Her name was Enheduanna. She was a high priestess, a writer, and a chronicler of her times. Perhaps the first human author for whom we have a name, an image, and surviving texts. A she. Not Homer, Socrates, or Aristotle, as many have been taught to believe, and as many have believed for millennia. Remember her name.

Enheduanna’s father was Sargon of Akkad, often credited with creating what is sometimes called history’s first empire. Stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, Sargon’s realm encompassed over sixty-five Sumerian city-states, each with its own religion and administrative tradition. How could one man rule a world so fractured? The answer was a woman. Appointing his daughter as high priestess, Sargon hoped that her learning and eloquence would unite the empire. He was right: Enheduanna’s hymns to the goddess Inanna were so influential that, for centuries after her death, scribes learned their craft by copying her words.

First unearthed in the 1920s and translated into English fifty years later, Enheduanna’s texts are many things: devotional poems, political rhetoric, and, as it turns out, the earliest first-person account of sexual assault:

“He has turned that temple into a house of ill repute. Forcing his way in as if he were an equal, he dared approach me in his lust! He made me walk a land of thorns. He took away the noble diadem of my holy office. He gave me a dagger: ‘This is just right for you,’ he said.”

The very first known text written by a woman is, among other things, a story of rape. In the final line, her assailant’s words – “This is just right for you” – suggest that she should kill herself. Rape here becomes a weapon of annihilation, a means of stripping dignity and life itself. Centuries later, Lucretia would take that dagger literally, ending her own life after assault. For others, like Christine de Pizan, suicide was not the only possible response. In The Book of the City of Ladies, de Pizan imagines three paths for women after rape: suicide, mourning, and justice. Her refusal of the traditional rape script, her insistence on agency, action, and speech, renders her writing startlingly relevant today.

_{Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) The Rape of the Sabine Women, 1635-1640. Oil on Canvas, 169.0 x 236.2 cm. via The National Gallery, London.}

In our earliest history classes, children are taught that the roots of “Western civilization” lie in ancient Greece and Rome. They are told to praise Plato, Ovid, and Aristotle. They read Homer (who, incidentally, may not have existed at all) and learn philosophy from Socrates. They read and reread the ancient myths, discuss them, watch them retold in film, restaged in paintings and plays.

But what don’t we talk about when we talk about history?
We don’t talk about women.
And we don’t talk about rape.

Demeter, Europa, Daphne, Persephone, Antiope, Hera, Leda. Philomela, Lucretia, the Sabines; remember their names. The specter of rape haunts Western civilization, and yet the history of rape remains largely unwritten. If there is no history of rape, has rape always existed? What does its persistence – and its erasure – tell us about the past? And what might we learn by seeking out its traces?

_{Titian (Pieve Di Cadore, about 1488-1576, Venice) The Rape of Europa, 1559-1562. Oil on Canvas, 178 x 205 cm. via The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.}

The history of rape is elusive; its evidence scattered and evasive. Most records come from male non-victims – ancient playwrights, medieval clerics, wartime chroniclers – but women’s voices are not entirely lost. We are only now beginning to rediscover them. These records also reveal that the stereotypes we hold about the past, namely, the belief that rape did not exist as a recognized category of violence and that the notion of consent held little to no significance, are false. Ancient Near Eastern laws and medieval court cases show otherwise. Rape was debated, legislated, and resisted. It is time to take this history seriously. Only then is a different future possible; one in which women are believed, and rape is not endured but eradicated.

Historicizing Rape

The dominant narrative of history insists that women have never held power. Feminist historiography exposes this as fiction. What happens when we view the past differently? When we restore women’s agency and take their words at face value? History is not static; it is a living discourse. It can erase, but it can also resurrect.

Because there was no single word for “rape” until at least the fourteenth century, early accounts use euphemisms like abduction, seizure, or adultery, effectively disguising sexual violence. Patriarchal language shaped patriarchal memory. In literature, rape was often reimagined as seduction or desire—already present in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and amplified in medieval romances and art:

“Never would a woman dare say with her own mouth what she desires so much; but it pleases her greatly when someone takes her against her will.”

Christine de Pizan recoiled from this logic:

“I am troubled and grieved when men argue that many women want to be raped… It would be hard to believe that such great villainy is actually pleasant for them.”

_{Guerrilla Girls, If You're Raped, You Might As Well Relax and Enjoy It, 1992. via Tate.}

Six hundred years later, radical feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon would say the same. Rape culture, they argued, not only enables sexual violence; it teaches us to eroticize it.

In 2014, Anastasia Powell and Nicola Henry defined rape culture as a network of beliefs and representations that normalize, excuse, or trivialize sexual violence. Art historian Macushla Robinson demonstrated its endurance in All the Rapes in the Met Museum (2021), analyzing 181 catalog entries where rape was aestheticized, never condemned.

As Lauren E. McCarthy and Gina Luria Walker argue, the sexual abuse of women is transhistorical and transcultural. From Margery Kempe’s fifteenth-century fears of nightly assault to today’s headlines, the continuity is chilling. The language changes, the fear does not. Even medieval law reflects this ambivalence: though rape was punishable by castration or death, the legal and cultural loopholes were endless. Women were deemed lustful, deceitful, changeable; “real rape” required torn flesh, immediate outcry, identical retellings, and tears. In 1313, a woman named Joan accused “E.” of rape and became pregnant. The jury ruled her pregnancy proof of consent—“a miracle,” since “a child cannot be conceived without mutual desire.” Seven centuries later, U.S. politician Todd Akin echoed the same logic, claiming that in cases of “legitimate rape,” “the female body has ways to shut the whole thing down.”

_{Käthe Hollwitz, Raped, 1907. via The Art Institute Chicago.}

As historian Barbara J. Baines observed, “Perhaps we think rape has no history because we mistake history for change. The legal history of rape, however, is the same old story.”

Resistance and the Right to Speak

_{Elisabetta Sirani (Bologna, 1638-1665) Timoclea Pushing the Tracian Captain Who Raped Her into a Well, 1659. Oil on Canvas, 174.5 x 228 cm. via Wikipedia Commons.}

And yet, the story is not only one of silence. Across centuries, women have found ways to resist, to demand justice, to speak. In 1405, Isabella Gronowessone and her daughters ambushed Isabella’s rapist, castrated him, and were later pardoned. Christine de Pizan recounts the Galatian queen who beheaded her attacker. In the thirteenth-century case Plomet v. Worgan, Isabella Plomet sued her physician-rapist, won, and had him imprisoned. Marguerite de Carrouges insisted on a trial by combat in what became known as The Last Duel, risking her life for truth. And in the seventeenth century, Artemisia Gentileschi brought her rapist to trial despite public humiliation, then transformed her trauma into art that shocks the viewer with vengeance and power.

Through her Judith Slaying Holofernes, Gentileschi paints not despair but defiance. Her voice and brush assert what history sought to suppress.

_{Artemisia Gentileschi (Rome 1593 - Naples 1652/53) Judith Beheading Holofornes, 1620. Oil on Canvas, 146.5 x 108 cm. via The Uffizi Gallery.}

Why is narrativizing so essential? Because telling one’s story is itself a form of survival. As feminist theorists remind us, empowerment does not lie in reclaiming a “unified self” but in the act of narration. To study the history of rape, then, is to listen – to insist that women’s voices, long silenced, be heard on their own terms. It is to recognize that history as we know it (history) belongs to men. But another history is possible: one written through women’s eyes and voices.