Whose Voice Descends: Authorship, Loss, and Return in Narratives of Female Violation, From Enheduanna to Ovid

This paper examines a recurring literary structure — violation or loss followed by a staged, itemized return of what was taken — across documented episodes spanning roughly two and a half thousand years: Inanna's descent through seven gates and reascent reclaiming seven garments of power; the myth of Inanna and Shukaletuda, in which the goddess is raped while asleep and pursues her own justice; Ovid's Philomela, whose tongue is cut out by her rapist and who regains voice by weaving her account into cloth; and Persephone's independently attested, structurally related abduction and partial return in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. It asks a question prior to the usual one: who is actually speaking. The earliest and most extensive surviving Inanna material is credibly attributed to Enheduanna, high priestess of Ur and the first named author in world literature — meaning the foundational instance of this structure is not obviously a case of men writing a woman's violation at all. Drawing on Propp's structural account of recurring folktale functions, the paper argues that the loss-and-return structure recurs across documented literary history as an independently occurring narrative form, evidenced separately at each occurrence, rather than as a transmitted identity connecting them, and that the authorship question is genuinely mixed rather than uniformly male — a finding that complicates rather than confirms the premise the paper was commissioned to test.