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Betty de Shong Meadot. Inanna: Lady of the Largest Heart. Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna. Foreword by Judy Grahn. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000. 225 pp, incl index. ISBN: 0-292-77693-4.
Inanna was a goddess who celebrated her vulva, founded horticulture, and collected all the principles of her culture into her "boat of culture" as the introducing poet Judy Grahn tells us in this remarkable volume valuabe for teaching writing for performance, the possible boundarliess of female imagination, and the roots of matriarchal pre-classical literature. Scholars familiar with the oral literature of India's earth goddesses and Kali will notice similar characteristics as recorded by the poet Enheduanna, "High Priestess of the Moon God of the City of Ur," the city from which Abraham and Sara exited over five hundred years later. This Sumerian poet on a timeline lived seventeen hundred years before Sappho, and about eleven hundred years before Homer. She is clearly the mother of written poetry, and we are priveleged to have her forty five hundred lines that seem as exotic and far removed as science fiction fantasy, as Grahn tells us.
In the late nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson read from translated fragments of Sappho, the majority of whose work was burnt in the Christian era. Sappho was primarily focusing her attention on the star goddess, Venus in Latin, or Aphrodite in Greek. Thus Sappho was part of the female lineage of Enheduanna, this priestess and devotee of the goddess identified with the Venus in her time: Astarte in Syruia, Sihtar in Akkadia, and Inanna in Sumeria. Inanna has already influenced canonical writers in American literature, and she will more,...