Near the end of May I had the privilege of giving a tour of the Penn Museum Mesopotamian storage to Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods, Anansi Boys,Coraline, and many other excellent books, graphic novels, and stories of all sorts. I asked him what he would like to see and he said anything and everything, so I took him through the shelves and stopped first at an artifact I thought he might have a particular interest in. Known as the disk of Enheduanna, it holds a connection to Neil’s profession — it depicts a person who is probably the world’s first recorded author, Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad and high priestess of the moon god at Ur.
(It was wonderful! Read more about Enheduanna & what we know of her at http://penn.museum/blog/museum/ur-digitization-project-item-of-the-month-june-2012/)
saving this for anyone who tries the ‘but what have women ever REALLY done’ shit on me in the future
(I mean, I’ll always default to Grace Hopper, aka ‘the person responsible for computers moving past a state of being really fancy calculators’, but first identifiable author in all history? That’s pretty badass, too.)
(via keelansean)
