Enheduanna, the Office's Best Known Holder

Almost everything modern readers know about how the entu office actually functioned comes from the writings and inscriptions of one holder, Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, installed as entu of Nanna at Ur around the twenty fourth century BCE. A cycle of forty two Sumerian temple hymns, one dedicated to a major shrine in each of Sumer's principal cities, is attributed to her and survives in later scribal copies, along with two long devotional compositions to the goddess Inanna, the Exaltation of Inanna and Inninsagurra, that include an apparently autobiographical account of Enheduanna being driven from her office during a political rebellion and pleading with Inanna for restoration. Because these texts name their author directly, Enheduanna is conventionally credited as the earliest author in world literature identifiable by name, predating the Homeric epics by well over a thousand years.

Enheduanna's writings are not merely of literary interest, they are the primary source scholars draw on for how the entu office combined devotional, literary and political functions in one figure, and later entu priestesses at Ur, some of whose administrative seals and inscriptions also survive, are generally read against the template her career establishes. The office is attested continuing at Ur and elsewhere well after the Akkadian dynasty's fall, into the Old Babylonian period, though no later holder left as extensive or as personal a body of surviving writing.