It is characteristic of leadership in this early period that there is a merging of divine and secular power personified by the ruler. The king list, a document written down in about 1800 B.C., traces the successive dynasties for the major cities in Mesopotamia back into the third millennium. While the chronologies are somewhat inflated, archaeologists have verified some of the data with other evidence. The earliest Sumerian dynasties were based in the cities of Kish, Warka, and Ur. According to the king list, the founder of the dynasty of Kish was Queen Ku-Baba, who is listed as having reigned a hundred years. She is identified as having formerly been a tavern-keeper, an occupation which puts her at the margins of society. She was later identified with the goddess Kubaba, who was worshiped in Northern Mesopotamia. She is the only woman listed in the king list as reigning in her own right, but the merging of her historic personality with that of a divinity is not unlike that of the mythical demigod Gilgamesh, ruler of Warka, who supposedly reigned in the Early Dynastic period, but for whose historical existence there is no hard evidence, and whose exploits are immortalized in the epic of Gilgamesh.
-Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy