Women in Antiquity

Real Women across the Ancient World

Stephanie Lynn Budin, Jean Macintosh Turfa, Stephanie Lynn Budin, Jean Macintosh Turfa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317219903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume gathers brand new essays from some of the most respected scholars of ancient history, archaeology, and physical anthropology to create an engaging overview of the lives of women in antiquity. The book is divided into ten sections, nine focusing on a particular area, and also includes almost 200 images, maps, and charts. The sections cover Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, Cyprus, the Levant, the Aegean, Italy, and Western Europe, and include many lesser-known cultures such as the Celts, Iberia, Carthage, the Black Sea region, and Scandinavia. Women's experiences are explored, from ordinary daily life to religious ritual and practice, to motherhood, childbirth, sex, and building a career. Forensic evidence is also treated for the actual bodies of ancient women.

Women in Antiquity is edited by two experts in the field, and is an invaluable resource to students of the ancient world, gender studies, and women's roles throughout history.

PART I Mesopotamia

Map by Paul C. Butler.

Mesopotamia

2900–2334	Early Dynastic
2334–2159	Akkadian Empire
2159–2112	Gutian Invasions; Reign of Gudea of Lagaš (c.2150–2125)
2112–2004	Third Dynasty of Ur
2017–1792	Isin-Larsa Period
1813–1781	Old Assyrian Empire (Age of Samsu-Addu)
1792–1595	Old Babylonian Empire (Age of Hammurapi)
1595–1155	Kassite Era
1365–1031	Middle Assyrian Empire
934–612	Neo-Assyrian Empire
614–539	Neo-Babylonian Empire
550–331	Achaemenid Empire (Persia)
331–64 BCE	Hellenistic/Parthan/Sassanian Period

Introduction

“The Land Between the Rivers,” as the Greeks dubbed what we now call Iraq and eastern Syria, vied with Egypt as the land with the earliest known writing system (late fourth millennium BCE), and is second only to Anatolia as the place where the world’s oldest elements of civilization appeared—group projects, specialized craft, and socio-political hierarchy. From the dawn of the Early Dynastic period, its political organization consisted of numerous independent city-states, each under the authority of a king—Lú.GAL or “Big Man” in Sumerian. Some of the most important cities were Ur, Uruk, Lagaš, Umma, and Kiš (š = sh). It was in this last city where tradition held that kingship first descended from heaven, and the title “King of Kiš” remained in the royal titulary since the third millennium. Already from the Early Dynastic period both prestige display and warfare were prominent in Mesopotamian society. The royal burials from Ur, dating to Early Dynastic III (c.2600), revealed copious gold and imported semi-precious stones adorning the body and coterie of the interred Lady Pu-abi. Texts and iconographic sources, such as the stele of Ur-Namma (end of the third millennium), depict ancient battles, often over water rights.

Unification of Mesopotamia first began under Lugalzagesi of Umma, who conquered the disparate city-states of southern Mesopotamia. This king was soon displaced by his own cup-bearer—Sargon of Akkad, beloved of the goddess, Ištar (or so claim the legends). As king, he established his capital at Akkad (probably close to modern Babylon), and it was under his rule that the cuneiform script used for the Sumerian language was adapted to express the Semitic language Akkadian, mostly by using existing logograms (images that mean an entire a word) to represent phonemes (individual sounds) as well. It was also Sargon who first established his daughter as high priestess (entu) of the moon god Sîn at Nippur. This Enḫeduanna would become the world’s first named poet.

The Akkadian Empire, which reached its zenith under Sargon’s grandson, Naram-Sîn, fell to a combination of internal strife and external threat, notably the arrival of the “barbaric” (at least to the Mesopotamians) Guti to the East. After a brief period of relative, but not universal, mayhem (Lagaš thrived during this period under its king Gudea), unification and stability were brought back to Mesopotamia under the Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III). Its first king—Ur-Namma—drove off the eastern barbarians. But the empire’s true apogee was under it second king, Šulgi. It was he who truly unified Mesopotamia, establishing a religious capital at Nippur and its neighboring “customs center” at Puzriš-Dagan, modern Drehem. It was also he who reestablished the primacy of Sumerian culture, notably as a literary and religious language. Ur III eventually fell to internal strife, very much pertaining to Šulgi’s Byzantine bureaucracy.

The first half of the second millennium is marked by the arrival of the Amorites, speakers of a Semitic language similar to Akkadian. To the north, Samsu-Addu (aka Šamši-Adad) established the Old Assyrian Empire, ruled from his capital in Ekallatum and from the city of Mari to the west, and co-ruled by his sons, Yasmah-Addu and Išme-Dagan. It was during this period that the Anatolian trading center (=Karum) Kaneš (modern Kültepe) was active, where Assyrian men would go to trade Assyrian wares, notably their wives’ textiles, for Anatolian goods such as tin and silver.

To the south, the Old Babylonian Empire reached its zenith under Hammurapi (=Hammurabi), the king most famous for the law code that bears his name. As his Amorite forbear before him, he too conquered the Syrian city of Mari, extending his reach to the borders of Anatolia. Here the Semitic-speaking Mesopotamians came into contact with the Hurrians, founders of the Mitanni Empire, who spoke a language distinct from those of southern Mesopotamia (possibly related to the northern Urartian language). The Hurrians had been a significant power-player in Mesopotamia since the third millennium, when one of Naram-Sîn’s daughters—Taram-Agade—married into the royal Hurrian family of Urkeš (modern Tell Mozan). The Hurrian element would continue to be a significant aspect of Mesopotamian and Levantine culture through the end of the Bronze Age.

The Old Babylonian Empire came to a close when the city was sacked by the Hittites, the Indo-European-speaking regime dominating central Anatolia in the latter half of the second millennium. The Hittites destroyed Babylon and carried off the (statue of the) city god Marduk as booty. The power vacuum was filled by the Kassites, a previously unknown population speaking a non-Semitic language. Although originally declared a “Dark Age” in Mesopotamia by early Assyriologists, the Kassites appear to have ruled peacefully and stably for over four centuries. Included within this span is the so-called Amarna Age, the period of the mid-fourteenth century documented by the archival finds at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt (ancient Akhetaten). These documents reveal a Babylon with a stable economy based on silver and a stable monarchy based in part on highly political marriages and careful diplomacy.

To the north, the Assyrians overthrew the Mitanni Empire and filled the gap left in its wake, heralding in the Middle Assyrian Empire. The great powers of the Near East consisted of the Hittites, the Assyrians (having replaced Mitanni), Kassite Babylonia, and Egypt. Lesser powers of the region included the city-state of Ugarit on the coast and the Canaanites of the southern Levant. To the west, there were occasional references to a kingdom of Aḫḫiyawa, past the island kingdom of Alašiya (Cyprus).

The Kassite regime came to a crashing end like everything else at the end of the Bronze Age. Eventually, even Assyria lost its grip on power. It was not until the tenth century that Assyria, now the Neo-Assyrian Empire, reasserted its power under kings Aššurnaṣirpal II and Šalmaneser III. The apogee of the Empire occurred under its last four kings—Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Aššurbanipal, infamous for their roles in the biblical texts. It was under Sargon that Israel was destroyed in 721, while it was Sennacherib who trapped King Hezekiah of Judah within his fortress “like a bird in a cage.” The Empire came to its final end when the puppet kings of Babylon reasserted themselves on the world stage. A combined force of Babylonians, Medes, and Skythians defeated the land of Aššur in 612, inaugurating the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.

The most (in)famous king of this regime was Nebuchadnezzer, who conquered Judea in 586 and deported the population into Mesopotamia—The Babylonian Captivity. The empire did not long survive this monarch, however. In 556 the pious king, Nabonidus, took power, a king more concerned with religion than the maintenance of his kingdom. In 539 Babylon was conquered by the combined Medeo-Persian Empire under the authority of King Cyrus “the Great.” Mesopotamia would remain under Achaemenid Persian rule until the conquest of Alexander “also the Great” in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• General Introduction—Stephanie Lynn Budin and Jean MacIntosh Turfa
• PART I Mesopotamia
• PART II Egypt
• PART III Hittites
• PART IV Cyprus
• PART V The Levant and Carthage
• PART VI The Aegean, Bronze Age and historical
• PART VII Etruria and the Italian archipelago
• PART VIII Rome
• PART IX At the edges The edges of Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures
• PART X Coda
• Index