A book on the role of women in ancient Mesopotamia
Josué J. Justel, researcher from the Department of History and Philosophy of the University of Alcalá, and Agnès Garcia Ventura, from the Interuniversity Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Studies (IPOA) of the University of Barcelona, are the editors of Las mujeres en el Oriente cuneiforme (UAH), the first work in Spanish which focuses on the role of women in the Fertile Crescent. The studies this volume gathers are based on the way cuneiform written sources mention women: “In written texts from thousands of years ago, there are queens and women from the elite, but there are also working women, scriveners and musicians; women are more visible than what we could believe at first”, says Garcia Ventura.
Josué J. Justel, researcher from the Department of History and Philosophy of the University of Alcalá, and Agnès Garcia Ventura, from the Interuniversity Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Studies (IPOA) of the University of Barcelona, are the editors of Las mujeres en el Oriente cuneiforme (UAH), the first work in Spanish which focuses on the role of women in the Fertile Crescent. The studies this volume gathers are based on the way cuneiform written sources mention women: “In written texts from thousands of years ago, there are queens and women from the elite, but there are also working women, scriveners and musicians; women are more visible than what we could believe at first”, says Garcia Ventura.
Justel and Garcia Ventura contacted distinguished experts, both national and international, to contribute to the work with articles on their field of expertize. The resulting book collects different contributions on the role of women in the first civilizations that used writing and shows they were involved in many different situations and they even enjoyed some degree of independence under certain conditions. “We think it is important to publish such a book, because it enables us to provide first-level research to an audience that could not access it, be it for the language, or the degree of expertize of the content”, notes Garcia Ventura.
As seen in the contributions in the book, the ancient Mesopotamian society was patriarchal. In general, women were left on a second level and the father, husband or brother acted on behalf of these women. For instance, the amount of texts proving a woman bought, sold or had a contract, etc. is low compared to the same situation regarding men. However, sources show many special situations in which, for some reason, women had some independence and political, legal and economic action. Cuneiform texts talk about scriveners that wrote texts for different people, queens who managed their own administration, women with a distinguished role in the composition and interpretation of musical pieces in the court, and others who decided to disinherit male family members because they did not take care of them when they aged, etc. Although these are exceptions, these data bring valuable thoughts on the field of history of women and genders studies. Moreover, it is seen that patriarchal societies would protect vulnerable population groups, such as widows, divorced women, and girls, apart from poor or sick people. “The book allows us proving that women from different social conditions were visible in written sources and therefore, our current view should make them more visible”, concludes Garcia Ventura.
Different civilizations such as the Sumerian, Hittite, the Babylonian or the Assyrian lived in the ancient Mesopotamia and nearby areas. In short, this geographical frame corresponds to the current countries of Iraq, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey and a part of Iran. These places expressed their different languages (Sumerian, Acadian, etc.) with the cuneiform system, which consisted on the print of abstract signs on clay tablets. Cuneiform writing was used since the late fourth millennium BC, and it ended around the first century AC, which means those people wrote for three thousand years of history, around 300,000 texts that have been recovered in archaeological excavations.
The different contributions to Las mujeres en el Oriente cuneiforme are divided in several theme sections: intellectual and cultural life, economic and legal life, and political life. Also, the book has a complete index and an introduction by the editors, which presents the historiographical aspects of this topic.