The Latest Breaking News from Enheduanna

Is AI really ‘writing’? From a priestess to philosophers, ancient authors would have said ‘no’

I teach writing and rhetoric, but my college students and I often overlook a surprisingly complicated question: What is writing?

The Conversation · May 14

The world’s first museum was curated by a princess. A tour reveals the origins of the zodiac, calculus and writing

Around 2,500 years ago, a princess living in what is now modern-day Iraq collected a number of artefacts, including a statue, a boundary stone and a mace head. The items, which show signs of preservation, date from around 2100 BCE to 600 BCE. This collection, it is generally thought, was…

The Conversation · Apr 28, 2025

In Search of Enheduanna, the Woman Who Was History’s First Named Author

It was a random morning in November, and Enheduanna was trending. Suddenly, the ancient Mesopotamian priestess, who had been dead for more than 4,000 years, was a hot topic online as word spread that the first individually named author in human history was … a woman? That may have been…

Asharq Al-Awsat · Nov 13, 2022