MY NAME IS Enheduanna. I was named after the courageous priestess who fought invaders to save the sacred temple of Inanna, our city’s powerful goddess of love and war. Enheduanna was also a magnificent poet who wrote about her epic adventures. My mama calls me Heddy. I wish to be a poet and priestess like the brave woman I am named after. But I am too frightened of the goddess’s great ziggurat, the massive stone pyramid that is home to the most holy of our temples and whose very name inspires terror and awe.
I live in Ur in the Fertile Crescent, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Ur is wealthier and more advanced than other cities in Mesopotamia. We have irrigation canals, wheeled vehicles, and brick walls. But it’s our epic literature that most interests me. My parents know this, and one morning after Papa went to the wheel shop to talk to my friend Anki’s father, who makes and rents out wagons and chariots, Mama called me.
“Heddy!”
I was behind the house, in the morning shadows, using water to soften the clay I’d dug from the irrigation canal by Papa’s fields. I made my own clay tablets to practice
