Entu Priestess

The entu was the senior priestess in the service of a major Mesopotamian god, most famously the moon god Nanna at Ur, and the office was reserved for women of the highest social standing, typically a king's own daughter. The role was conceived as a kind of sacred marriage: the entu was installed as the ceremonial consort of the god she served, resided in a dedicated temple complex, the gipar, adjacent to his main sanctuary, and took on ritual and administrative duties that extended well beyond devotional worship into the management of substantial temple estates, land, herds and dependent labour that a major Mesopotamian temple controlled as an economic institution in its own right.

Appointing a royal daughter to the office let a king extend his political reach directly into a rival or newly conquered city's religious establishment without displacing the existing cult, since the entu served the city's own patron deity rather than importing a foreign one. Sargon of Akkad used exactly this strategy when he installed his daughter Enheduanna as entu of Nanna at Ur shortly after conquering the Sumerian south, a move later scholarship reads as a deliberate act of religious and political integration binding the newly unified territory together through his family's presence in its most prestigious priesthood.

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.