(in alphabetical order)
Cathleen Chopra-McGowan
Lamentations as Indictment of Masculinity: The Complexity of Gender Performance
My paper examines the Book of Lamentations as a work of indictment of Yahweh’s divine masculinity. Drawing on theories of gender, and range of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hebrew laments, I contend that existing interpretations of Lamentations as a text that makes use of feminine imagery in its construction of apology and confession are too narrowly constructed. I argue instead that Lamentations is not a prayer for deliverance or restoration but a satirical indictment of Yahweh’s fitness to rule Judah.
Appealing to an established ancient Near Eastern code of royal masculinity, Lamentations levels a sophisticated critique of Yahweh’s ability to be king of Zion. For the poet, the event of Jerusalem’s fall was an ambiguous turning point in their relationship marked by an insistent demand to evaluate the costs of continued reliance on Yahweh. The poet uses this turning point to consider and critique elements of Yahweh’s character even through his tenuous commitment to fidelity to Yahweh. The poet’s awareness of the fragility of his obligation to Yahweh is reflected in both the form and content of his work. He mediates the aesthetic formal markers and political content through the composition of poetic sequences that critically identify and diagnose the failures of Yahweh’s performance of masculinity and the impact of these failures on the current position of the people.
My paper demonstrates that laments were a sophisticated literary technique not only to offer pious confessions but to formally indict divine malfeasance. The appeal of this genre lies precisely in the innovations which the form allows and fosters. The use of satire and gender theory to understand the literary characterization of divinity significantly enriches existing interpretations of the function and use of lament poetry, and provides deeper insight into the religious imagination of its ancient authors.
Megan Cifarelli
“Perhaps it was Always Already Gender:” Dressed Bodies in the Archaeological Record.
Since the earliest days of mortuary archaeology in the Near East, scholars have been interested in whether the human beings they found burials should be classified as women or as men. Initially, archaeologists relied on anachronistic assumptions about the sex-specific nature of certain aspects of material culture, notably those associated with dress. Accordingly, bodies found with “female” things were sexed as women, those with “male” things were sexed as men.
Feminist archaeologists, in an effort to correct the cultural biases inherent in the sexing of bodies through materials, and with access to more refined osteological techniques for sex determination in archaeological bodies, reframed the discussion to consider of patterns of association between bioarchaeologically sexed bodies and artefact types. These depositional patterns were examined through the lens of gender theory to fashion narratives about the role of material culture in the performance of gender in these burials.
But, as this paper explores, this latter approach is as anachronistic as the former, for its insistence on sex as being both inherent to body, scientifically determinable, and binary. This paper will challenge the utility of “scientific” determination of sex and its relationship to gender in ancient Near Eastern burials, offering a new approach to understanding the relationships amongst bodies and the objects that surround and adorn them, and their role in the lived and embodied experience of gender and identity in the past.
Laura Cousin
Looking for Gendered Spaces: the Case of Babylon in the First Millennium BC
In the first millennium BC, Babylon was the religious and political capital of Babylonia, housing the great religious complex of the god Marduk and the royal palaces. Based on a study of archaeological and epigraphic data (administrative and daily documentation, topographical texts Tintir = Bābilu), this contribution will attempt to determine whether some spaces were dedicated to men and others to women in the domestic sphere, in the major institutions (palaces and temples), and finally within the city itself, in order to lead to an analysis of “gendered spaces” within Babylon.
Firstly, understanding the place of women and men in houses and large ensembles, including the royal palace, is crucial. This question can lead us to a study of the normalization of the space and the distribution of the male and female populations within these structures. Secondly, more broadly, it would be interesting to determine whether certain urban spaces were reserved for men and others for women, raising the question of the circulation of individuals. The topic of the activities and professions that men and women could have carried out in the streets at different times of the day can also be raised. For example, it would seem that the chapels located in the streets, called ibratu, were rather associated with goddesses, especially Ištar, and have been frequented by women, thus attesting to a gendered practice of worship.
This paper will thus reconsider the traditional opposition between a public space that could have been rather reserved for men, and a private and domestic sphere rather reserved for women, and to question the possibility for men and women to have existed and acted in the same external and internal spaces.
Katrien De Graef
Seals on Heals. The Sealing Practice of Female Economic Actors in Old Babylonian Sippar.
Research on the role of women in the Old Babylonian economy showed that nadītu women were particularly present in this domain during the reigns of Sîn-muballiṭ and Hammurabi when their active participation in economy nearly equals that of men (De Graef 2016 and 2018). Initially predestined to be keepers and enlargers of the family estate, some of these women clearly became first rank economic players, developing their own estate alongside the family estate.
This paper investigates the sealing practice of female economic actors in sale, lease and loan documents from Old Babylonian Sippar, in order to shed light on their agency. Although their agency is not the result of their own free choice – their family decides to invest them with these roles – the unintended result is empowerment of these women as top-class economic players. A key question is therefore whether and to what extent they merely acted on behalf of their families or also acted in their personal capacity. Especially as some scholars still believe that it was the father and/or the brothers who actually managed the estate of their daughter/sister. One of the indicators is their sealing practice: do they have and use their own seal or do they seal with the seal of a male family member such as their father or brother? If they have and use their own seals, do these seals reflect their identity, gender, professional affiliation and/or social status?
The majority of these women seal with either an individual seal cut with a legend mentioning their name, patronymic and allegiance, or with a seal to which a by-script or kišib was added to indicate them as being the user, thus individualizing them as an independent economic actor.The assumption that the father and/or brothers actually managed the estate of their daughter/sister can no longer be maintained. The iconography of their seals, however, does not seem to differ from that of the seals owned and/or used by men. It seems thus that the possession and use of a seal is not gender specific but dependent on the social status of a person. As such, the sealing practice of female economic actors corroborates their economically and socially independent status in society or their “honorary maleness”.
Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme
The Aroma of Majesty: Gender and the Hebrew Bible’s Olfactory Cultic Theology
In the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh’s sanctuary is permeated by luxurious and exotic aromas. The sanctuary and its priests are scented with the “sacred anointing-oil” (Exodus 30:22-33) and the anteroom of the sanctuary is enveloped in smoke from the incense offerings (Exodus 30:7-9). Both the incense and the anointing-oil mark out Yahweh’s cult place as a fragrant sphere and in this way the Hebrew Bible’s description of Yahweh’s sanctuary corresponds with other Ancient Near Eastern and ancient Greek texts, where both the deities and their temples are said to emanate a lovely smell.
There are particularly two spheres in Hebrew Bible texts, where luxurious scents and exotic aromas are described in detail; one is in descriptions of the cult as mentioned above and the other is in texts that focus on sexual attraction and seduction, such as the Song of Songs and the Book of Esther. These texts make it clear that enticing scents and fragrances are an important component in the construction of sex appeal in the Hebrew Bible. In Hebrew Bible scholarship, these two scent-related spheres, the cultic and the erotic, are consistently treated separately, either as a means of categorization or because these two spheres are seen as incompatible. However, the Hebrew Bible’s non-cultic use of scents may in fact inform our understanding of Yahweh as a fragrant god.
This paper argues that the luxurious scents in the Hebrew Bible’s olfactory cultic theology overlap not only with the erotic sphere but also to a very large extent with the sphere of masculinity and kingship and that Yahweh’s fragrant cult corresponds with Yahweh’s supreme majesty. Therefore we should understand the scented symbolism of the Hebrew Bible’s description of cult as expressing something about Yahweh as the highest king and alpha-male as well as expressing divine presence and divine ontology.
Ana Delgado Hervás and Aurora Rivera Hernández
Rituals of Mothering and Fathering in Phoenician Sacred Places
The aim of this paper is to analyze the maternity and paternity related ritual practices from a variety of sacred places in the Phoenician and Punic area. In order to undertake this endeavour, the material culture present in various ritual wells or favissas from the Mediterranean Levant, Sardinia, Ibiza and the south of the Iberian Peninsula is studied.
Special attention will be paid not only to the analysis of the terracottas but also to other materials provided in these contexts, which will further allow the study of the gestures, ritual actions and memories − both individual and collective – that were generated as consequence of the execution of said rituals. Traditionally, the material culture of the favissas has been vaguely, simplistically and superficially related to the realm of maternity. The rereading of these contexts provides a novel vision that comes close to describing the actual complexity of the magic and ritual practices performed in the above mentioned spaces, as well as the emotions, desires and fears of the different people who took part in their execution.
Baptiste Fiette
Zinû, Wife and Manager in Old Babylonian Larsa
In 1763 BC, the troops of Hammu-rabi, king of Babylon (1792-1750 BC) conquered the kingdom of Larsa, in southern Mesopotamia. A new provincial administration has been established in this land henceforth called Yamutbal, with Babylonian dignitaries among high officials. One of them was Šamaš-hazir, the manager of the royal lands in the Larsa region. His archives are well known: 337 tablets document his professional as well as private activities.
The archives of Šamaš-hazir concern in particular the economic activities of his own domain and reveal the involvement of his wife Zinû for its management. 13 letters, 2 loan contracts and 8 accounting documents testify to her functions relating to the cultivation of fields and palm groves, stockbreeding, and product storage, as well as her interaction with economic partners of Šamaš-hazir’s domain (farmers, shepherds, high officials) or other members of the family (sons, Zinû’s mother). The case of Zinû thus appears very interesting for a re-examination of the active role played by a woman (with a high status) in the management of an agricultural domain, whereas the cuneiform documentation shows more broadly the involvement of Mesopotamian wives in food and textile production within the domestic sphere.
Through the study of her activities, this paper will investigate Zinû’s degree of autonomy by the examination of her own ability to act as an active economic player when Šamaš-hazir entrusted her with the management of the domain in his absence. To answer this question, we will examine the relationship between Zinû, her husband and their economic partners, and we will compare the case of Zinû with that of other contemporary wives, like the well-known spouses of Old-Assyrian merchants or princess Iltani at Qaṭṭara.
Raffaele Frascarelliand Letteria Grazia Fassari
Queering the Past. The Case of the Goddess on Lion at Hasanlu
Rooted in the Central Asian iconography of the sacred from the 3rd millennium BCE until the arrival of Islam, and also related to the mixed pantheons that combine Central Asian, Iranian, Buddhist, Hindu and Chinese divinities, the image of the goddess riding a lion in the Hasanlu bowl offers the chance to investigate its origin. Posture, attire, lion, divine emblems mark her belonging to a cultural horizon that seems to allude to the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe. The Iranian, Assyrian, Syro-Hurrite, Elamite, Hurro-Urartian and Transcaucasian influences make Hasanlu a privileged observatory to analyze the regulatory apparatus affecting gender hierarchies. Eluding the boundaries imposed by the binary vision, the nomadic lifestyle seems to free the body in favor of fluid strategies necessary to deal with harsh natural conditions. Indeed, some iconographic details of the Hasanlu bowl might reveal a social dimension related to an unconventional gender performativity caused by the mobilization of cultural resources that identified nomadism. Furthermore, the presence of the riding goddess at Hasanlu suggests scrutinizing the cyclical infiltration of nomadic cultures within Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Exploring gender, questioning its epistemic boundaries, enquiring how gender stereotypes have crystallized over time, this paper proposes an inception towards a different history whose traces may have been lost in the unwitting binarism of expertise.
Amy Rebecca Gansell
Images of Divinely Sanctioned Neo-Assyrian Queenship at Nimrud’s Northwest Palace
This paper presents an iconographical study of Neo-Assyrian queenship at Nimrud’s Northwest Palace. Neo-Assyrian art preserves a few images of royal women, which scholars have identified as queens. But, moving beyond the identification of individual figures, I would like to turn our language and perspectives to a consideration of the visual representation of queenship, as a divinely sanctioned royal office. Indeed, any image of a queen may be described as an image of queenship – i.e., the woman is portrayed enacting the duties or opportunities of her office. Such images are exemplified by the depiction of the royal couple on the Banquet Relief from Ashurbanipal’s North Palace at Nineveh and Queen Naqia’s ritual procession behind the king on the well-known bronze plaque fragment in the Louvre.
Here, however, I will emphasize images that fundamentally affirm the office of queenship and thereby visually establish queenship as an official position within the Assyrian ideological system. This iconography appears on seals and a gold pendant excavated from the royal tombs at Nimrud’s Northwest Palace. Some of these objects were directly associated with the bodies of queens and probably served as markers not only of personal identity, but also of personal authority. The iconography consists of scenes in which a goddess and a queen are depicted facing one another.
I propose that the goddess is Ishtar. Her attributes vary but probably include a sword, scimitar, archery gear, and a lion. In some images the goddess holds a ring, which I interpret as an emblem of rulership. She extends the ring toward the queen, demonstrating that queens, in the manner of kings, were invested with divinely granted authority. Thus, queenship, as an empowered position, is illustrated in the eighth-century BCE prior to Sennacherib’s religious reforms that are credited with elevating the office.
Agnès Garcia-Ventura
Women Talking about Women: Digging the Memory of Women in Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Isabel Frances Dodd (1857-1943) worked for more than 40 years in the American College for Girls of Constantinople (now Istanbul) as professor of art and archaeology. In this institution Dodd was an active teacher and member of the board, and she also leaded the initiative of a small archaeological museum. Moreover she took advantage of her training and privileged position in the area to visit some archaeological settlements, like Hattuša, and therefore to see and study some archaeological finds first hand. Thanks to these circumstances, she was able to launch some hypotheses which were influential in the arena of ancient Near Eastern studies. In spite of this, she was never considered, neither by herself nor by her contemporaries, as a “proper” scholar. Indeed she was always considered an outsider in academia, although this did not prevent her from being a member of prestigious learned societies and cultural institutions such as the Society of Women Geographers or the American Museum of Natural History.
Anne Goddeeris
Women and Their Weight. Incorporating Weighted Nodes in a Network Analysis of a File of Administrative Records from Old Babylonian Nippur.
An administrative file from Old Babylonian Nippur records expenditures of barley. Besides identifying the individuals receiving various amounts of barley and those responsible for specific transactions, the expenditures give information concerning their purpose and concerning the occasion on which they take place. The expenditures stand out thanks to their variation in purpose and destination: building projects occur next to rations, offerings and the acquisition of foodstuffs for cultic occasions. These details situate the file in the Nippur temple management, which apparently also is involved in urban building projects. At the same time, the file is extremely coherent and uniform from a typological point of view.
The amounts distributed display a great variation as well, and therefore, these expenditures lend themselves for a network analysis with weighed edges, a methodology that has not yet been tested in the field of Assyriology, where network analysis has been used for prosopographic purposes mainly.
Since several women play a central role in the file, I will focus on their role in the file, and, in extension, in the Nippur temple management in this talk. They appear on all levels, receive small and large amounts, for personal use as well as for the acquisition of offering foodstuff. Large segments of the management of this organization fall in the hands of women, some, but not all of whom have a cultic title.
Ann. K. Guinan
Probing the Boundaries of Mesopotamian Heteronormativity: The Case of Tablet 103
Tablet 103 of the Mesopotamian Omen series Šumma Alu records omens based on acts of sexual intercourse between a man who is the sexual subject and the woman is the sexual object. All the omens on the text are based on the alignment of biological sex and the cultural constructions of sex and gender. Therefore, the topical thread linking the omens on the tablets is an implicit concept of heteronormativity. The omens of Tablet 103 test the limits of sexual norms. They explore the boundaries of the body, the liminal locales in the human environment, and the sexual possibilities within boundaries of the family.
Historians of premodern sexualities come to the subject with a set of concepts and terms derived from the 19thcentury. While understanding premodern sexualities may be difficult, it is often the case that we can comprehend the patterns of sexual life lived outside our modern categories, but lack an adequate vocabulary to describe them.
Today historians of sexuality are careful not to refer to premodern homosexuality. K.M. Phillips and B. Reay remind us that heterosexuality, “the other side of the modern sexual currency” is also a 19thconstruct — equally anachronistic and easier to overlook. Just as the term homosexuality can no longer serve as a guide to premodern sexualities, they argue that heterosexuality has also outlived its usefulness. (Sex Before Sexuality: A Premodern History, 2011).
A Mesopotamian concept of heteronormativity complicates this theoretical picture. At the same time without a theoretical construct the question I address could not even be asked. This presentation is an interpretive reading of the omens of Tablet 103 and an examination of the text’s strange discursive logic.
Fumi Karahashi and Agnès Garcia-Ventura
Women’s Participation in socio-Economic Activities in Presargonic Lagash (I) and (II)
(I) This paper will closely analyze women’s activities recorded in Presargonic Lagash texts, such as overseeing the textile workers, buying and selling persons and houses, holding various types of land and fields, and giving and receiving gifts, and argue that Lagashite women, certainly small in number compared to men, actively participated in socio-economic activities of their times.
(II) Julia Asher-Greve, one of the scholars using “agency” to approach ancient Near Eastern sources, stated in a 2013 publication that “agency, the capacity of acting, of a person or group, depends primarily on access to social and cultural resources, and secondarily on gender and status”. In this paper we will pay special attention to the way the latter features, i.e. gender and status, conditioned the capacity of socio-economic action of women in Presargonic Lagash according to the data registered in the texts and previously presented by Fumi Karahashi in her paper [see (I)]. In doing so we aim to be able to see to which extent these women developed enterpreneurship and to discuss which degree of agency they had compared to contemporary women from other social groups and to men as well.
Brigitte Lion
Grandmother’s Tablets: Some Reflections on Female Landowners in Nuzi
In the kingdom of Arraphe, it is not uncommon for women to own land: queens but also rich women are landowners. From this point of view, gender does not seem to be a fundamental factor, on the one hand because real estate ownership is primarily linked to economic means, and on the other hand because men and women make the same kinds of transactions: they acquire land and pass it on to their descendants, with property titles. These tablets include ṭuppi marūti, real estate adoption tablets, which keep this name even when the adopted person is a woman.
However, gender is a secondary factor, since women appear less frequently than men as real estate owners; they apparently own only a small part of the land.
This paper will examine transactions of land held by women, particularly in the context of family strategies where transmission appears patrilineal and matrilineal, but also outside the family. The question arises as to whether gender is a relevant category in this case, and if so, to which extent.
Mireia López-Bertran and Meritxell Ferrer
Performing Beauty in Phoenician and Punic Cultures: a Gender Perspective
Most of the studies focused on beauty have conceived it as a social and cultural phenomenon. This understanding is strongly related to body studies that have emerged from feminist and postprocessual theories. Our approach to the concept of beauty considers it as an on-going process stressed by body modifications, whetherpermanent or not, that in many cases request to be repeated in time and that actively participate in the construction and performance of social identities of gender, sexuality, status or ethnicity.
We will analyse the beautification practices of the Phoenician and Punic societies of the Levant and the Mediterranean centres from the 8thcenturies to the 2ndcenturies BCE. In order to do that, we will use a wide range of data: the material culture of body modifications like cosmetic boxes, pyxides or grinding palettes, the written sources, especially the Ancient Testament and Ugaritic texts, iconographic sources, e.g, terracotta anthropomorphic figurines and the funerary record. We will contend that Phoenician and Punic societies had a standardised pattern of feminine beauty. In addition, we will also shed light onto cross-gender beauty practices that affected women and men alive and dead.
Natalie. N. May
Women in Cult in Mesopotamia
Researching the female role in Mesopotamian society, Joan Westenholz wrote: “Mesopotamian women are most visible functioning in the religious sphere.” Departing from her assumption my paper will explore the role of women in cult in Mesopotamia in diachronic perspective. But I will particularly concentrate on the first millennium for which the cultic functions of women remain unexplored with the reference to the reasons for the lack of research in this sphere.
I will target the correlation between the social status of women and their role in cult as well as the evolution of this role. I will address the question how shall we define “priestess” for Mesopotamia given all the difficulties involved with the definition of a male “priest”.
James D. Moore
Socio-Historical Insights into Women at Elephantine according to the Aramaic Documentary Sources
Since the sensational discovery of the Elephantine Aramaic Papyri in a series of publications at the beginning of the 20th century, scholars have noted the significant presence of women in the contracts, and to a lesser extent in the epistolary papyri (Porten 1968). In recent years, the welcomed perspectives of women and gender studies have found the Elephantine papyri to be rich databank, as the title of Azzoni’s monograph illustrates, The Private Lives of Women at Elephantine (2013).
The corpus of Aramaic documents from Elephantine, which date between c. 500–400 BCE, has grown extensively in the last 12 years, and the interest in women on the island, across languages and periods, has become a major research area for an ERC funded project at the Berlin Museum (dir. Verena Lepper). This paper will discuss the role of women on Elephantine island by studying the Aramaic documentary data. The objective is to provide new insights into the social history of women on the island, focusing particularly on the overlooked administrative papyri and the hundreds of newly published ostraca, many of which are address to (and perhaps composed by) women. Previous studies have looked at the nuanced roles women played as legal parties in property exchanges or their liberal divorce rights; this study will build on these findings and show that women held equal ranks to many men in the Persian state’s military units on the island and that they played significant roles in the daily economy, perhaps even the temple economy.
Beth Nakhai Alpert
Ecce Feminae: Excavations at the Convent of Notre Dame of Sion and the Arch of Ecce Homo on Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa
Sister Marie Godeleine (1879-1960), a member of the French Order of the Sisters of Notre Dame of Sion, lived in the Convent of the Sisters of Sion by the Arch of Ecce Homo on Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa. The story of her archaeological work uncovering the Lithostratos, the pavement that tradition holds is where Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus, is virtually unknown in the larger archaeological world. Sister Marie Aline de Sion (1911-1971), her younger colleague, also lived at the Convent. In 1955, she completed her doctorate at the Sorbonne, building on the work of Sr. Marie Godeleine and exploring other archaeological elements of the Convent. Although her dissertation was published, she, too, never gained stature in the community of Jerusalem’s archaeologists. I “discovered” these women while researching Jerusalem’s female excavators. Members of the Sisters of Notre Dame of Sion and others have generously shared archival materials which, together with ephemera and published reports, have enabled me to reconstruct something of the rich story of these two important French women, whose contributions to the field of archaeology have been, until now, virtually unknown.
Omar N’Shea and Sophus Helle
Soldier or Scholar? Competing Masculinities in the Representation of Asshurbanipal
‘Nabu, scribe of the world, gave me the tenets of wisdom as a gift, while Ninurta and Nergal endowed my body with strength, virility, and peerless power!’ (Assurbanipal Prism E, l. i 4’-7’)
In his inscriptions, the Assyrian king Assurbanipal (c. 687-627 BCE) lays a double claim to hegemonic manhood: he insists on presenting himself not only as an accomplished scribe who is knowledgeable in everything, but also as a fierce fighter who exerts his strength on the battlefield.
This paper will examine the intersection of masculinities in Late Assyrian royal art, focusing on various representations of king Assurbanipal in their historical and artistic context. These representations betray the existence of multiple models of masculinity that were brought into new configurations during the last decades of the Assyrian empire. In the secondary literature, Assurbanipal is strongly associated with a new ideal of masculinity, a scholarly ideal, which emphasizes arcane knowledge and scholarly craftsmanship. Hymnic texts describe his personal dedication to Nabu, god of wisdom and the scribal arts. But at the same time, this new ideal is matched by a constant return to a more traditional image of the king as a virile soldier.
On the one hand, these ideals appear to be complementary, as they are concerned with the king’s mind and body respectively. They are two different domains, both of which need to be divinely ‘shaped’ for Assurbanipal to meet the requirements of kingship. Further, both are insistently sexualized: the role of the soldier highlights the king’s virility, while that of the scholar stresses his ‘pleasant mouth’, lips, and tongue. On the other hand, the constant oscillation back and forth between the roles also hints at a more fundamental disunity between them. The king is presented first as aggressive, then as reflective, first as sadistic, then as eloquent. In this paper, we will explore the place of Late Assyrian royal art at an uneasy intersection between military and scholarly masculinities, and ask whether this dialectic reflects a contradiction, a complementarity, or a poetics of uncertainty.
Ilan Peled
Was It Law? Gender Relations and Legal Practice in the Ancient Near East
One of the most frequent questions Assyriologists face when dealing with ancient Near Eastern law is probably the most fundamental one: was it indeed law? Were the texts we call “law collections” indeed utilized as such, or did people live their lives completely regardless of what these collections decreed?
In my presentation I examine this question by focusing on gender relations. I suggest that when it came to matters of gender, at least some correspondence indeed existed between the law collections and texts that attest to people’s everyday life. In assessing this correspondence, I use the terms “instructive texts” and “descriptive texts”.
To the first group belong texts that were meant to instruct people how to behave: first and foremost, the law collections themselves, and to a lesser degree, royal decrees and instructions, and loyalty oaths taken by officials. The second group is harder to delineate, since it includes a variety of texts that describe how people actually behaved: court decisions, economic transactions, letters, even literary compositions. All these types of sources could relate to legal matters, and thus, comparing these “descriptive texts” with the previously-mentioned “instructive texts” allows us to test the question of the applicability of the law collections, and to assess if-and-how they governed gender relations in daily life. By this, I offer another outlook on the dynamics of gender relations in the ancient Near East, by examining their legal aspects.
Frances Pinnock
The Late Bronze Age in Syria: Was It a Dark Age for Women?
The Late Bronze age in Syria is a period of profound transformation with respect to the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. Changes can be observed in architecture and town planning, but also in the visual representation of kingship. Notably, female figures seem to disappear from monumental art, while it is possible to observe the flourishing of the so-called “Intercultural Style”.
The questions I will try to answer in my paper are: 1) why did these changes take place? Is there a different way to represent visually the elites? How does this affect the public presence of women?
Sarah J. Scott
The Scorpion and the Spider: Gendered Identities in Early Literate Seals and Sealings
Archaeological, social, and linguistic research on the Ancient Near East has benefited from etymological methodologies. Indeed, the contribution of Assyriologists’ work on patronymies has shed much light on the histories and genealogies of the region. Only in the past few decades have scholars begun to focus on genealogies of women and queens in particular. Combined with recent art historical approaches we are now seeing a clearer picture of female identities and societal roles in the region. Seals and sealings have been brought to bear in this discussion, and provide a unique opportunity for exploring the role of women within the socio-political fabric of the Ancient Near East. Such objects provide evidence of active agency of a working population, allowing us to disentangle the relationship between ideology and social reality of another time’s gendered experience. This paper will present a snapshot of glyptic evidence from three moments in time in southern Mesopotamia where administrative and economic activity bears the imprint of female actors. During the Uruk period at Uruk and Susa female slaves played an important role in the socio-economic fabric of urbanism, while in the early literate Jemdet Nasr period women appear as laborers. By the Early Dynastic period, at sites such as Ur and Lagash, women appear with both political and religious titles. An examination of the imagery from seals and sealings suggests that this changing role of women is clearly evident through two specific iconographies: the scorpion and the spider. Ultimately, we find that seal imagery from these early periods developed gender-specific referents informing their users and audiences regarding identity diversification and female genealogies in the Ancient Near East.
Saana Svärd
Arabian Queens: Constructs of Gender and Ethnicity in the Neo-Assyrian Empire
The study will explore the Neo-Assyrian (911-612 BCE) textual and iconographical evidence for Arabian queens. The Neo-Assyrian texts give the title šarratuto these women. This title occurs otherwise only as an epithet of female deities, never, for example, as a designation of Assyrian or other non-Assyrian queens. I argue that it refers to a concept of foreign ruling femininity, “a female kingship” which was very different from other forms of femininity constructed in Neo-Assyrian texts.
King Assurbanipal’s (668-630 BCE) campaign against the Arabians is especially relevant to this argument. Its narrative is presented in royal texts and on reliefs in Assurbanipal’s palace. It is surprising and requires an explanation that Assyrians, who are noted for their enthusiastic depictions of cruelty against their enemies in reliefs, show violence against women only in this instance. The violence is gender specific, portraying Assyrian soldiers slitting open a woman and pulling out a fetus. This is also interesting from the point of view of Assyrian hegemonic masculinity, a part of which was killing male enemies, not women and children. This performance of masculinity no doubt relates to the way Assyrians perceived the femininity of Arabian women.
This case study gives ample opportunity for an intersectional study of Assyrian constructs of femininity, masculinity, ethnicity, and social rank. I suggest that they were anomalous to Assyrians, as they were perceived as females, but simultaneously associated with male attributes of kingship.
Allison Thomason
Women’s Property and Social Networks in Mesopotamia
The role of women in work and society is a topic of great recent interest in ancient Near Eastern studies. Recent research programs from scholars as well as collaborative conferences on women and work have produced several important volumes assessing the relative status of women in Mesopotamia in politics and the economy. These scholarly ventures have explored whether women had agency in economic and social contexts, especially for the literate societies of Syria and Mesopotamia. In most cases, the women are studied in relation to the men in their environments; however, the topic of their relationships with each other, whether in the family, through the economy or through political contacts, has rarely been discussed.
This paper will explore the modes of contact and networking relationships between women which Mesopotamian texts, and in rare cases images and objects, can reveal. As a beginning case study, analysis of the textual evidence related to the women involved in the Old Assyrian trade network between Ashur and Anatolia may illuminate the female-to-female relationships within families and outside of them. What did women write to each other about? How did they refer to each other in correspondence and related texts? What do these communications reveal about their use of social networks to alter or enhance their own situation or status?
The goal of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of the lived daily experiences for women in the ancient Near East. A second goal is to interrogate whether studies of female-to-female networks and communication can enhance our understanding of the performance of gender in ancient Near Eastern social contexts, including family and property relations, work and trade, and courtly life and politics.
Elizabeth B. Tracy
Vanishing Point: Perspectivity on Women in the Book of Exodus
This paper’s theoretical framework comes from a three-point observation: 1. Women and water are essential to securing the survival of the infant Moses, the future savior of the people of Israel. 2. The physical and spiritual focal point of the Book of Exodus is the Decalogue. Within that statute the relative center is occupied by a) a law mentioning women, b) the one law that serves both the divine/human and human/human relationship, and c) the only law of the group to contain a promise. 3. The final mention of women in Exodus involves women who donate their brass mirrors so that a laver can be made. This laver will hold the water necessary for priests to purify themselves before they can enter the tabernacle and perform saving rituals for the people of Israel.
The objective of this paper is, in an overview fashion, to investigate and define the collective function of women in the Book of Exodus and to discern if the remnant of feminine identity contained therein influences the divine destiny of the children of Israel. The aim of this research is to attempt a change – to change the conventional fixed viewing of biblical women from secondary characters to a holistic study of the roles, responsibilities, and power of women in the Book of Exodus.
Lorenzo Verderame
Engendered Cosmic Spaces in Ancient Mesopotamian Myths
This paper analyses how cosmic spaces are engendered through polarization in ancient Mesopotamian myths. More specifically, it explores the opposition between the earth and the sky, the (eastern) mountain and the flat Mesopotamian plain, and the salty waters (sea) and the sweet waters.
The three spaces (earth, mountain, sea), as well as the divine entities that are identified with or related to them, are conceptualized as feminine. Passive and sterile in nature, they are fertile and productive only if activated and fecundated by a male entity. On the contrary, when a creature spontaneously emerges or sprouts from one of these feminine spaces, or when they proceed to create them themselves, the result is always the birth of monsters. Strictly identified or associated to the realm of the dead, the three spaces are liminal and show different degrees of association with alterity: the earth represents both the womb and the grave; the sea is, at the same time, a marginalizing and marginalized element, and the mountain is the place of alterity par excellence, the Sumerian word kur meaning “highland, foreign/hostile country, Netherworld”.
I advance the hypothesis that the Mesopotamian mythical thought revolves around the polarization, particularly the opposition and different interrelation of feminine and masculine.
Karolien Vermeulen
Of Cities, Mothers, and Homes. A Cognitive-Stylistic Approach to Gendered Space in the Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible presents cities, most prominently Jerusalem, as female protagonists. Previous research has focused on the cultural origin (Dobbs-Allsopp 1993) as well as gender related issues of this personification (O’Brien 2008, Maier 2008). Building on this work, this paper will focus on the advantages of applying a different method, proposing a cognitive-stylistic analysis of the gendered city space. In particular, it will look at those passages where the city is portrayed as a mother. Cognitive stylistics pays attention to the keys in the text that assist the reader in meaning production.
The paper will show that the biblical authors exploit the cognitive metaphor the city is a mother. It allows them to frame the city in a particular way. The paper will first address the extended family metaphor that is evoked, including the father (God) and/or the children (inhabitants). It will continue by pointing out the role of the city/mother as a home space to which typical features such as ‘happiness’ and ‘security’ are attributed. Finally, the paper will demonstrate that the mother/home/city space functions as a focal point of a spatial play of positioning, with distancing, approaching, removal, and return. Considering the city-mother from a cognitive-stylistic perspective reveals the power of the image of the mother and sheds new light on the often problematized use of gendered space in the Hebrew Bible.
Yoko Watai
Women involved in daily management in Achaemenid Babylonia: The cases of Rē’indu and Andiya
In this presentation I would like to focus on the activities of two women, called Rē’indu and Andiya, who lived in Borsippa of the Achaemenid period (6–5thcentury BCE). Rē’indu, probably the wife of the head of the Ilušu-abušu family, was entrusted with the management of the family budget, and paid for foodstuffs and drinks as well as several other daily goods. She also wrote to her husband, while he was away from home, to inform him of the situation of the family and of the city.
As for Andiya, her husband may have been a merchant or an intermediary of the sale and purchase of foodstuffs, such as meat and bread to be offered to deities. These foodstuffs were then redistributed to prebendaries, and were eventually sold in the market. She seems to have participated in his business with a certain amount of responsibility, as she gave orders to her agent concerning the distribution and preservation of meat. Since our sources of information are limited to memorandums and letters which conserve only restricted information in an obscure context, we cannot fully explicate the situation of the two women. However, I believe that this study will throw some light on the active role of women, especially wives of the heads of families,in the economic sphere.
Sera Yelözer and Mihriban Özbașaran
Entangled at Death: Beads, Gender, and the Dead at Early Neolithic Aşıklı Höyük
Ornaments have often been categorized as objects confined to certain gender groups, which mostly consists of females in the modern western discourse. However, ethnographic studies, supplemented with research on prehistoric beads, have revealed that bodily adornment was/is a means of reflecting identities in various scales and also a medium of ritual practices in the case of mortuary contexts where relations between the objects and both the deceased and the mourners are entangled. Gender archaeology, a deconstructive approach to the stereotypes produced by the western, male-biased perspective in archaeology may offer a productive tool for a critical re-evaluation of the relations between things and people in the past. This paper aims to assess the mortuary practices of a newly settled community during the Aceramic Neolithic Period in east-Central Anatolia, Aşıklı Höyük (c. 8350-7350 cal BC) through personal items, particularly beads, found with burials and their relations to the sex and age groups of the deceased. The present data from the site represent the formative stage of sedentism, food production economies, and the formation of new social identities. The long and uninterrupted habitation at the site from the mid-9thto the mid-8thmillennium BC displays changes in all these aspects and the dynamics of this change. Here we aim to discuss how gender identities were materialized in funerary rituals through distribution analysis of the raw materials, colors, and types of personal items.