Nanshe

Nanshe keeps the accounts nobody else keeps. The hymn to her lists what she notices — who cheated the orphan, who altered a weight, who took the debtor's last thing — and it amounts to the most explicit statement of social ethics surviving in Sumerian. She is also a dream-interpreter: Gudea of Lagash takes his famous dream to her to be read. She belongs to the marshy country around Nina in the Lagash state, and she is a daughter of Enki and Damkina.

Parentage

• Enki
• Damkina

Domains

• justice
• divination

Powers

• to take account of how the widow, the orphan and the debtor have been used

Sources

• Reference treatment of Nanshe, her parentage, her social role and her divinatory function.