The Exaltation of Inanna is the English title conventionally given to the Sumerian hymn Nin-me-šár-ra, attributed to Enheduanna. The book is not a biography or a narrative history of Enheduanna; it is a scholarly edition of that hymn. Its contents consist of the reconstructed Sumerian text of the poem, presented in transliteration, together with an English translation, commentary, and related textual apparatus. The edition was prepared by William W. Hallo and J. J. A. van Dijk, and it draws on cuneiform tablets to establish and explain the hymn.
The central content of the volume is the hymn itself. It is a first-person composition in which Enheduanna, speaking as a priestess, addresses the goddess Inanna. The poem combines praise of Inanna with an account of a personal and cultic crisis. Enheduanna appeals to Inanna for help and judgment, describing how a man named Lugalanne has violated the temple of the sky god An, treated the sanctuary with contempt, and forced her out of her priestly office. According to the poem, Lugalanne strips her of the distinguishing diadem of her office, humiliates her, and confronts her with a dagger in a way that has been read as an allusion to sexual harassment and to an incitement to suicide. Enheduanna presents herself as exiled, endangered, and reduced to walking “a land of thorns,” and she asks Inanna to intervene on her behalf.
The hymn then turns on Inanna’s response. Enheduanna intensifies her plea, invoking Inanna’s power over foreign lands, her destructive and sovereign aspect, and her capacity to restore her servant. Inanna accepts the prayer, and Enheduanna is reinstated in her office. The poem describes the goddess’s will prevailing for Enheduanna’s restoration, with Nanna and Ningal also present in the scene of restoration and blessing. The conclusion is both a praise of Inanna and a statement of the poet’s own authorship: Enheduanna describes her composition of the hymn as a kind of giving birth to the poem. This first-person voice—naming the speaker, narrating her expulsion, and making a claim about her own creative act—is one of the text’s most distinctive features.
The book’s scholarly apparatus supports the study of this hymn rather than retelling it as a story. It supplies the Sumerian text in transliteration, an English translation, philological and interpretive commentary, bibliographical notes, and plates or facsimiles of cuneiform material. Its scope is therefore the reconstruction, translation, and explanation of Nin-me-šár-ra: the hymn’s praise of Inanna, Enheduanna’s plea and indictment of Lugalanne, her expulsion and restoration, and the poem’s closing praise and authorial self-description.
Within the edition, the hymn’s exaltation of Inanna is theological as well as rhetorical: it presents her as the goddess who holds the numerous me—the divine powers or offices that order reality—and therefore as a sovereign whose favor can overturn the priestess’s disgrace. The poem’s movement from praise to complaint to renewed praise makes praise itself an act of petition; Enheduanna’s appeal depends on the greatness she attributes to Inanna. The indictment of Lugalanne is thus not merely personal grievance but a claim about the inviolability of An’s temple and the legitimacy of Enheduanna’s priestly office. The restoration scene affirms that cultic office and divine honor are intertwined: Inanna’s vindication of her servant is also a demonstration of her own supremacy.
The book’s interpretive significance is to make that intertwined literary, theological, and institutional content available for close study. Its commentary and apparatus allow readers to examine how the hymn constructs divine authority, how it frames priestly office and its loss, and how it uses first-person speech to claim authorship and devotional agency. The volume therefore documents a Sumerian poem that is at once a hymn of praise, a petition for justice, and a statement about the poet-priestess’s relationship to her goddess, while its scholarly presentation supports analysis of the text’s language, imagery, and religious thought.
