Priestess of the moon-god at Ur, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, ~2300 BCE — and, so far as any record reaches, the first author in human history to sign her name to her work. At the foot of her hymn-cycle nin-me-šara (the Exaltation of Inanna) the colophon reads:
“The compiler of the tablet is Enheduanna. My king, something has been created that no one had created before.”
The first author, claiming her novelty in the same breath she claims her name. For the Canon chapter she is the keystone: the first fixed text we can name arrived with its provenance stamped on it — I made this, you may know whom to ask — which is the whole bound-on-the-word in one gesture.
The honest twist
She did not invent writing (the wedge-marks were old in her country by seven centuries). And the tablets that carry her signature are copies made ~500 years later, in the Old Babylonian schools — so scholars grant her at most “authorship or editorship,” and the very verb wavers between spoke / made / gave birth. Far from spoiling the point, this is the point: the first provenance-stamp in history is itself of unprovable provenance. The origin of the canon operation is its own hardest case — which is exactly why the sort must be made from outside, never on the tablet’s own word. (Logged in The Discipline.)
Sources. Enheduanna (~2300 BCE), EN-priestess of Nanna at Ur, daughter of Sargon of Akkad; the hymn-cycle nin-me-šara (“The Exaltation of Inanna”). ⚠ Surviving tablets are Old Babylonian copies ~500 years later; “authorship or editorship” is genuinely debated. Search: Enheduanna Exaltation of Inanna nin-me-sara authorship debate.
Appears in: The Canon · The Discipline