Question 1

Who was Enheduanna?

Accepted Answer

A Mesopotamian priestess and poet of the twenty-third century BCE, and the **earliest author whose name is attached to their own writing** — a claim that predates Homer by well over a millennium.

**Who she was.** Daughter of **Sargon of Akkad**, the ruler who built one of the earliest known empires, she was appointed high priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur. The appointment was political: installing his daughter at the most important religious institution in conquered Sumer helped bind Akkadian rule to Sumerian tradition, and the arrangement was copied by later rulers for centuries.

**What she wrote.** A body of hymns, most famously the *Exaltation of Inanna*, addressed to the goddess Inanna. The work is remarkable for being **personal**: she names herself within the text, describes her own exile after a rebellion, her distress, and her appeal to the goddess for restoration. **Writing before her is overwhelmingly administrative or anonymous**; this is a named individual describing their own experience and claiming authorship of the composition.

**She also compiled the Sumerian Temple Hymns**, a collection covering temples across the region, which had a unifying religious and political function, and which ends with a line effectively signing the work.

**Why she matters beyond the first-author claim:** her hymns were copied and studied in scribal schools for **hundreds of years** after her death, making her a canonical literary figure in her own civilisation; her theological synthesis merged Akkadian and Sumerian deities; and the work is among the earliest surviving writing to use the first person about interior states.

**What is disputed.** Some scholars question how much of the material attributed to her she personally composed, given that the surviving copies date from centuries later and attribution in the ancient world was fluid. **The disagreement is genuine**, and the majority position treats the attribution as credible.

**Physical evidence exists**: a carved alabaster disc found at Ur depicts her presiding over a ritual and names her in an inscription — an image of the author, from her own lifetime.

Question 2

Who was Hypatia of Alexandria?

Accepted Answer

Hypatia was a mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who taught in Alexandria around AD 400, and one of the few women scholars of the ancient world whose reputation is securely documented by

Question 3

Was Homer a real person?

Accepted Answer

Nobody knows, and the question has been debated for over two thousand years. It has a name — the Homeric Question — and the range of serious positions is wide. What is attributed to him. The Iliad

Question 4

Who was Hildegard of Bingen?

Accepted Answer

A twelfth-century German abbess, composer, writer, natural philosopher and political correspondent — one of the few medieval women whose work survives in substantial quantity, and whose range is

Question 5

Was Cleopatra Egyptian?

Accepted Answer

She was Egyptian in the sense that she was born in Egypt, ruled Egypt, and was its last active pharaoh. Ethnically, her documented ancestry was Macedonian Greek. Cleopatra VII belonged to the

Question 6

Who was Gertrude Bell?

Accepted Answer

A British archaeologist, traveller, Arabic speaker and intelligence officer who was central to drawing the borders of modern Iraq — a role generally attributed in popular memory to men, and one whose

Question 7

Who was Noor Inayat Khan?

Accepted Answer

A British secret agent of Indian descent who worked as a wireless operator in occupied Paris during the Second World War — the most dangerous role in the network — and who was executed at Dachau in

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