Inanna, the queen of heaven

Inanna's temple precinct at Uruk was the Eanna, a name that means simply "house of heaven." It was among the largest sacred complexes in the ancient world, and it stood in the city that gave us the earliest writing we can read. Some of the very oldest tablets ever found are Eanna accounts: barley, sheep, beer, the ordinary business of running her household.

She was identified with the planet Venus, which is why she appears both as the last light of evening and the first of morning, and why the Sumerians could hold her two faces together without difficulty. The same body was both, so the same goddess was both.

Her emblem is an eight-pointed star, sometimes a rosette. You will find it on cylinder seals, boundary stones, and temple walls across three thousand years of Mesopotamian art. It is the oldest symbol we use, and we did not invent a single point of it.

The story called "Inana's descent to the nether world" is one of the most complete Sumerian myths we have. Inanna decides to go down to the realm of the dead, ruled by her elder sister Ereshkigal. Before she goes, she leaves instructions with her minister Ninshubur: if I am not back in three days, go and plead for me, first to Enlil, then to Nanna, then to Enki.

There are seven gates. At each one the gatekeeper takes something from her, one ornament, one garment, one of the me, the divine powers that make her what she is. She protests at every gate and is answered the same way each time: be silent, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. By the seventh gate she is naked and has no office left. The judges of the dead fix her with a look, and she becomes a corpse, hung on a hook.

Ninshubur does exactly as she was told. Enlil refuses. Nanna refuses. Enki does not refuse. He scrapes the dirt from under his fingernails and makes two small creatures out of it, beings of no rank at all, and sends them down with the food of life and the water of life. They get in precisely because they are nobody. They find Ereshkigal in agony and, instead of demanding anything, simply grieve along with her, until in gratitude she offers them a gift, and they ask for the corpse.

Inanna returns. But the underworld does not release anyone without a replacement, and demons come up with her to collect it. She spares Ninshubur, who mourned her. She spares two others who mourned her. Then she finds her husband Dumuzi seated on his throne in clean clothes, not mourning at all, and she hands him over. His sister Geshtinanna offers to take his place, and in the end the two of them split the year between them, half below and half above. That is the myth's account of why the year has a dying season and a returning one.

Around 2300 BCE, a woman named Enheduanna served as high priestess at Ur. She was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, and she wrote hymns, among them a long and fierce poem to Inanna usually called "The Exaltation of Inanna," in which she describes her own political exile and asks the goddess directly for help.

That makes her, so far as we know, the earliest author in human history whose name is attached to their work. Every writer before her is anonymous. It is worth sitting with: the first person to sign their writing was a woman, and she was writing to Inanna.

We should be careful about how we hold this. The surviving copies are Old Babylonian, several centuries after Enheduanna lived, and specialists genuinely disagree about how much of the text is hers and how much accumulated in the copying. What is not in dispute is that she was a real historical person, that the tradition attached her name to these poems, and that no earlier name is attached to any.