Enheduana, the Moon, and Me
Enheduana, the Moon, and Me
Episode XXVI ~ Finding Manuland: Two Second-Millennium Writers on the Moon’s Control of Our Words, Meanings, and Minds.
It’s time I further introduced the Moon as a main narrative theme into Finding Manuland. Where would be a better place to start than with humanity’s oldest named writer, Enheduana, high priestess of the Sumerian Moongod Nanna?
Enheduana was a biological daughter of Sargon, Universal Monarch, who united the Sumerian and Akkadian empires. The two most important deities and manifestations of deities in Mesopotamian cultures (which included Babylon, Akkad and Sumer) were the Moongod Nanna (Sumerian) / Sin (Akkadian) and the Sungod Utu / Šamaš. The Moon in Mesopotamian culture performed as it still does today in our months as a means of measuring time.
The Moongod’s motions were also studied and interpreted as signs emanating from the Gods to communicate with humankind. Studying the Moongod was a means of predicting what was about to happen. The Moongod’s movements communicated omens, which only the high priestess herself could interpret and communicate onwards to the community at large. Good job for the daughter of the monarch and his priestess wife to monopolise!
The Moongod Nanna, whom Enheduana served, was based in the ziggurat at Ur where Enheduana was the first in a line of priestesses we have written evidence of that stretched for five hundred years after her death. In Sumerian culture, as lists of the names of priestesses attest to, priestesses provided the means continuity of government between male sovereign monarchs.
Unlike in Indo-European cultures (the Sumerian language is not connected to any known language family, while Akkadian is a semitic language), the magical aspect of the Sovereignty function in Sumer was performed by female Magi. Enheduana was so prominent as an artist and magus that her writings and hymns were still being copied six hundred years after she died in 2,251 BCE. I discovered Enheduana’s existence through a tablet in a dusty corner of a Brussels museum I visited recently. I took this photograph of a tablet preserving one of Enheduana’s hymns when I came across it in a forgotten part of a museum in Brussels.
You perhaps know my hypothesis by now?
The sacred M-N- sound immanent in Indo-European culture’s most sacred vocabulary emanates from the sound the first Indo-European language speakers used to communicate the idea of the Moon as a measuring instrument (month, minute, menstruate, menarch, semaine, Samhain, moment,…).
In time (between 4,100 BCE and 2,500 BCE when the last Ancient Ukrainians who would found all of the main branches of the Indo-European language groups left the community from which Indo-European languages and culture emanated between the Danube and Don Rivers of Ancient Ukraine), the symbolic quality of the Moon’s luminescence was used to illuminate the fundamental linguistic bridge that connects all the networks of metaphors upon which our Indo-European languages depend for the totality of their meanings.
The Moon-based metaphor was used to illustrate how humans and animals are animated in the manner of how light illuminates the Moon’s disk (or indeed an alabaster disk representing Enheduana, magus of the Moongod Nanna).
Communicating the idea of meaning also became anchored to the Moon-based metaphor, according to my central hypothesis: one meaning is communicated by a sound which then is related to another sound and its meaning by the idea of meaning (itself an M-N- infused sound). Of such networks of interlocked sounds and meanings is the entirety of our communications’ apparatus constructed. So meaning itself as the M-N- sound immanent in it suggests is based on the Moon - a light which is not of the Moon illuminates the disk of the Moon, as one Meaning which is other than the sound signifying it, illuminates that sound.
Let’s go a step further than this Reversion to the Moon hypothesis (the idea of the ubiquity of this M-N- sound and connected meanings in a whole universe of sounds in Indo-European languages today is due to a force we don’t yet fully understand. Like a buoy bobbing in the water, M-N- bobs away on the surface of the sounds and words we use to communicate almost every thought in our daily lives. And in Finding Manuland, having identified this phenomenon, I articulate the mental and physical journeys into why this M-N- sound so predominates).
Let’s imagine the Moon exerts force / Mana on our minds in the same manner as it does on marine tides. Let’s imagine at least part of the Power of Mana is a function of the Moon’s immanence in this M-N- sound, meaning and Cryptotypic semantic signalling system. I am not saying we are all lunatics in the negative sense, just that those who coined the term “lunatic” and related mood to the Moon may well have been on to something.
The power / Mana that the Moon has over the tides and our minds is a phenomenon which the Ancients knew well, but which we need to be reminded of - thus the meaning and purpose of Finding Manuland. We hardly notice the Moon these days, except when, on nights like this one I recently experienced in Türkiye, the Moon’s luminosity is unavoidable in the night sky.
If we use that idea - the Moon pulls on our minds as it does on the tides - as an organising fiction in Finding Manuland, then as part of our mental and physical journey across Manuland, we might profitably begin to look at the Moon’s impact on our Indo-European culture, language, and minds a bit more carefully. And one means of understanding how the Moon impacts on early Indo-European culture is to look at Mesopotamia, and compare the two: Mesopotamian (Akkad, Sumer and Babylonia) vs Indo-European (Hittite, Mittani and, say, Celtic culture where we used a lunar calendar) cultures interacted in surprising ways in Anatolia. So that too is part of our story, as we have already hinted at.
As a writer myself, it’s natural that I might have a special affection for the first known writer in human civilisation. Here is the only known image of Enheduana (2,286 – 2,251 BCE). Here she is depicted on an alabaster disk (see top image) which, as befits a priestess dedicated to the Moongod Nanna is, even after 4,000 years, as luminescent today as a full Moon is.
See how in Enheduana’s Disk, Enheduana is, in scale, portrayed as being larger than the two attendants behind her, and the third priest (a naked male performing the work) in front of her? Here Enheduana is, compositionally taller and larger than the divinely inspired architectural form of the Ziggurat to her right on the Disk of Enheduana!
Ziggurats are, too, a part of our story here in Finding Manuland, where as cultural archæologists we look for the ancient in the everyday.
The transfer of the idea of a stepped tower with a temple at the top (in mimicry of the sacred holy mountains and burial mounds / mane - let’s recall the Dnipro Mound whose destruction by greedy property developers inspired the Power of Mana and Finding Manuland!) across Indo-European cultural space - in Buddhist mandalas, temples, stupas, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum) - one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World - until it reached the building and logo of my Alma Mater University of Oxford‘s Saïd Business School.
The Oxford Ziggurat was put there by divinely inspired architect Jeremy Dixon who liked the ziggurat of the Hawksmoor Church (St George’s) in Bloomsbury (see photo above), London and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The Tower of Babel episode in the Old Testament of the bible was written down around 1,300 years after Enheduana died, and was based on a ziggurat near Ur in Babylon. At the end of the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, Adam and Eve’s descendants go to Sumer and construct the city of Babylon of mudbricks around a Ziggurat - the Tower of Babel - or E-Temen-anki as it was known meaning “The Domain of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth.”
Worth noting en passant Finding Manuland was born at Saïd Business School, which is symbolised by a ziggurat, of my desire to marry my work as a diplomat in eastern Ukraine (where the Yamnaya forged the first Indo-European language and religious culture centred on the kurgan / burial Manes of male monarchs), with my studies at Oxford, as well as my Buddhist practice under the tutelage of Mañjuśrī.
The significance of Saïd’s location near the Omphalos of the island of Britain (Preten) - Osney Island - exactly where the two dragons one of whom would appear in the Welsh 🏴 flag were initially buried in a pit (Yamna) will come up again in our travels.
It has recently come to my attention that there’s a whole literature on pit grave rituals and ceremonies in which entire communities’ Mana is exchanged that is grounded in some of the 7,000 cuneiform documents found at Hattusa, capital of the Hittite Empire (1,600 BCE - 1,300 BCE) which we’ve already visited, Ancient Greek, Sumerian, Babylonian, Biblical and Akaddian texts, as well as in the archaeological remains at sites in Ancient Ukraine, such as at Dereivka, which I’ve written about before.
We will come back to this because tournaments and ceremonies (especially as part of death rituals and celebrations of the ancestors) (as the M-N- sounds immanent within them would suggest) are key to the transfer of Mana in communal settings, municipalities and communities.
The Yamnaya who created and spread the first Indo-European language from Ireland to India are themselves named for the pit grave burial custom that was used to identify them before isotopic and archaeogenetic science enabled us to determine Yamnaya Culture influence was mainstreamed after 2015.
On Enheduana’s Disk the naked priest bowing in front of Enheduana makes the offering, a reenactment of the primal sacrifice, on her behalf. Again, we have touched on the importance of sacrifice re-enacted as ritual across the entirety of the Indo-European cultural space before. The sacrificial offering, whether in the form of wine or bread in a Christian ceremony, or a goat (the word “sacrifice” is etymologically derived from the ritualistic killing of a goat) in other cultures is a re-enactment of the primal motivation of the foundation of whichever culture is making the sacrifice.
The offering represents a part of a contract with Sky Father, the Moongod or whichever local deity a culture wishes to troll into protecting their sovereignty, security and prosperity / fertility.
In Buddhism we make material and mental offerings as part of our daily practice. And in Tibetan Buddhism the mental offering of a Mandala with a Ziggurat at its centre symbolises the dedication of what merit we have gathered to all of humanity, the multiverse and the entire Cosmos.
Enheduana, after her initiations, was to spend the rest of her life in the Ziggurat at Ur. Sadly, and she writes about this in the text modern scholars have called the Exhaltation of Inanna, Ur was invaded by Lugulanne.
Enheduana writes thus of Lugulanne’s desecration of the temple of the Supreme God An in which she resided.
(Lugalanne) has altered the lustrations of holy An and all his (other rites).
He has stripped An Of (his temple) Eanna. He has not stood in awe of An-lugal
That sanctuary whose attractions are irresistible, whose beauty is endless,
That sanctuary he has verily brought to destruction.
The same emotion I experience when I learn, daily, of Ruschia’s latest monstrous destruction of places I and Ukrainians held sacred.
In the Exhaltation of Inanna, Enheduana also writes about the creative process, using the metaphor of birth “conceiving the word” after “heaping up the coals (in the censer), prepared the lustration, the nuptial chamber awaits you, let your heart be appeased.”
And my heart as a writer is also appeased by Finding Manuland and the act of legislating it into existence with such words as these. This is the experience of all artists, from Enheduana to me, whether they serve the Moongod illuminating Sumer, Manuland or not.
So we will return to this interaction zone again and again in Finding Manuland - Anatolia and Mesopotamia and Ancient Armenia and Ancient Iran. It fascinated me to learn that the Mesopotemians referred to Indo-European Aryan / Iranian (and Hittite?) cultures like the Mitanni (and Hittites?) as the “Umman Manda.”
Scholars have struggled for decades to explain this moniker for communities we now know are Indo-Europeans. Fans of Finding Manuland might intuit my hypothesis: Whereas the N-N- sound is ubiquitously immanent in Babylon, Sumer and Akadia terms, even in the second millennium BCE the M-N- semantic signalling sound was so immanent in the words used by the Indo-Europeans the Mesopotamians interacted with, they just called them the M-N-ers. And this linguistic phenomenon had remained forgotten until I discovered it again while investigating the Yamnaya Culture under the University of Oxford’s Ziggurat and in eastern Ukraine between the Don and Danube rivers.
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