The poem known from its opening words as Nin-me-sharra, lady of all the divine powers, is a plea. The speaker has been driven out of the giparu by a usurper named in the text as Lugalane, is wandering, and calls on Inanna to act because An, the sky god, and the moon god she serves have not. What it argues is theologically striking: the powers, the me, that belonged to An have passed to Inanna, and she is now the one who decides. The poem names its composer in the third person and describes her giving birth to it in the night. A collection of hymns to the temples of Sumer and Akkad closes with a line saying that the compiler is Enheduanna and that no one has ever done this before.
The manuscripts are Old Babylonian school copies, several hundred years later than her lifetime, and that is the whole of the difficulty. Some Assyriologists hold that the corpus was composed in her name later, as a way of giving a school text an authoritative voice. Others hold that the ascription is early and specific enough to be taken at its word. The argument is genuine, both sides are reading the same tablets, and the atlas does not settle it. What is not disputed is that a tradition named an author here, and that this is the first time it is known to have done so.