About

This site aims to make information about the ancient poet Enheduana freely available, offering tools and resources to anyone wishing to learn more about her.

The site is maintained by me, Sophus Helle, but I am always eager to incorporate suggestions by anyone working on Enheduana. Do you have an event, publication, video, or podcast about Enheduana that you’d like to share? Have you found a mistake on the website, or do you have a correction to the annotated translations? You can get in touch with me at email at sophushelle dot com. I see the site as a work in progress, which will change as our understanding of Enheduana changes, so all feedback is highly appreciated.

Thanks to Alexandra O’Sullivan Freltoft and Aya Labanieh for your feedback and support.

I am a writer, translator, and cultural historian, with an MA in Assyriology and a PhD in Comparative Literature. You can find my latest projects and publications at my personal website. I’ve been reading, writing, and thinking about Enheduana since my second year at university, in 2012, when I wrote a term paper about the dating of her poems. Enheduana was the main focus of my PhD thesis, which discussed the origins of literary authorship in ancient Iraq; and I’ve written articles about authorship as co-creation in Enheduana’s poems, the reception of her works in Old Babylonian Nippur, and her use of invocations. I’ve given talks, lectures, and interviews about Enheduana—you can find a sampling of them here.

My other work interests include the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, the narrative poetry of ancient Iraq in general, the history and practice of philology, and various pearls of premodern literature from across the globe.

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The first photograph is a view of the Euphrates river from Wikimedia Commons; the second is by photographer Maiken Kästner.