Sumerian
𒂗𒃶𒌌𒀭𒈾
Enheduanna
En-hedu-anna
An office-name: high priestess, ornament of heaven.
Etymology
Sumerian En-hedu-anna. En, high priest or priestess, lord of a temple. Hedu, ornament. An / anna, the sky-god An, heaven. The usual English gloss is high priestess, ornament of heaven. It is a title bestowed with the office at Ur, not a private given name in the modern sense.
Historical usage
Enheduanna was en-priestess of Nanna at Ur in the time of Sargon of Akkad, about the twenty-third century BCE. A temple-hymn corpus is attributed to her and later counted as forty-two hymns. That count is a list.
She writes Sumerian hymns to Inanna. She is not the goddess. She is not the author of Inanna’s Descent as we have it.
Later development
English ENHEDUANNA, hyphens stripped, Full Reduction 42. The other three frozen faces miss. Cipher of a later spelling is not Sumerian arithmetic.
Why it matters here
Two kinds of forty-two: a hymn-count, and a later alphabet. The invitation is about office and ornament, not a claim that Sumer encoded English.
Stories that hold this word
Relationship type is not optional
A word present in a source text is not the same as a later critical term applied to that story.
Historical context
Inanna’s DescentPriestess-poet of Inanna’s city-world. Not a character in the Descent as we have it.
Related
Historical context
Inanna’s Descent