Gender in Mesopotamia and now

[xuchilpaba]

This is something that bothers me quite frequently. The whole gender ordeal, at least in Babylonia and Assyria was very sexist towards women and women were basically slaves their entire lives. (Its funny to me, because looking at it now... It only got worse for women in the Middle east!) I understand that women were allowed to read and write in Sumer, but beyond that as far as Sumer and Caanan goes I really don't know. (If someone wants to fill this knowledge void please do.)

So this leads me to a question, espcially with certain myths as Inanna, do you think the gods would've supported women's rights or gender equality eventually? With Inanna I see alot of "feminism" in her mythology (Not in the Neopagan, mother goddess way mind you.) and since she has had prostitutes of both genders serve her... I would say to the very least, Inanna might support this idea. (And maybe Anath, theres a story where she killed a man because he said that she was inferior at shooting arrows because she was a woman.)

[us4-he2-gal2]

Xuch: Am at the library right now sifting through some things that demand immiediate attention - however remind me in the next week to review the below article which I can sum for you, and which I wouldnt proibably otherwise tread upon hehheh. Should be relelvant.

"State Formation in Sumer and the Subjugation of Women, by Ruby Rohrlich
Feminist Studies © 1980 Feminist Studies, Inc."

[us4-he2-gal2]

I've reviewed a few things in trying to answer the question of Gender or equality in Sumerian times. A very reliable source I believe is "A history of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000-323 BC" by Marc Van De Mieroop

Female Workers:

Van De Mieroop dedicates a chapter to Early Dynastic Sumer, and this question may be most interesting when considered in the early times. As the author explains society in this period is characterized by an organization into "households," that is, social units larger than nuclear families whose members reside together, and concurrently the palace is called é-gal "great household" and the temple é-[godname] so household of such and such a deity.
Each household was self-sufficiant and can be regarded "as an autonomous unit" with its own livestock, tools, fishing boats etc, and was organized hierarchically; at the very bottom of this heirarchy were the workers, the male worker (gurush) and the female work (géme). Workers were rewarded for their work by receiving rations: barley on a monthly basis and wood and oil annually. Its of interest to the question of equality in reading Van De Mieroop explanation of distribution:

"The persons recieving these goods were mainly working men and women, but children and old people were also recipients. It is clear that these rations constitued the support given to the household's dependants, whether productive or not. The amounts were provided according to the sex and status of the worker: a male worker regularly recieved double the amount of grain given to a female worker, supervisors recieved more than their subordinates, specialized craftsmen more than unskilled laborers, and so on."

Its also apparent while women of lowest class were geting "paid less" they were also worked very hard:

"The majority of workers provided repetitive manual labor. Women were especially used as millers and weavers. Milling at this time was a backbreaking task which required that grain be rubbed back and forth over a stone slab with a small hand-held stone. The women were supposed to produce set quotas ona daily basis. The amounts produced depended on the quality of the product, which varied enormously. From later Ur III period texts, we know that quotas were high: one woman had to produce 10 litres of regular flour or 20 liter of coarse floor a day. Weaving quotas could easily be as high as 2 square meters a day. Those were heavy tasks, that could lead to physical injuries, as is shown by the skeletons of women excavated at the seventh millennium Neolithic site of Abu Hureyra in Syria: their knees, wrists and lower backs showed signs of artthritis while their toes were deforms from constantly tucking them udner the foot. While the Early Dynastic accounts are for women as groups, it is likely that they worked individually at home, simultaneously taking care of children. These tasks were primarily cottage industries."

Higher class Females:

While the above picture hardly indicates a Womans life in Early Dynastic Sumer should be very appealing, Van De Mieroop explains that even this lowest class are not slaves, though the gurush and géme both are "dependent workers." Its important to recognize that *not all* women were consigned to this life: that is, not all were at the bottem of the hierarchy, a royal example would be the é-mi, a household owned and administered by a Queen of ED Lagash and which varous funcationaries were women.




STILL TO COME: a review of "State Formation in Sumer and the Subjugation of Women" , I was a the library and halfway finished reviewing this when they clkosed and I had to leave - and then got home and realized id lost the half I had managed to review! Its absolutly dreadful as a article anyway and my review was critical.

[xuchilpaba]

Well, it sounds alot like alot of societies including *ancient* Japan... Women of lower class were usually somewhere at the bottom. While high class women were more likely to be educated, cultured, and independent.

[saharda]

It sounds more like people of the lower class in general have it tough. Not like lower class people of the middle east today. They just get recruited by self destructive organizations. (If all of the energy that was put out to hate the western world was channeled into building solar panels, the middle east could cover the world.)

I have read a decent amount (not a huge amount, but more than a little) of literature on the roll of ancient women in Sumer, and it was rough, but much more equal than it was in many other cultures in similar situations.

The most reliable information comes from those who talk about what "life" was like in ancient Sumer and not what Women were like in ancient Sumer. If you go in looking at it from the point of view of womens issues you end up seeing things that aren't there.

I'll see if I can hunt anything down from my wife's books. She has a completely different collection than I do.

[saharda]

Oh, and I think I will cross post this on TOD. (Or you could save me the work)

[xuchilpaba]

saharda said:

It sounds more like people of the lower class in general have it tough.

Lol *thinks of the Middle east now*

[us4-he2-gal2]

Saharda - I honestly cant see grounds for posting TOD messages at Enenuru at this point though searching for elusive modes of participation is in itself a good call. The answer to me always comes down to something like reading difficult or important works and discussing their merits or progress in some format.

I have transfered my comment on
"State Formation in Sumer and the Subjugation of Women, by Ruby Rohrlich Feminist Studies © 1980 Feminist Studies, Inc."
below, as Xuch stated its sounds like BS - and it is BS. I would have reviewed it further but as mentioned loss of information as library was closing. May or may not look at this article again.

While the author does mention a few worthwhile notes for persons interested in womens roles in Sumer, such as the Queen's house e-mi as mentioned above, or the tradition of Eme-sal which charactoristically is the language of female gods and priests, she seems to liberally interpret everything: an example is the following

"The oldest meidcal tablet found so far dates back to the last quater of the third millennium B.C when Gula was goddess of healing and medicine, and docters were probably still mainly women. This document "us entirely free from the magic spells and incantations which are a regular feature of the cuneiform meidcal texts o later days; not a single deity or demon is mentioned in the text. " On the other hand, a document of the time of Hammurabi, around 1750 B.C., "attributes the diseases to be demons, and the cures consist primarly of incantations." As medicine became a male profession, serving mainly the elites, these "old husbands' tales" seem to have become incorporated into medical lore, although women healers ministering to the lower classes probably containued to use herbal medicines."

[us4-he2-gal2]

Article of interest here (to be reviewed)


Women in Old Babylonia Not under Patriarchal Authority, by I. M. Diakonoff
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1986 BRILL

[xuchilpaba]

That thing you sent me was awesome. But I want to see more.

If I saw more, I can get a genelization in my head and a quick synopsis in a post.

[us4-he2-gal2]

For a relevant Scholar to this thread I would also recommend Susan Pollock who seems to have considerable aptitude for the subject matter. Though not a linguistic, by all appearances, she does have however credentials and experience. Her biography at the U. of Binghamton ( see here) reads:

" [Susan Pollock] PhD University of Michigan 1983), Professor of Anthropology, is a Near Eastern archaeologist with interests in political economy and feminist approaches to the study of prehistoric and early historic societies. Her current research includes studies of community and household in village-based societies, the economies of early states in Mesopotamia, and analysis of the media's use of archaeology in constructing public opinion. She has conducted fieldwork in Iran, Iraq and Turkey (Kazane and Fistikli Höyük)."

A relevant work of hers might be "2000. (with Reinhard Bernbeck) "And they said, Let us make gods in our image: gendered ideologies in Ancient Mesopotamia. In Reading the Body: Representations and Remains in the Archaeological Record", ed. by Alison Rautman, 150-164. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia."


Having glanced through her 1999 book "Ancient Mesopotamia" I don't see too much I can quote here that is of direct use. A paragraph on pg. 221 reads: " Many scholars have argued that women experienced a sharp loss of status with the emergence of states and civilization (see Silverblatt 1988), but there seems to be only limited support for an argument based on simple, unidirectional trend in the status of women as a whole. Rather, emerging class differences widened the distances among women and among men of different classes, and shifts in the contexts of production and consumption brought about changes that cannot be simply characterized as positive or negative. As in any situation of growing inequality, some women, men, and children benefited while many, indeed most, others lost. Overall, society seems to have offered much less to most women than to men."

Pollock here differs with the somewhat simplistic study of Rohrlich 1980.

[madness]

You might want to check out

Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East
Proceedings of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Helsinki, July 2-6, 2001

2 volume set, edited by Simo Parpola and Robert M. Whiting

www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~EIS~~I~PARSEXAND

Looks like a lot of top scholars contributed to this.

[scribeofnisaba]

Beware Pollock's rabid Marxism when you read her work, but she is pretty sound. Eleanor Robson is another one to read on gender in Sumerian times, especially with regard to literacy - I've already cited her article "Gendered literacy and numeracy in the Sumerian literary corpus" elsewhere on this board. I myself am writing an article on gendered wisdom, but it's not really about the lot of the average woman in Babylonian society.

Also, with regard to the OP - it may amaze you, but when Islam first appeared it was the best religion "of the book" by far in terms of women's rights - far outstripping Christianity and Judaism in terms of the freedoms women were allowed. So it's not entirely fair to say that the Middle East has gone downhill since Babylonian times...