#HistFicThursdays - Enheduanna's Song from the Sands by Ellen Rachlin - Guest Post

Today, for the #HistFicThursdays blog, I'm delighted to be hosting Ellen Rachlin with a guest post about her book brilliant upcoming book Enheduanna's Song from the Sands, as part of her Coffee Pot Book Club tour! Read on to find out more about the writing journey with Enheduanna and what inspired Ellen to write her story.

But first, let's meet the book...

Blurb

Discover the untold story of Enheduanna, the world’s first named author, as she navigates power, betrayal, and divine destiny in ancient Mesopotamia. A mesmerizing fusion of history, myth, and female leadership that challenges how we see the past—and ourselves.

A high priestess dethroned. A rebel with a dangerous plan. One empire hanging by a thread.

When Enheduanna is named High Priestess of Ur, her connection to the gods makes her a target. Lugalanne’s coup strips her of robes, power, and home, casting her into the perilous underworld. There, amid forests of shadows and treacherous trials, she discovers that divine favor alone won’t save her—only cunning, courage, and a willingness to embrace the ruthlessness of her enemies can restore her.

Drawing on history and myth, Enheduanna’s Song From the Sands follows the world’s first named author as she fights to reclaim her voice and her destiny. Political intrigue, betrayal, and divine tests collide as Enheduanna must decide whether to forgive, to fight, or to harness the power that could shake the foundations of an empire. For readers who love The Song of Achilles’s intimate heroism, Circe’s mythic depth, or The Daughters of Sparta’s fierce women, this is a mesmerizing dive into ancient Mesopotamia where courage and cunning are the only paths to survival.

Enheduanna's Song from the Sands

is available via this Universal Link

Guest Post

Thoughts On Creating Enheduanna’s Song From the Sands

Moments after stumbling across her name, I wanted to write about Enheduanna. I encountered her while reading an article on Sargon the Great, her father, and the world’s first emperor. That claim alone stunned me because, of all the emperors crowding our history books, I didn't recall ever encountering his name. How could we forget the first? But I soon discovered there were many more forgotten “firsts” from ancient Mesopotamia.

For example, before I read that Enheduanna was his daughter, Sargon’s bio stated that his mother was a high priestess who placed him in a reed basket to float down the Euphrates. High priestesses weren’t allowed to have children. I found that I’d also encountered the precursor to the Hebrew literary tradition.

Then, among Sargon’s five children, two of his four sons succeeded him as kings of Akkad, though little is known about them. His daughter, Enheduanna, however, was both a high priestess and the world’s first named author. I was hooked. This discovery changed everything I thought I knew about authorship. The first named author wasn’t a scribe, a king, or a man, but a woman living in a patriarchal society. I picked up some translations of her work and soon realized that not only was she the world’s first named author, but extraordinary works were attributed to her.

The writings were detailed and deeply personal. They were supplication hymns appealing to the god Inanna, written by a woman who desperately needed saving. This one god was believed powerful enough to intercede and restore Enheduanna to her position as high priestess, from which she had been forced to leave due to a rebellion led by a man named Lugalanne.

I also found that her authorship is contested. None of the writings attributed to her are dated to her lifetime. Why create and attribute these remarkable works to a woman? The scribal tradition was male, and it was a male-dominated society. Either she wrote these works, or she was powerful enough to have them attributed to her hundreds of years after her death.

The case for her being the true author is compelling, including the existence of a seal dated to her lifetime. The seal appears to depict Inanna and Ebih, a composition attributed to Enheduanna. Similar mythological seals had not existed before.

Either she authored these works or she didn’t. Either way, she remains fascinating. As the daughter of Sargon the Great, high priestess of a major temple, and despite her privileged position, she was forced into exile. This deeply traumatic period is recounted in another hymn, The Lady of All the Divine Powers. The pain in the hymn’s voice drew me further into her life. I began to imagine events that might have shaped her extraordinary experiences.

There was scant biography to provide scaffolding for my story, but there was a rich treasure trove of works attributed to her, myths, legends, and other writings.

Enheduanna’s Song From the Sands is based on about twenty pieces of ancient literature, all of which have been recovered from tablets and translated by scholars whose work continually amazes me. In uncovering this literature, I came to appreciate the fact that this civilization held many of the same pillars we uphold today: schools, legal systems, governance structures, mathematics, astronomy, and literature, among many others.

Some aspects of their beliefs appealed to me. For example, Inanna is a central god in my character’s world. She was neither solely good nor solely evil. She was both benevolent and vengeful. This was true of all the gods. Inanna coveted ever-greater power. Myths describe her coveting the mes, or the divine powers that made the world function. In another story, she risked her life to seize dominion over the underworld from her sister.

I imagine that when the ancients stared into a night sky untouched by light pollution, their sense of wonder must have surpassed ours. They concluded that many gods were responsible for the different aspects of their lives, from the heavens to the underworld. They also believed that these divine beings created humankind to perform work on their behalf. Honoring the gods for the gift of existence was therefore an integral part of daily life. Ziggurats dominated city skylines.

If I could have become anyone in Enheduanna’s Song From the Sands, I would choose Nidintu, Enheduanna’s dear friend, who supports her throughout the story. This civilization lives only in my imagination, yet I would have loved to walk its streets beside Enheduanna herself.

Now, let's meet the author:

Ellen Rachlin’s poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Granta, Court Green, Literary Imagination, and various anthologies. She has published two collections of her poems, Until Crazy Catches Me (Antrim House, 2008) and Permeable Divide (Antrim House, 2017), winner of the 2018 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Silver Award.  

She has a historical fiction novel, Enheduanna’s Song From the Sands, based on the life of Enheduanna, the Akkadian high priestess and world’s first-named author, forthcoming from Histria Books and a collection of poems, At the Big Bang Resort, forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

She is also the author of two chapbooks, Waiting for Here (Finishing Line Press, 2004), a finalist in the New Women's Voices series, and Captive to Residue (Flarestack Publishing, 2009).  She received her MFA from Antioch University.  She serves as Treasurer of The Poetry Society of America and is a partner at Blue Leaf Ventures. 

Other writing genres include numerous textbook and journal articles on the subject of finance and investing with various publishers including Wiley.

You can follow Ellen on these links:

Website - Facebook - Instagram - Amazon Author Page - Goodreads

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