9-2 FINAL MILESTONE: WOMEN, GENDER, AND THE FEMINIST WAVES IN ASSYRIOLOGY
Marlen Harrison
HIS 501: Historiography
January 24, 2024
Introduction
How has the field of Assyriology investigated women and gender, and how have paradigm shifts in historical research, particularly the 20th and 21st century feminist waves, influenced these investigations? Early Assyriology as an academic discipline developed in a traditional albeit scientifically critical period (mid-to-late 1800s) in Europe and North America that constructed men and women quite differently from contemporary treatments of sex and gender; as a critical category of human behavior, gender had yet to exist.[1] Assyriologist Saana Svärd, focusing her scholarship on the Ancient Near East, addresses where the field began: “Although Mesopotamian women have been an object of study for more than a hundred years, most early publications treated women as an isolated category. ‘General’ history was male history where exceptional women occasionally intruded. In most of these studies the position of women was seen from an ethnocentric Western perspective.”[2]
More recently, interest in women as a research construct has given way to considerations of gender more broadly. Oxford historian Lyndal Roper reflects on how these waves influenced her own inquiry, “When I got interested in women’s history, it was all about uncovering women in the past. Then we started to realise that the challenge of women’s history was much bigger and much more ambitious. It wasn’t just about women’s history but about gender, relations between the sexes.”[3] Roper, a Regius Chair in History, adds, “And at the same time, the new generation has a very different approach to gender identity. They see it as much more fluid. They don’t think in terms of two sexes and they have raised a whole set of new questions about sex and gender.”[4]
Developments in women’s rights and the waves of feminism, educational opportunities for women, the presence of female scholars, and the evolution of gender studies and theories have all had an impact on how women and gender have been constructed in Assyriological historical scholarship. For example, Michel explains “In Assyriology, early studies on women were influenced by historical preconceptions based on the place of women in the classical world or in Islam, visible in the choice of the words ‘harem’ or ‘veil’ in the translations of cuneiform manuscripts.”[5] As such, this paper will examine how historians have been influenced by these waves, and their resulting writing about women and gender that grew out of them.
Asher-Greve and Wogec’s 2001 “Women and Gender in Ancient Near Eastern Cultures: Bibliography 1885 to 2001 AD”[6] presented a thorough overview of scholarship. From their bibliography, three key sources have been selected. The first author examined is Bernard Frank Batto whose Studies of Women at Mari is widely considered to be the first in-depth study of women, power, politics, and religion in ancient Mesopotamia. Here we see the recognition of women in a history that kept them largely silent.
Considering that the main international academic conference on Assyriology (Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale) chose “women” as its theme in 1986, Mary Wakeman’s 1985 “Ancient Sumer and the Women’s Movement: The Process of Reaching behind, Encompassing and Going Beyond” will be presented as a second wave example of how a religious historian approached the exploration of patriarchy in writing about ancient Sumer, while transparently exploring the ability of feminist theory to critique interpretations of female goddess worship.
Sanna Svärd’s 2016 Female Administrators in Neo-Assyrian Palaces, a chapter in The Role of Women in Work and Society in the Ancient Near East, will be presented as an example of third wave feminist historical writing from a writer who recognized additional opportunity to explore not just women, but gender.
Women and Early Assyriology
Early writing on the Mesopotamian world (mid-1800s to early 1900s) was limited in scope by the newness of the discipline, availability and completeness of artefacts with which to construct a historical record, the challenge of language and translation of those artefacts, and the problem of access considering that the field was developing across numerous languages and in diverse geographic regions, and in collaboration with numerous other disciplines.[7] It may be useful to note that the British and German schools of Assyriology viewed the discipline largely as a combination of archaeology and philology, and the French and Italians saw it largely as a matter of ancient history studies.[8] As for the Americans, Assyriology was grounded in language and culture, e.g. Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and University of Chicago’s departments are titled “Near Eastern Language and Civilizations.”
Research on women as a subject in Assyriology is recognized to have begun when the first marriage contact translation and discussion was published in 1885.[9] Following the publication of the Hammurabi codex in 1902, research on the status of women in Mesopotamian society followed, though Asher-Geve and Wogec are quick to point out the disappointing lack of continued scholarship in this area until the 1960s.[10] Likewise, women were present in the field and publishing as early as 1901, with Yale University, for example, awarding its first doctorate to a female scholar in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 1903.
The Feminist Waves and Assyriology
In the 1960s and 70s, issues of gender began appearing in ancient historical studies thanks to a new generation of researchers across disciplines and a marked shift in how scholars thought of sex and gender. Moreover, the late 1960s saw a sudden rise in the number of female students at American universities, for example, as barriers to admission came down, increased gender parity in admissions occurred, women selected a wider range of fields, and “the stated aims of college and university women shifted en masse from good marriages to good jobs.”[11]
This period saw the birth of the feminist modern movement and critical scholarship on women across an array of academic disciplines. Maccoby’s 1966 edited book, The Development of Sex Differences, and follow-up The Psychology of Sex Differences (with Jacklin, 1974) are often credited for their influence on North American and European thinking about sex and gender.[12] Garcia-Ventura and Zisa explain the various trends in feminist research as waves: “the first wave can be dated to the 1960s and the 1970s, the second to the late 1970s and the 1980s, and that the third began in the late 1980s and 1990s and lasts up until the present day.”[13] They also add that the key aim of the first wave was to write women into the historical record; the second was to examine the origins of patriarchy; and the third was to recognize and avoid androcentrism while also exploring queer and gender studies.[14]
As for Assyriology, Svärd explains that the discipline was somewhat slower to respond to the first wave of writing women into history, partly due to the lack of textual evidence from various time periods. For example, it wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that much of the Neo-Assyrian textual evidence first became available.[15] In 2001, Asher-Greve, who published an extensive bibliography on women and gender in Ancient Near Eastern Cultures from 1885-2001, noted that until the 1970s, studies on women, sexuality, and family remained relatively rare in this field.[16] And more change would arrive with the third feminist wave and questions about the usefulness of categorizing gender altogether. In the next sections, historians will be showcased to examine the ways in which feminist values influenced their work.
The First Wave: Bernard Frank Batto and the Women at Mari
A scholar of Ancient Near East Languages and Literatures (Johns Hopkins University, 1972), Bernard Frank Batto’s 1974 Studies on Women at Mari is one of the first full scale texts dedicated solely to women in politics and religion in the ancient Assyrian world. As such, it well represents how the first wave of feminism, writing women into history, impacted these studies. Though he acknowledges a handful of other scholars also working on issues of women in ancient Mesopotamia at that time, he asserts in his introduction to Studies that “a careful, in-depth study of women in ancient Mesopotamia–as for most other social institutions of that culture–has yet to be written.”[17]
He also admits that the timing of his scholarship is mediated by the new availability of women’s correspondence from Mari (on the Euphrates river, present day Syria) during the Old Babylonian period, “it is more by accident than by design that these studies on women at Mari appear at this time.”[18] Batto takes as his source material Georges Dossin’s 1967 translations of letters from the Royal Archives at Mari. This underscores that while the impact of feminist thought may have been unfolding across disciplines in waves throughout the middle and late 20the century, the application of feminist theory in Assyriology has been largely mediated by the availability of materials to examine.
Batto explains that the purpose of his work is to “provide additional building blocks” for “a complete social history of the woman not only of Mari but of Mesopotamia in general.”[19] He achieves this by examining letters from female members of King Zimri-Lim’s family (his queen and daughters), as well as priestesses in religious settings to explore possibilities of female power and agency in these specific social contexts and classes. He concludes, for example, “Thus it was apparently not any institutionalized role of queenship per se but intimacy and prestige with the king that gave Sibtu her prepotency. Of course being queen gave Sibtu the opportunity to acquire that prestige and influence.”[20] This is an interesting reading that foreshadows the later 20th century focus on gender studies and relationships among men and women. It also enters the second wave conversation explored further in the next section of this manuscript by examining patriarchal power.
Batto’s credibility is bolstered by his strong utilization of primary and secondary sources, notably texts by oft-cited Assyriologists such as Oppenheim, Ebeling, Jacobsen, and Bottero, and strong reviews from colleagues such as Waldman[21] and Kilmer[22] praising Batto’s focus on women in a field that had previously largely overlooked them. Moreover, the work is the publication of Batto’s doctoral dissertation, suggesting it was rigorously vetted by his advisors. Studies became a widely-cited book upon its publication and thereafter. For example, Batto’s work is cited in several contemporary books with titles such as Bottero’s 2001 Everyday Life in Mesopotamia, Steele’s 2009 Woman and Gender in Babylonia, and Chavalas’ 2013 Women in the Ancient Near East: A Sourcebook. Batto’s work is, though profound, self-admittedly narrow. He is working with a group of letters from a very specific group of women, in a very specific location, across a brief time period; generalizability can be tricky. However, his work stands as some of the most important and lasting scholarship on women during this period and in this geographic region.
The Second Wave: Mary Wakeman and Ancient Sumer
Having completed her PhD in religious studies in 1969 at Brandeis University (USA), Mary Wakeman’s 1985 article in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion illustrates the influence the feminist movement had on scholarly discussions of the Near East, as well as the allure that this region and period held for feminist scholars of this period. Focusing on religious imagery, her scholarship is an excellent example as to how second wave feminist scholars saw their new responsibility and framed their arguments around patriarchy.
Wakeman begins by introducing us to the connection some feminist scholars felt with the ancient Near East and hypothesized their interest:
Feminist scholars are taking a serious interest in ancient Sumer as the birthplace of cities and of Western civilization. Some of the impetus for exploring ancient history emerges from a religious need felt by participants in the women’s movement for a new myth of origins that will re-empower women. Other feminist scholars have noted the increasing limitation on women’s independent exercise of power, as Sumerian civilization developed.[23]
Wakeman’s scholarship explores the Sumerian Goddess Inanna and “the changing definitions of political power and how those were sanctioned in religious terms.”[24] She concludes that “the religious ideas associated with this goddess were adapted at each new stage of Sumer’s history to support the emergence of patriarchal structures of authority.” Wakeman interestingly concedes, however, that “The various assessments of Inanna’s significance may reflect differences in ideological orientation within the women’s movement,”[25] an admission that seemingly weakens her own position while also acknowledging the nature of subjective interpretation.
The strength of Wakeman’s scholarship as a valid work of Assyriology is established through her uses of primary sources, peer-reviewed journal articles, books by foundational authors in religious studies and ancient history, and artefacts as evidence; many of these textual sources are credibly reliable and well-known to regular readers of Assyriology. Cited sources here that support Wakeman’s feminist reading include scholars who have explored the relationship between goddess worship and women’s political and economic power such as Ruby Rohrlich. For insight into the reading of the historical record, Wakeman relies on foundational Assyriologists such as Thorkild Jacobsen and Samuel Noah Kramer. If there is room to criticize Wakeman’s scholarship, it is perhaps only that a reader might benefit in learning more often the sources of her supporting arguments and their details through additional notation. As a layreader, this writer would have benefitted from additional referencing. It also seems that Wakeman relies heavily on Jacobsen’s translations almost exclusively; does this limit her ability for interpretation?
As a writer, she approaches her topic with a surprising subjectivity, bringing the reader into her world and way of thinking by utilizing first-person voice, a dramatic departure from earlier objective reporting and analysis. Wakeman begins her manuscript, “I speak as a white, middle-class, Protestant, American woman who is now reevaluating the elite, white, male, Western tradition in which she was educated. For me, as for many others,
the women’s movement has been a religious movement.”[26] This stands in stark contrast to the work of Batto who did not see his research as a reflection of the researcher.
Should Wakeman’s inclusion of her own thoughts and feelings, often written from a first-person “I” position be considered a weakness of the scholarship or typical of feminist writing? Feminist historian Susan Crane suggests that all historians have a historical consciousness and that historical subjectivity “begins with the individual scholar’s perception of her connection to, and distance from, the past, and it is sustained through the historian’s decision to make that perception integral to her scholarship. In other words, historical subjectivity is an expression of an individual’s historical consciousness.”[27] The feminist approach taken by Wakeman celebrates such subjectivity and allows the reader some insight into her own historical consciousness while allowing for those aforementioned differences in ideological orientation.
Wakeman’s work has been considered by numerous scholars since its publication, with Thomas offering the following criticism:
Wakeman describes the reaching back to Sumer as a process of “reaching behind the intervening patriarchal development to recover our sense of connectedness to the earth, with other species, with each other and with our own bodies.” However, there is little evidence that a sense of “connectedness with the earth” is recoverable in ancient Mesopotamian narrative. Concepts like “connectedness with the earth” are philosophies that arise from modern ecological movements. In fact, there is a substantial body of evidence that seems to indicate that the Mesopotamians viewed nature from a position of subjection and fear.[28]
Elsewhere, Wakeman’s work is used as corroborative evidence illustrating “the shift in power from female to male from the third millennium to the beginning of the second millennium B.C..”[29]
The Third Wave: Sanna Svärd and Human Interaction
If the first wave was to write women into history, and the second wave about understanding patriarchy, Svärd explains that the third wave “relates to the nature of knowledge production. Instead of seeing the researcher as someone who is seeking to uncover the truth that is “out there,” they advocate the framing of research as a project for making sense of different phenomena.”[30] Svärd continues, “when knowledge production is seen in this way, as production, the traditional dichotomies of research – male and female, sex and gender, matriarchy and patriarchy, public and private, power and oppression – become suspect and the question arises, are these useful categories for producing knowledge?”[31] This third wave has been greatly influential in current Assyriological studies with several female scholars taking up the call.
In her contribution to 2016’s edited anthology The Role of Women in Work and Society in the Ancient Near East, Finland’s SannaSvärd (a Ph.D. in Assyriology from University of Helsinki, 2012) traces the evolution of the treatment of women in this region and offers a suggestion for a new pathway of inquiry that well-represents this third wave paradigm. She reasserts that “gender does not exist independently of the actions creating it”[32] while noting that historians have little evidence of Mesopotamian views on masculinity or femininity. However, as texts and artifacts provide information on social interactions she also suggests that “all of these actions produced gender. Interactions between people convey much more than just gender as well. On the basis of principles of intersectionality, it follows that by analyzing more closely the interactions between individuals we may gain a better understanding of the interplay of gender, ethnicity, class, and so forth.”[33]
The aim of this article was to propose a new methodological approach for the study of gender in Mesopotamia in response to an article she had previously published. Presenting a case study of texts relating to šakintus, female Assyrian palace administrators, Svärd asserted that “actions of individual šakintus reproduce or reshape femininity,”[34] and concluded that “the evidence indicates that in many Neo-Assyrian palaces there were households of the queen which were headed by a šakintu and employed hundreds of people, probably in textile production.”[35]
What makes Svärd’s work so compelling for this current inquiry, and one of the article’s strengths in addition to the consistent use of credible primary and secondary sources, is her acknowledgment that while her earlier work was typical of first wave approaches, she still sees more work to do. In aligning herself with sociologists West and Zimmerman (authors of Doing Gender, 1987), she could see a third wave reading as well:
When I now place this research in the context of gender studies, it is very clear that it is typically first-wave research. I have taken a group of women, examined the textual evidence on them and written them into history, describing the way that they worked in the administration of Neo-Assyrian palaces. This needed to be done, but with my current understanding I see that I failed in not taking things further and asking new questions of the material.[36]
Svärd then asks, “In this new approach, where femininity is seen as a cultural construct and gender is treated as constructed by individuals in their everyday actions, what types of gender are šakintus’ actions constructing?”[37] Even more interestingly, Svärd suggests, echoing the French Annales School by taking a more sociological intersectional approach to examining these female palace administrators: “Thus, the actions of the šakintus – through interactions with other individuals – created a specifically elite feminine gender identity.”[38]
Like Wakeman, the strength of Svärd’s scholarship as a valid work of Assyriology is established through her uses of credible, reliable sources from sources such as Asher-Greve, Parpola, and Melville, all feminist scholars themselves. Also like Wakeman, Svärd uses first-person voice to narrate her scholarship. As such, we can see that her work is firmly grounded within a paradigm of feminist thinking.
Due to the relative newness of this chapter, only a few scholars have cited this work, e.g. Nazif’s 2022 “Gender in Archaeology and Gender Archaeology” and Lorenzon’s 2023 “Building Walls, Social Groups, and Empires: A Study of Political Power and Compliance in the Neo-Assyrian Period.”
Conclusion
Scholarship on Mesopotamian women and gender is continuing to develop as the earth yields additional cuneiform correspondence to archaeologists and historians, and new theoretical interpretations bring forth fresh insight. As the image of Mesopotamian women becomes clearer and richer, third wave feminism can continue to influence scholarship by further exploring not just gender, but sexuality as well. At this time, there is little discussion of woman’s sexuality, partially due to the newness of the topic in contemporary scholarship, and partially due to the Assyrians’ silence on the matter. Nissinen’s 2010 “Are There Homosexuals in Mesopotamian Literature” suggests that “love between male persons, as well as some kind of intimate interaction between males (much less often between females), was quite as thinkable in the world of the audience of Mesopotamian texts as it is worldwide in different times and cultures.”[39] It will be interesting to see how scholars continue to consider love between women, and how the current gender studies paradigm might respond.
The scholars explored in this manuscript have succeeded at providing depth and insight into women and gender in ancient Mesopotamia. Collectively, they make women a focus of historical scholarship in a field that was largely silent; they examine women in light of patriarchy and power; and they study gender by considering behaviors and performances of both women and men. In each example, we can see how the historical interpretations have changed over time as political, cultural, and intellectual contexts have also changed. The presence of women in Mesopotamian historical scholarship has been mediated by both the availability of the historical record as well as theoretical/ideological developments around sex and gender. As such, a historiographical study of women and gender in historical writing about ancient Mesopotamia reveals how a relatively new field has responded to changing paradigms of “women”, and more directly, how the feminist waves have influenced a transdisciplinary field such as Assyriology.
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Nissinen, Martti. “Are There Homosexuals in Mesopotamian Literature?” Journal of the
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Thomas, Paul. “Re-Imagining Inanna: The Gendered Reappropriation of the Ancient
Goddess in Modern Goddess Worship,” The Pomegranate 6.1 (2004): 53-69.
Wakeman, Mary K. “Ancient Sumer and the Women’s Movement: The Process of Reaching
behind, Encompassing and Going Beyond.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 1, no. 2 (1985): 7-27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25002015.
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[1] Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Category of Historical Analysis,” in The Modern
Historiography Reader, ed. Adam Budd, (Oxon: Routledge, 2009), 389.
[2] Saana Svärd, “Studying Gender: A Case Study of Female Administrators in Neo-Assyrian Palaces,” in The Role of Women in Work and Society in the Ancient Near East, ed. Brigitte Lion and Cécile Michel (Boston/Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 494.
[3] Lyndal Roper, “The Growth of Gender and Women’s History,” accessed January 1, 2024, https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/growth-gender-and-womens-history.
[4] Roper, https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/growth-gender-and-womens-history.
[5] Cécile Michel, “Gender Studies and Manuscript Cultures: The Case of Assyriology” (lecture, “Between Invisibility and Autonomy: Negotiating Gender Roles in Manuscript Cultures,” University of Hamburg, October 24, 2022).
[6] Julia M. Asher-Greve and Mary Frances Wogec, “Women and Gender in Ancient Near Eastern Cultures: Bibliography 1885 to 2001 AD”, NIN 3, 1 (2001): 33-114, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/157077602100416896.
[7] Leo A. Oppenheim, “Assyriology- Why and How?” Current Anthropology 1, no. 5/6 (1960): 409–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2739505.
[8] Dominique Charpin, “How to Be an Assyriologist,” last updated October 2, 2014, https://books.openedition.org/cdf/4924?lang=en.
[9] Julia M. Asher-Greve and Mary Frances Wogec, 37.
[10] Julia M. Asher-Greve and Mary Frances Wogec, 37.
[11] Stacey Jones, “Dynamic Social Norms and the Unexpected Transformation of Women’s Higher Education, 1965–1975,” Social Science History 33, no. 3 (2009): 247–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40268002.
[12] Kristina M. Zosuls et al., “Gender Development Research in Sex Roles: Historical Trends and Future Directions.” Sex Roles 64, no. 11-12 (2011), 826-842.
[13] Agnès Garcia-Ventura and Gioele Zisa, “Gender and Women in Ancient Near Eastern Studies,” Akkadica 138 (2017) fasc. 1.
[14] Agnès Garcia-Ventura and Gioele Zisa.
[15] Saana Svärd, 495.
[16] Julia M. Asher-Greve and Mary Frances Wogec, 33-114.
[17] Bernard Frank Batto, Studies on Women At Mari (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 3.
[18] Bernard Frank Batto, 3.
[19] Bernard Frank Batto, 3.
[20] Bernard Frank Batto, 136.
[21] Nahum M. Waldman, Review of Batto’s “Women at Mari,” by Bernard F. Batto. The Jewish Quarterly Review 67, no. 4 (1977): 244–45. https://doi.org/10.2307/1454576.
[22] Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, Journal of Biblical Literature 96, no. 2 (1977): 278–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/3265884.
[23] Mary K. Wakeman, “Ancient Sumer and the Women’s Movement: The Process of Reaching behind, Encompassing and Going Beyond,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 1, no. 2 (1985): 7. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25002015.
[24] Mary K. Wakeman, 8.
[25] Mary K. Wakeman, 9.
[26] Mary K. Wakeman, 7
[27] Susan A. Crane, “Historical Subjectivity: A Review Essay,” The Journal of Modern History 78, no. 2 (2006): 434. https://doi.org/10.1086/505803.
[28] Paul Thomas, “Re-Imagining Inanna: The Gendered Reappropriation of the Ancient Goddess in Modern Goddess Worship,” The Pomegranate 6.1 (2004): 53-69.
[29] Samuel A. Meier, “Women and Communication in the Ancient Near East,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111, no. 3 (1991): 540–47. https://doi.org/10.2307/604270.
[30] Saana Svärd, 455.
[31] Saana Svärd, 455.
[32] Saana Svärd, 456.
[33] Saana Svärd, 452.
[34] Saana Svärd, 452.
[35] Saana Svärd, 452.
[36] Saana Svärd, 453.
[37] Saana Svärd, 454.
[38] Saana Svärd, 454.
[39] Martti Nissinen, “Are There Homosexuals in Mesopotamian Literature?” Journal of the American Oriental Society 130, no. 1 (2010): 73–77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25766947.
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