, change, and destruction. And she was, she is, the world's first author-- a woman, a priestess, and most lastingly, a poet. She sang of gods and their temples, and her verses, especially those to Inanna, are startling, stunning, some of the most powerful I have ever read. We have with us tonight her most recent English translator, Dr. Sophus Helle, whom I will also introduce properly in a few moments.
He reminds us that the goal of Enheduanna's hymns, quote, "are not to describe the world, but to change it, to change it by invoking the gods and enlisting their help." He also reminds us that, quote, "The hymns that we now label literature were, in fact, a way for ancient people to defend themselves from the mood swings of the gods. Their lavish praise might soothe the heart of an angry deity and so keep its wrath at bay, at least for a time." And although he asks us whether it is right to think of these hymns as literature, Sophus also asks us to wonder-- and here, I'm quoting-- "What would the history of Western literature look like if it began not with Homer and his war-hungry heroes, but with a woman from ancient Iraq, who sang hymns to the goddess of chaos and change?"
Indeed, what would it look like to begin the history of literature not with he, but with she, who wrote? This afternoon's programs falls into two parts. In the first, we will hear from our two esteemed experts, Professor Celine Debourse and Dr. Sophus Helle. After their two talks, Dr. Helle will read a selection of Enheduanna's poems in their original Sumerian, with his English translation. After his readings, we'll shift from the first to the second part of the program, the musical performance. And I will return to the podium to introduce Anne Harley, the piece, the project it's a part of, the composer, conductor, and our musicians.
But now it's time for me to introduce our two experts. Professor Celine Debourse is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is an Assyriologist specializing in the languages, history, and religion of Babylonia during the first millennium BCE. Her work centers around two broad themes-- ancient ritual, and the effects of empire, which she studies together in the context of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic Babylonian periods.
Dr. Sophus Helle is a translator, journalist, and cultural historian specializing in the literature of ancient Iraq. He has translated the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh and the Sumerian poems attributed to Enheduanna. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, where he's working on a project that looks at how ancient epics engage with time. Celine and Sophus, thank you so very much for joining us for this event. We're delighted to host you.
And while I'm in the business of giving thanks, there are a few people I must acknowledge. First, I'd like to thank Gosia Sklodowska, the Center's associate director, and Laurie Sedgwick-- Where are you, Laurie? In the back, as she often is. Laurie is the Center's events coordinator. I'd like to thank them for their tireless work on this very special event. Perhaps I shouldn't say "tireless" though, because I think they're both pretty tired after this long semester, and they deserve a holiday break.
Second, I'd like to thank Anne Harley, who I genuinely think is tireless, or at least we haven't seen her slow down once in this semester. Just before this event began, she was pitching Gosia and me three other events. So perhaps she is tireless. In all seriousness, though, Anne, you're a delight to have around. I'm forever grateful to you for many things, but for introducing me to Enheduanna.
And finally, I want to thank Eve Sada-- Where's Eve? There's Eve-- who is a postdoctoral fellow here at the Center and our residential advisor, who has led this semester's reading group on Enheduanna. There is a certain poetry in knowing that you, a Mesopotamian woman and singer living over two millennia after Christ, is leading our reading group on another Mesopotamian woman and singer who lived over two millennia before Christ. Thank you, Eve, for all that you do for the center.
So without further ado, we will start the program. Please join me in welcoming our two esteemed guests. Celine, the floor is yours.
[APPLAUSE]
CELINE DEBOURSE: Hi, everyone. I want to start with thanking everyone for coming, and for the people who have made this event possible. It's really marvelous to put Enheduanna in the spotlight like this. Enheduanna's work was created and is set in the context of ancient Mesopotamian temples. Like all of Mesopotamian society, which was patriarchal, also Mesopotamian temples were a largely male-dominated space. And how did Enheduanna navigate this space? So today, I will not talk about Enheduanna, but about three other women. And I think they can help us understand a little bit of Enheduanna's experience.
Before I start, I should say a little bit what a Mesopotamian temple is. Mesopotamian temples are attested from the very early stages of Mesopotamian history until the very end, and a very long, stable tradition. You can see on the slide that we are closer to the last temple in Mesopotamia in time than it is to one of the early temples attested in the same city-- here, in this case, in Uruk.
Mesopotamian temples were not just places of worship. They did house statues of the gods, which were fed and clothed on a daily basis, or entertained with rituals and festivals. But they were also places of scholarship and learning, and they housed libraries within their walls. And they were also very important socioeconomic institutions. They employed many people that lived in their vicinity, and they held considerable economic assets. So you should keep all of this in mind when we talk about Enheduanna and other people in ancient Mesopotamian temples.
Today, I want to travel through time and space, within the Mesopotamian heartland that is the land between the two rivers, Euphrates and Tigris. And we're going to travel from the early second millennium BCE until the end of the first millennium BCE. And we're going to meet three women who held different roles within their temple setting. And we're going to start in the city of Sippar, in the old Babylonian period, at the beginning or the middle or the first part of the second millennium BCE. And here, we meet Awat-Aya.
Awat-Aya was a naditum priestess. We don't translate the Babylonian word "naditum." We just use that word because it best designates what a naditum is. Awat-Aya was probably part of a high-status class of elite women who had been devoted by their male family members to serve a god in their home city. So Awat-Aya was unmarried, and so she devoted her life to the sun god Shamash.
We know very little about the cultic functions of women who were naditums, but we a little bit about their initiation because this little text tells us about that. It talks about how Awat-Aya was initiated into the profession of naditum. And it tells us this in a very specific wording, because the text is worded like a marriage contract. In a way, it seems to suggest that Awat-Aya was somehow married, even though she was not married, to a human man. So it tells us about the dowry she receives, and it tells us about the objects that her father gives her for her life, in the temple context, and it also tells us about a gift that was given to her father-- a very common practice during marriage ceremonies.
So after Awat-Aya was initiated, she would move into what we call the "gagum." It's often translated as "cloister." It was a specific walled-off section in the city where all the naditums lived and worked together independently. This may or may not be a part of the city of Sippar that was the gagum. We don't know for sure.
The most important task of these naditum priestesses was to worship the god Shamash and his divine wife Aya. And they did this to represent their male family members, mostly their father. And they prayed for the well-being of their family. And that was the most important task, and this also meant that their father gave them a means of sustenance to be able to perform this continuous devotion in front of the gods. But naditums were not just unmarried. They also remained childless. You can see here the cuneiform signs that are used to write naditu, and we read it in Akkadian as "lukur," which means "fallow woman."
So they remained childless, which also means that all the means that they received, if they received lands or silver or jewelry, that this would pass on to the next generation undividedly because the naditu had no children. So this means that these naditu women were not just priestesses. They didn't just have a religious role. They had a very large economic role. And so they almost serve as free agents who took over roles that were normally only held by men.
On the slide, you can see a little comparison of how men and women deal with land sale transactions throughout the Old Babylonian period. That's the first half of the second millennium. And you can see that quite a lot of these naditu women did participate in business transactions, such as sales of land, the hiring out of slaves, and loans of silver. And so that meant that the means that they had received from their male family members in order to be a naditu priestess, they could enlarge these means. And at the end, when they would die, these would pass on to the next generation undividedly.
Now by the end of the Old Babylonian period, by the middle of the second millennium BCE-- or earlier, actually, already-- this profession of naditu kind of peters out and very likely can be linked to the fact that families simply no longer had the means to sustain these types of women. And this really attests-- the naditums and Awat-Aya really show us how these women in a temple setting could hold a very strong economic role.
So now we move to more than 1,000 years later. We make a big jump in time, and we move to the Assyrian city of Arbela. And here, we meet Ishtar-beli-da'ini. Ishtar-beli-da'ini was a votaress who had been dedicated by an Assyrian King, King Esarhaddon, to the goddess Ishtar of Arbela. We know very little about votaresses like Ishtar-beli-da'ini. Very likely, she was also from a rather high-end family, perhaps of foreign origin, maybe Egyptian or so, and her social status is not entirely. Clearly, she was not a slave, but she was perhaps also not an entirely free woman. She was in the service of the goddess Ishtar of Arbela.
But she was also more than that. She did more than just-- She was more than just a priestess who prayed and performed the worship of this goddess, because Ishtar of Arbela is associated with prophecy. She was a goddess who would give oracles that related to the King, and the royal family, and kingship. And Ishtar-beli-da'ini was one of these women who was in the service of Ishtar of Arbela and would receive oracles from the goddess, and would then pronounce them.
And we have lists of those oracles pronounced by different women in the service of Ishtar of Arbela, and they all relate to specific political intrigues at the court or to specific wars and military campaigns. And so there was a very clear political undertone to these prophecies pronounced by these women in the context of this cult. So Ishtar-beli-da'ini was not just a priestess, but she had a very small part of political power, too.
Now we move back to Sippar, but in the sixth century BCE. And here, we meet Muranatu. Muranatu performed one of the most stereotypical female tasks, and that's the task of weaving. But she didn't do that in a very stereotypical female manner, because she was a linen weaver. I will tell you in a little bit why that was not so stereotypical.
Mesopotamian textiles were famous throughout the ancient world. And we know that women were a very big part of the production of textiles, but they are largely invisible in our texts. This was probably a task performed at home and among women, and so very little evidence is present to tell us about linen production or weaving productions. Now weaving, in the context of the temple, is important because, as I said, the gods were clothed, and they would receive different types of clothing on different occasions. And linen, specifically, was associated with purity and the divine, and so divine statues would receive, aside from other types of textiles, linen clothing.
We have little lists, like this one, that tell us about who participated in the production of these clothes. And they are mostly men. So in the production of the clothing of the gods, only men participated. It is not entirely clear if this relates to some kind of purity concerns, or if it's just a kind of social aspect that these men would be working in a workshop in the temple, whereas women would be weaving at home. But what is very interesting is that in eight of these little lists, Muranatu appears as one of the women who helps in the production of these linen clothing for the gods-- linen garments for the gods.
So she weaves linen thread. In this specific list, she is one of the women who delivers one piece of clothing or part of a piece of clothing for the gods, and it raises a few questions about what we actually know from these little lists, because we see all these men mostly appear in these lists, but we do know that women were so active in the production of textiles. So perhaps, some people have suggested, that behind Muranatu hide more women; that this reference to that woman who probably produced these things in her household, more women hide.
And this brings me to a poem that I would really like to bring because I think it can also-- I would like to keep it in mind when we talk Enheduanna, and it's by Doireann Ghriofa. And she says, Instructions to make a marionette. "Fold a page laundry smooth. Repeat. Repeat again, until the paper pleats resemble a pale accordion. Sketch a female silhouette. Use a sewing scissors to snip a woman out of it. In lifting her female outline from the cuttings, you're birthing her from the page. She's not alone. Observe how they all rise-- hand in hand in hand. Remember this lesson-- in every page, there are undrawn women, each waving in her own particular silence."
So today, we celebrate Enheduanna, as we should, as this marvelous, singular thing, unique person in history, but we should really keep in mind all the women that are undrawn and that hide behind the silhouettes of Enheduanna. Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
SOPHUS HELLE: Fantastic. Thank you so much to Celine. That was amazing. That was a really great overview. Giving a short overview of all of Mesopotamian religion is no easy thing. Thank you, also, to the organizers for this amazing event, and I cannot wait to hear the musical performance. Very excited for that.
I would like to begin by taking your mind back to one of the first things Celine said, in which she compared these two temples from the very beginning of cuneiform culture and from the very end. These are 3,500 years apart. As Celine said, the later temple is closer to us in time than to its predecessor in Uruk. So these are the kind of temporal distances that we are dealing with when we talk about ancient Mesopotamia. We like to say, in the field, somewhat tongue in cheek, that we study the first half of history, and leave the rest to everybody else.
So that is-- and so today, we are journeying back to Enheduanna's period, which lies towards the beginning of that time span, namely the old Akkadian period. And the old Akkadian period, just to set the scene in general, is this time of dramatic excitement, both for the better and for the worst. And it would be remembered for millennia to come as this larger than life period, taking up a space in the cuneiform cultural imaginary, somewhat like, let's say, the golden age of piracy, or Westerns, or the Middle Ages have for us today. This would be a time that would go on to become mythical.
And the kings of the period, Sargon, Enheduanna's father, and Naram-Sin, his eventual successor, would become these figures that would be warped and twisted to become these-- what you say, like almost archetypes of the good and the bad king. And that is the kind of period in which Enheduanna lived, and even beyond this historical mythmaking through which her figure would be filtered, even the actual historical information that we have about the period point to a time of great excitement, great dramatic change. The world would have felt bigger than ever before.
Enheduanna's father, Sargon of Akkad, united the previously independent city-states of Sumer, and his warriors, his soldiers, then made their way into places that people might not even have heard of the generation before. Trade boomed, there were huge technological advances, as well as in art, but at the same time, this new wealth and power that flowed into Sumer was extremely unevenly distributed. It was tightly concentrated around the king and his court.
And at the same time, the latter part of the period sees dramatic climate change, not man-made, as we have it today, but what we call the 4.2K dust event-- these kinds of terms that geologists like to come up with-- that would leave the area drier and would create famine and possibly even contributed to the eventual collapse of this empire. So why am I telling you all of this? Why am I beginning with the details of this period? Because I think all the things I just said could also, to varying degrees, serve as descriptors of our own period.
We are also living through a period of climate change. We are living through a period of great technological advancement. All sorts of-- I really feel like history is barreling forward, but at the same time, a time of huge social inequality, a time of huge divisions, social tensions. And again, these social tensions definitely also characterized Enheduanna's time as well. There were constant revolts, and one of those revolts is the narrative frame for Enheduanna's best-known poem, The Exaltation of Inanna. So a time where literally everything was turning upside-down.
And during this time, we have this priestess who is installed by her father as high priestess in the city of Ur, and the poem that is attributed to her, or the best known of the poems that is attributed to her, The Exaltation of Inanna, is a hymn to the goddess of change and contradiction and chaos. And again, I will return to a moment, in a moment, whether Enheduanna wrote this poem herself or not. But it is striking to me that this is the poem that people at the time attributed to her. This is a stunning moment, I think, in literary history.
This is a time in which everything was turning upside-down, and in which, rather than trying to think of dramatic change as an interruption of history, as something that comes to us and then passes, these poems, The Exaltation of Inanna, and especially another poem attributed to Enheduanna, The Hymn to Inanna, think of change and the goddess of change as the supreme forces that ruled this cosmos. So they don't think of chaos and change as interruptions, but as the way things are. And I think that remains a philosophical and a historical and a spiritual challenge that is more relevant than ever today.
If there is one thing you should take away from my talk, one piece of information I want you to remember about Enheduanna-- this is not even me who came up with it. It's two of my colleagues, Eleanor Robson and Gina Konstantopoulos, they developed this wonderful framework for thinking about Enheduanna that I really like, and that is to say that Enheduanna had three lives. And I think that's very important for how we understand her.
So the first life is in the period that I just described, and that is the Historical Enheduanna, who we know lived and served as high priestess. And this is her disk. You see an image of her there. We know she was a historical individual, unlike Homer, who might or might not have existed. We know that Enheduanna was indeed the daughter of Sargon. We even have the name of her hairdresser, which is one of my favorite things about her.
Her hairdresser had a cylinder seal, and so we recovered it in there. Like, we have the hairdresser's grave. We have the grave goods of Enheduanna's hairdresser. I like to think that somewhere in the Penn Museum archives, they'll find a hair, and then in a sort of Jurassic Park twist, they'll clone her. It's probably not going to happen. Don't hold out hope for that.
So we know she was a real historical person. We know very little about what her life would have been like, in part because we have so little information about her. But even so much about her role as high priestess is unknown, and I think one of the other really important things I want you to take away from Celine's talk is never would Enheduanna have operated in a vacuum. Enheduanna would have thought of herself as stepping into a long lineage of high priestesses before her, and also a long lineage of high priestesses that would have continued after her death. And so that is the first life of Enheduanna.
The second Life of Enheduanna comes 500 years later, during the time of Awat-Aya-- a wonderful name-- in which Enheduanna was remembered as a literary superstar. And so people at the time would have learned the language in which Enheduanna's poems were written, Sumerian, which had died out as a living language in the intervening centuries. And so Sumerian had become this language instead of literature and scholarship and religious ritual, much like Sanskrit in India or Latin in European Middle Ages.
And just as until relatively recently, or indeed, still today, British Prime ministers would be made to sweat over Virgil if they were to have any hope of attaining the office. So would courtiers in the Old Babylonian period have been made to sweat over Enheduanna's Exaltation in order to learn Sumerian and gain the cultural capital that came with it. Also, at the same time, Sumerian was, as I said, a language of religious ritual. And I really think that's also a very important part of Enheduanna's legacy for this context, in which we know she was studied because these are hymns. They are prayers to the goddess Inanna first and foremost, and in the case of another text that was attributed to her, the temple hymns to the various temples of the Sumerian world. So learning Enheduanna's text was also learning how to speak to the gods.
And the third life is this one. It's now. It is Enheduanna as an ancient figure in the modern world. And it is a life that began back in the 1930s, when this disk was dug out of the ruins of Ur, and then has been progressing slowly since then. Another thing I love about Enheduanna is that the first edition of the Exaltation was published in 1968, just as the world was turning upside down anyway. Why not also publish a hymn to the goddess of change and rebelliousness?
But then slowly, since then, she has become gradually and gradually better known, but still very much living in the shadow of better-known cuneiform texts like The Stele of Hammurabi or The Epic of Gilgamesh, until very much last year and Sidney Babcock's wonderful exhibition at the Morgan that I really think kickstarted a new wave of interest in Enheduanna. And it was such a wonderful coincidence that my translation could appear just in the wake of that. So I very much hope that I have done my small contribution and that events like this will continue to contribute to making Enheduanna better known.
So those are the three lives-- ancient historical priestess, ancient literary superstar, and then ancient figure in the modern world. One of the reasons that it's so useful to think of these three different lives is that we're not fully sure the degree to which they, as it were, match up with one another. So these manuscripts that we know the texts from, they were produced by students studying her text in the Old Babylonian period. But that is 500 years after the historical priestess herself, and we do not know-- we have no texts of the intervening centuries of her poems, with some caveats-- that's a longer discussion-- but the poems could have been written in the intervening centuries by other writers writing in her name, because these poems are told in Enheduanna's voice as a way of celebrating the already then famous high priestess.
So that would make them the ancient equivalent of historical fiction. Or they could have been Enheduanna's own compositions that were transmitted across time. And there is nothing particularly inherently suspicious about the fact that they are only known from this period, because that is when most of Sumerian literature is known from, anyway.
So that question remains open, and I think that question has unfortunately clouded Enheduanna somewhat. I think that is one of the reasons she has not been better known, but I think she's a fascinating figure regardless. Whether she is just a character in these poems or whether she is their author, she is an absolutely fascinating figure to me. And I also think it's worth noting that we see the very beginnings of literary authorship with her, regardless of whether she wrote the poems herself or whether they were written in her name because these are the first time that poems were attributed not to an anonymous and collective tradition, but to an individual and named author, and that is true regardless of whether that attribution was correct or not.
Yes, as I said, five poems were attributed to her-- the two hymns that are so fragmentary it's hard to make sense of them; the temple hymns, which celebrate the temples of Sumer, the gods who lived in them and the cities in which they stood; and then-- I don't want to play favorites among my children, but then the two best poems, or at least the most interesting ones are the ones that resonate most with modern readers, which are two hymns to the goddess Inanna. And both hymns combine an appeal and a glorification of this complicated, ever-changing goddess-- god of change, god of contradiction, god of chaos, god of war, god of sex-- they combine a celebration of her with Enheduanna's account, autobiographical or pseudo autobiographical of her own plight.
In the hymn, the section in which Enheduanna describes herself is missing. And if there was ever a fragment, if there was ever a break designed to annoy me personally, it's that one. Enheduanna says in that poem, "I am Enheduanna, High priestess of Nanna," and then the text breaks off. It's very precisely targeted at me, I feel like. But that is not the case in the Exaltation. In the Exaltation, which is one of the very few, fully-preserved poems from the ancient world, Enheduanna weaves her story and that of Inanna together to describe how there was this rebellion in the city of Ur that kicked her into exile, and during which she then appealed to the goddess Inanna for help. And that is the poem that we will hear today in Sumerian, in translation, and then in performance.
I only have a few minutes left, but I was also asked by the organizers to talk a bit about gender and its role in Enheduanna's poetry. And I'm very happy that I was asked to do this, because I think it is important to celebrate Enheduanna as a female poet, as a female voice. I think that's important. But I don't think we should pigeonhole her as that, either, because one of the other fascinating things about Enheduanna is that her poems contain some-- and especially in the case of The Hymn-- contains some rare but important descriptions of what we might think of as third gender or non-binary identities from the ancient Near East.
Her poem, The Hymn, is the pretty much almost the only source we have for one of these several different non-binary identities called the "pilipili," which is explicitly described as falling somewhere in-between what was conventionally male and what was conventionally female. And Enheduanna even describes herself in that poem, in what the very few passages that is preserved that is also biographical from The Hymn, she even makes a direct link between herself and these people.
That is not to say that Enheduanna was not a woman. She would definitely have been perceived both by herself and by others in her time as a woman, but she saw herself and her ritual performance in relation to these people. So just, I think, these groups are a good note to end on because they really show what is the main message of Enheduanna's poetry because what their function was, they were not just subverting gender identities for the fun of it-- though I'm sure it must have been fun, by the descriptions of their rituals that we read. It does sound a lot of fun-- but they did so in part to remind people that everybody in this world is subject to Inanna's power.
So Inanna can change everything. As shown in The Hymn, she can change the landscape by destroying mountains, if the mountains fail to bow to her. She can bully the other gods. She can do-- She can change everything and everybody. And one of the ways in which Enheduanna's power-- Inanna's power to change people manifests is her power to change people's gender. So these ritual activities in which people would take male and female symbols and reverse them and play with them and subvert them, they were reminders that everything about us and everything that we see around us is changeable. So they were constant, living reminders of Inanna's greatness and of Inanna's unpredictable greatness. Inanna can impose this change without warning and without seeming reason.
So to live in Inanna's world, as Enheduanna believes that we do, is sometimes terrifying and a sometimes glorious experience, as we will hear more in these selections from Enheduanna's poetry.
So I have also been asked to read some selections in preparation for the musical performance. And so I will do that. And these are selections from The Exaltation. And so you're about to hear something quite rare, which is a reading of Sumerian poetry. And there's a reading reason why this is quite rare, which is that we don't know how to do it. So the Akkadian language that people like Awat-Aya would have spoken is a dead language. Sumerian is, as it were, doubly dead.
And we have some guesses of what Akkadian might have sounded like. With Sumerian, it is much, much more difficult. So please take this with not just a grain, but perhaps a gram of salt. I'm going to read, first, some Sumerian passages, then some English passages, and so on. So this is from The Exaltation of Inanna, and I will read the Sumerian first.
[SPEAKING SUMERIAN]
I cannot emphasize to the extent which I don't do that often.
"Queen of all powers, downpour of daylight! Good woman wrapped in frightful light, loved by heaven and earth, holy woman of An. You hold the great gems, you love the good crown, to rule is your right-- you have seized the seven powers of the gods.
My queen, you are the guardian of the gods' great powers-- you lift them up, and grasp them in your hand, you take them in and clasp them to your breast. As if you were a basilisk, you pour poison upon the enemy, as if you were the Storm God, grain bends before your roar. You are like a flash flood that gushes down the mountains, you are supreme in heaven and earth-- You are Inanna.
Raging rainfall of fire! It was An who gave you power. You are a queen astride a lion, you give orders by the holy order of An. Who can fathom the great duties that befall you? It is who strike down the enemy, you who give the storm its strength. Enlil loves you for teaching the land how to fear, An has ordered you to stand by for battle.
My queen, hearing your battle cry the enemy bows down. Fleeing sandstorms, terror, and splendor, humanity assembled to stand before you in silence, and of all the gods' powers, you took the most terrible. Because of you, the people must march past the threshold of tears. Because of you, they go to the great house of grief. Because of you, they yield all they own without a fight."
[SPEAKING SUMERIAN]
"Your rage cannot be cooled, O great daughter of Nanna! Queen, outstanding on earth, who can rob you of your rule?
The mountain fell under your rule. Its harvest has failed, its city gates burn, its rivers run with blood-- the thirsty must drink it. All its armies march before you, all its troops disband before you, all its soldiers stand before you. While the wind fills the squares where they danced, their best men are led before you in chains."
[SPEAKING SUMERIAN]
"Wise and clever queen of all lands, of living beings and the innumerable people-- I will sing you a sacred song. Good goddess who is fated for power, it is daunting to sing of your might. Good woman, inscrutable and radiant, I will sing of your power. For you, I stepped into my holy home.
I am Enheduanna, I am the high priestess. I carry the basket of offerings, I sang the hymns of joy. Now they bring me funeral gifts-- am I no longer living? I went to the light, but the light burnt me; I went to the shadow, but it was shrouded in storms. My honey-mouth is full of froth, my soothing words are turned to dust."
[SPEAKING SUMERIAN]
"I am Enheduanna. I will pray to you, holy Inanna-- I will let my tears stream free to soften your heart, as if they were beer. I will say to you, The decision is yours. I cannot make Nanna care for my case. But Lugal-Ane has defiled the holy rites of An, wrenching the Temple of Heaven from the God of Heaven. Even the greatest god he does not fear. He has turned the temple of infinite joy and endless delight into a home of evil. He has made himself my equal, but envy hounds him. O, my righteous aurochs, chase him, chain him!"
Great girlboss moment.
[SPEAKING SUMERIAN]
"Queen, beloved of heaven! May your heart have mercy on me. Nanna has said nothing, so he has said, It is up to you! Let it be known!
Let them know that you are as mighty as the skies. Let them know that you are as great as the earth. Let them know that you crush every rebel. Let them know that you deafen the enemy. Let them know that you grind skulls to dust. Let them know that you eat corpses like a lion. Let them know that your gaze is terrifying, and that you lift your terrifying gaze. Let them know that you're eyes flash and flicker. Let them know that you are headstrong and defiant. Let them know that you always stand triumphant.
Nanna said nothing, so he has left it up to you. My queen! This has made you even greater, this has made you the greatest.
Queen, beloved of heaven! I will sing of your fury. I have piled up the coals, I have purified myself. The Holy Inn awaits you. Will your heart not have mercy on me? The pain filled me, overwhelmed me. Queen, lady! For you, I have given birth to it-- what I sang to you at dead of night, let a lamenter repeat at midday."
[SPEAKING SUMERIAN]
"The mighty woman, the greatest in the gathering of gods, has heard her plea. Inanna's holy heart came back to her.
The light pleased her. She spread joy and beamed with a passionate delight, like a downpour of moonlight, wrapped in charm. Nanna extolled her, Ningal blessed her, and the temple's thresholds welcomed her home. What she said to her holy woman was magnificent.
You who crushed the mountains, you who were given power by An. My queen cloaked in charm-- All praise Inanna!"
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
CHARLES STANG: Thank you, Celine-- Celine had to step out. Thank you, Sophus. That was beautiful reading, and two very, very brilliant talks. Thank you. So let me begin by introducing Anne Harley properly. She is, as I mentioned, a visiting scholar at the CSWR and a part of the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative. And Dorothy Harley is a Canadian-American performer, scholar, stage director, and professor based in Claremont, California, where she teaches music and interdisciplinary humanities at Scripps College.
After earning her BA in comparative literature-- Russian and French-- she taught at a university in China for a year, and then completed a master's of music in voice performance, a performance diploma in opera, and a doctorate in music with a concentration in voice and historical performance at Boston University. This afternoon's composition and performance are part of Anne's long-standing project, Voices of the Pearl, a song cycle that is inspired by the lives and writings of women who dared to encounter the divine unmediated and whose experiences span time, religions, nations, and cultures.
The voices of these women, as captured in ancient, often centuries, if not millennia-old texts, are juxtaposed against modern music. The result is often surprising, unsettling-- and justly so, as it mirrors, one may argue, the lives of these very women, their extraordinary experiences, and the fact that they braved and broke societal norms, putting them at odds with religious and social institutions. For this piece, inspired by Enheduanna's writings, Anne commissioned Douglas Knehans, Norman Dinerstein Professor of Composition at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. Douglas is also the director of Ablaze Records, a company which records and produces music by living composers.
We're thrilled to be hosting tonight the world premiere of Douglas' original composition, "To the Stars," which resulted from his partnership with Anne. The composition structure was built around Enheduanna's own hymns, which will be sung, as you just heard them spoken, in their original Sumerian. You will have English translations in your program booklet.
So the composition has five movements. Movements 1 and 3 deal with power and war, and so they're the liveliest of the five. Movement 2 is a report of Inanna's wrath. Movement 4 is intended as a portrait of Inanna. And the final section is a still and reverential movement in the form of a meditation on power and beauty.
Douglas' movie-- "movie--" Douglas' music draws freely on the whole history of vocal performance, from late Renaissance, early Baroque, to jazz and everything in between, including intoned or rhythmically spoken text mixed with sung text. This approach was specifically elicited by Enheduanna's words, which are rich, dynamic, dramatic, and expressive. So along with the composer, we hope that this piece will touch and engage you emotionally and you might experience a wide range of responses-- aggressive, thrilling, visceral, beautiful, and contemplative.
In Douglas' own words now, quote, "I hope that through my sound painting with the ensemble and electronics, the audience can be transported or seem to be transported back to that time, with its sprawling history, its expansive mysticism tied to the stars, and the natural world and our human place within all of that." Thank you, Douglas.
So late last night, as I was finishing these opening remarks, Anne wrote me a note. I told you, she's tireless. And I decided not to try to paraphrase the note, but just to read it to you, not least because for those of you who don't know Anne, you'll get a taste of her sense of humor and her sensibility. So these are Anne's remarks.
"Over 10 years ago, I was preparing to teach the first half of our music history sequence at Scripps, which starts at something called 'antiquity' and ends with Bach's death in 1750. In the first chapter of our textbook, I came across the mention of Enheduanna, the world's first named composer. It's taken until the current project, started several years ago, to find a composer intrepid enough to set to music those verses in their original Sumerian by this Ur-composer, who literally lived in the city of Ur."
That's a German joke, by the way. It's always good when you have to explain your jokes. It's not mine. It's Anne's, but I laughed. I thought it was good. OK.
"This evening's event honors Enheduanna contributions, but I hope--" This is still Anne speaking in the first person, by the way-- "This evening's event honors Enheduanna contributions, but I hope it raises more questions than it answers. If you're a student, a faculty member, a staff member, or an interested community member, I hope you'll consider categories of contributions you might have overlooked. Who are the documented female spiritual leaders in your area of interest or expertise or tradition? Are there any? Why have so few of us ever heard of Enheduanna before this semester?
If this evening nudges your dissertation or next article, or provokes a footnote or an additional sentence, or challenges you to discuss women's spiritual trajectories over the lovely reception our wonderful staff have prepared, a major goal of this work will have been accomplished. Please make sure to bother me--" That's Anne-- "Please make sure to bother me with your suggestions for focus for future cycles." Anne is hungry for more instances of this. So here, again. This is still Anne's voice. "Special thanks to the composer, musician, Enheduanna reading group leader Eve Sada, the tireless CSWR staff, and especially to Dr. Martin Worthington, whose initial generous contributions of expertise made this project possible."
Those are the end of Anne's remarks. In closing, I wish to join Anne in acknowledging and thanking our wonderful musicians this evening, including Maggie Finnegan, the second soprano in addition to Anne, Gaby Diaz on the violin, and Amy Advocat on the bass clarinet, Matt Sharrock on percussion, and Evan Ziporyn conducting. Thank you all once again. I hope you enjoy this performance, and a reception will immediately follow the performance in the space behind you. Please, to the stage.
[APPLAUSE]
[ANNE HARLEY, "TO THE STARS"]
[SINGING IN SUMERIAN]
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 2: The world premiere of "To the Stars." Douglas Knehans, composer; Anne Harley, soprano; Maggie Finnegan, soprano; Gabby Diaz, violin; Amy Advocat, bass clarinet; Matt Sharrock, percussion; Evan Ziporyn, conductor. Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.
SPEAKER1: Copyright 2023, President and Fellows of Harvard College.