She Who Wrote Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia ca. 3400-2000 BCE

Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia” is a small exhibition appearing at the Morgan “She Library and Museum in New York City from October 2022 to February 2023. Its focus is on Mesopotamian females of the third millennium BCE, including both goddesses—mainly Inanna and Ištar—and mortal women, mainly, although not exclusively, of the royal classes. The exhibit is subdivided into nine sections: Women Emerge, The Realm of Inanna, Goddesses Visualized, Individual Women, Women of Prominence (notably Pu-abi), Akkadians (notably Enheduanna), The Empire of Ištar, Motherhood, and Women Who Came After (second-millennium women). Objects displayed came from the Morgan’s own collection as well as the Oriental Institute of Chicago, the Yale Babylonian Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the British Museum, the Louvre, the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, and the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. The exhibit was created under the auspices of Sidney Babcock, the Jeannette and Jonathan Rosen Curator and Head of the Department of Ancient Western Asian Seals and Tablets of the Morgan Library and Museum; with the added expertise of Zainab Bahrani, the Edith Porada Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University; and graduate students Elizabeth Clancy, Majdolene Dajani, Ana Alverez Guzman, Jeiran Jahani, Lelah Javaheri-Saatchi, Giovanni Lovisetto, Kutay Şen, and Erhan Tamur. © University of Chicago Press.