Gilgamesh, legendary warrior of ancient Mesopotamia, is widely considered to be the world’s first literary hero. But what if there is another figure, equally charismatic but far less well known, with a stronger claim to the title? What if the world’s first literary hero was, in fact, a woman?
The case for Gilgamesh begins with him as a real king, in what is now Iraq, in about 3000BC. If he was indeed a real person, the civilisation he was born into – the world’s first, in all likelihood – was called Sumer, and it was there that writing itself first emerged.
Received wisdom has it that Gilgamesh the king became the legend, and his exploits – his adventure in a cedar forest, his search for immortality, his close friendship with a wild man – were passed down in an oral tradition. Later they were recorded on clay tablets. In Babylonian times, in about 1500BC, the stories were assembled into the Epic of Gilgamesh. This relatively recent rendering still predates our oldest scrap of Homer by a thousand years, and no earlier literature exists. Therefore Gilgamesh is the first literary hero. Case closed.
Much of this theory falls apart on closer inspection, however. There is writing in existence that might be claimed as literary and that is older than the Gilgamesh stories. It depends on what you call literature. But even if you dismiss that earlier writing on literary grounds, then there is another Sumerian just as prominent in early literature: Inanna, the goddess of love and war.
Inanna is remarkably little known these days, but at the dawn of civilisation, she was vastly important. She went on to become Ishtar, who is more widely recognised, and then aspects of her character were incorporated into the goddesses Aphrodite and Venus. Of all the deities, she is arguably the one who has lived the longest.
I first became interested in Inanna while rereading the Epic of Gilgamesh. She is something of a baddie in the story, throwing a massive sulk when Gilgamesh refuses to marry her. But what an interesting and unusual creature she is, even glimpsed sideways, in a story about the man who spurned her. Somehow, on earlier readings, I had failed to clock her magnificence.
It was then that I researched the myths in which Inanna is a central figure. There’s the story of her descent into the underworld, for example, which leads to her horrifying death and subsequent resurrection. Her decision to send her lover Dumuzi, the sheep god, to the underworld in order to secure her own freedom. Her war against Enki, the lord of wisdom, which concludes with her thoroughly vanquishing him. I decided then that Inanna deserved her own epic, and set out to write it in novel form.
The ancient stories about Inanna are indubitably epic and, in my view, certainly count as literature. In them, Inanna herself is a great hero. The earliest copies of these stories are from around the same date as the earliest Gilgamesh stories, circa 1800BC. So it seems her claim to be the first literary hero is as strong as his. But it could be stronger: what if the myths about Inanna are actually older?
Getting to the bottom of this is complicated. What we today think of as the standard myths about Inanna and Gilgamesh were written at about the same time, but the stories themselves could have existed for a long time in oral form. Sometimes the earliest copies are in fragments, in different collections, in different countries. Sometimes evidence is known of, but not published. Moreover, the ancient Mesopotamians used a writing system called cuneiform, which is sensationally hard to read.
For answers, you have to look to scraps of earlier archaeological evidence, and the handful of academics who study early Sumerian literature. Jana Matuszak, assistant professor of sumerology at the University of Chicago, says there are unpublished fragments from about 2100BC that contain early stories about Gilgamesh that did not survive into the later canon. However, there are literary texts from about 2600BC that feature Inanna and her unfortunate lover, which may indicate that elements of Inanna’s story were already known then.
“Based on the evidence, it seems that stories about Inanna are older than those about Gilgamesh, but we can’t be absolutely sure,” Matuszak says. “So many stories never made it into the written transmission.”
What seems certain is that Inanna, a goddess, existed first. She is believed to first appear in the historical record, on a vase, in about 3000BC (long before the first mention of Gilgamesh).
Then there is the evidence contained within the stories themselves. As Martin Worthington, associate professor in Middle Eastern studies at Trinity College Dublin, points out, the stories about Inanna could be prehistoric. They do not depend on the existence of cities, he argues, in the same way that Gilgamesh’s do.
Matuszak mentions the theory that, if Inanna represented the planet Venus, the story of her descent into the underworld could have been a way of explaining the planet’s temporary absence from the night sky. “I would assume that the rather unique movement of Venus across the sky was something that warranted explanation very early on,” she says.
I ask her if there are any other characters from the dawn of history who might vie for the position of first literary hero. It seems the answer to that is no. For whatever reason, it was stories about Gilgamesh and Inanna that first caught humanity’s imagination, and held it for millennia.
So is Inanna the first literary hero? Quite possibly. But, as Worthington remarks, this is now “an extremely fast-moving field”. Research into cuneiform tablets, which is now supported by AI, means that at any moment, a new piece of literature could appear, transforming our understanding of the world’s very first epics and the heroes who stride through them.
• Inanna, Emily H Wilson’s retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh and other ancient Sumerian myths, is published by Titan. To buy a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
