Sexuality in Mesopotamia

[david]

I hope this is the right place for this, if it's not, would it be ok for someone to move it, please?.

Anyway, one of the things that I'd really love to learn a lot more about (it's hard to pick just a few when it comes to ancient Mesopotamia) is sexuality in Mesopotamia, like what was the attitude to sex, whether homosexual, bisexual, hetrosexual, etc?.

I don't know a whole lot about this topic, but I'd really like to learn. The only thing I know is that in Inanna's temples, there were male prostitutes and I think she also had Transgendered priests and priestesses, but I'm not too clear on that, but is Inanna the only one, or did other Gods have similar practices and/or priests associated with them.

Are there any good books or articles on this that you'd recommend?.

I hope this doesn't sound like a dumb question, it's just I really would love to learn more about this topic and Id appreciate anything you can say and/or add.

Thanks for any help.

David.

[xuchilpaba]

Theres that prostitution article if you haven't read it yet, but I think you have.

Like you I am also very curious. I know some of the babylonian practices concerning women and they are very sexist.

[us4-he2-gal2]

Curious you say? That is a revelation

David: I'm now convinced we are going to have to really research this one as its persistence is now a demonstrable fact. And so let it be observed, there apparently isn't anything we don't want to know about Mesopotamian culture..

Alright. maybe I really don't want to know what Enkidu and Gilgamesh were doing in their private time if they were doing anything. But in good faith, I will start with the following citation anyway. J. S. Cooper seems to be among the pioneers on the subject of Sex and Gender in Mesopotamia, a list of his work can be seen here.

From that curriculum vitae, one can see that he wrote an article called "Buddies in Babylonia: Gilgamesh, Enkidu and Mesopotamian
Homosexuality.” - from Riches Hidden in Secret Places. Ancient
Near Eastern Studies in Memory of Thorkild Jacobsen, ed. T. Abusch. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2002. 73-85."
Hence Cooper has an occasional urge to name his articles with a very tongue-in-cheek humor: witness such names as "Enki's Member: Eros and irrigation in Sumerian literature" and "Babbling on: Recovering Mesopotamian orality".



OHhhh heheh... I get it and thats scary 0_0

But anyway, only the first is relevant to this thread - perhaps Madness, a man who collects Scholarly ANE volumes like they were pogs, might reference the relevant article for us?

P.S. Also, I will now go to the forth floor and check Leick's work on Sex in Mesopotamian - titled something like that - for any hot Babylonian women that may by chance be pictured. Oh and if theres anything on homosexuality Ill photocopy it for you should you want to peruse it on this thread.

Cheers.




... hm. Dammit! I really want Coopers article:

“Magic and M(is)use: Poetic Promiscuity in Mesopotamian Ritual.”
M. Vogelzang and H. Vanstiphout, Mesopotamian Poetic
Language: Sumerian and Akkadian. Groningen: Styx
Publications, 1996. 47-57.

[madness]

In Cooper's article "Buddies in Babylonia" he presents a brief history of Jacobson's interpretation of the Gilgamesh stories. In 1930 (Acta Or. 8 (1930): 70) he believed that Enkidu became Gilgamesh's sexual partner, but by the 70s he had abandoned his original ideas of homosexuality, and his Treasures of Darkness presents a very different view.

Cooper continues: The possibility of a homosexual relationship has been forcefully denied by B. Foster and rejected by W. G. Lambert. Other Assyriologists have allowed the possibility, but are cautious.

He then discusses the apparent erotic associations in the ball- and battlefields in the stories of Gilgamesh. Enkidu's superhuman sexuality (6 days 7 nights with Shamhat), Gilgamesh "mounting" the widow's son in a ball game, and his dreams of embracing an axe "like a wife."

Lambert here insists that "the text of the epic as preserved nowhere portrays sexual contact actually taking place between the two heroes; the homoerotic language, both explicit and implicit, may indeed be a device to, on the one hand, connote the insistent, compulsive and violent nature of Gilgamesh's behaviour on the ballfield, and, on the other, as a metaphor for intense same-sex friendship."

Also he remarks:
Author's note: After this contribution was submitted in 1997, the monograph by M. Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World (Minneapolis, 1998), appeared, discussing many of the issues raised here.

[amarsin]

You might try to look at various commentaries to the law codes, since they often cover various topics related to women and sex. The RlA article on sexuality won't be out for another year or so, I bet. But the article on Prostitution (written by Cooper) is out.

[madness]

I'm not sure but I think it's meant to be 6 days and 7 nights of continuous intercourse.

I.e. non-stop action for 156 hours

[ummia-inim-gina]

You could check out the paper "Love and Sex in Babylon" by Jean Bottero. It is reprinted in the following collection of research papers.

Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia
by Jean Bottéro
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001
List Price: $21.95


Also as mentioned by us4-he2-gal2 you could check out

Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature (Kindle Edition)
by Gwendolyn Leick
Taylor & Francis, 2007
Print List Price $38.95
Kindle Price: $35.06

[us4-he2-gal2]

Leick (1994) about the homo-erotic nature of Gilgamesh' dreams:


Her book Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature explores cheifly the various relevant aspects of literature, myth, hymns etc., so it is not itself a study of the societal aspects of Mesopotamia but nevetheless contains many insights based on literary observation. She affirms thats the interpretation of Gilgamesh's dreams and the extent to which they are understood as homo-erotic differ widly amonst Assyriologists. Her own commentary on this reads:

"Before Enkidu is 'discovered', Gilgamesh has two dreams that he recounts to his mother Ninsun, who interprets them. Both dream accounts use puns that rely on the double meaning of the key words. In the first dream, he sees a block fall from the night sky, which prooves to heavy for him to life. He tried to move it over but it would not budge:

The people of Uruk were gathring around it,
The men croweded over it,
The young men massed over (to see it)
And kissed its feet like small children.
For myself, I loved it as a wife.
I put it at your feet,
(And) you treat it equal to me.

(I, 26-39)

The second dream is very similiar, this time the object is an axe, and again Gilgamesh is unable to life it, and feels strong emotional and sexual attraction towards it. Ninsun interprets the dreams as being favorable:

A mighty companion will come to you,
Who can save his friend's life,
He will be the most powerful [in the land],
The most vigorous,
His strength like that of the block (fallen) from heaven

(I, 21-4)

As Draffkorn-Kilmer has shown, the 'block' (kiṣru) sounds very much like kezru, the male equivalent of kezertu, literally 'the curly haired' one, a male prostitute, while the 'axe' (haṣṣinnu) could be taken as a pun on the familiar assinnu, the potentially sexless, often passive homosexual. The may be fortuitous, but both dreams emphasize the strong erotic feelings the strange objects arouse in the hero."


So Leick interprets homo-erotic language here, and key-words that relate to certain a-sexual prostitue types. This segment in the dream is further related to Gilgamesh's feeling for Enkidu when in the myth, this dream event is interpreted by Gilgamesh' s mother Ninsun:

"The stars of heaven [appeared] above you,
[like a] rock from the sky one fell down before you.
You lifted it up, but it weighed too much for you,
you tried to dislodge it, but you could not dislodge it.

You lifted it up, set it down at my feet,
And I, Ninsun, I made it your equal.
Like a wife you loved it, caressed and embraced it:
a mighty comrade will come to you, and be his friend's saviour."

[adante]

I don't think homosexuality or bisexuality was all that much of a problem. For one thing, people married for reasons other than love. My experiences with Inanna have shown me She's a very flirty goddess and doesn't care if you are male or female, She's very sexual and loves to flirt.

[amarsin]

Well, some law codes-- the Middle Assyrian law codes, for instance-- did include some harsh punishments for homosexuality. So obviously-- again, at least in some periods and regions-- homosexuality was perceived to have been a problem.

[adante]

I have a theory based on nothing but my gut instinct that as cultures developed down the time line, things like attitudes to women and homosexuality changed for the worse. I think it was more likely not an issue earlier on, in the Sumerian hey day so to speak.

[amarsin]

It's hard to point to any historical data that would suggest that woman had it better off at some point only to have attitudes sour later. I'm not familiar with many references to homosexuality in the third millennium, though.

[sheshki]

I dont know about homosexuality in mesopotamia, but ive read often about neolithic cultures and that they were often matriarchic , as long as they didnt settle down. As cities and villiages became more settled, the mothergoddess slowly disappeard and male gods appeared because war over properties and soil were now more important to the people. And with this develpoment the women started to loose influence on society and also lost their social position from the giver of life to the caretaker of home and kids etc.
Another impact on martriachic organized tribes was the contact with so called kurgan tribes who where partriachic organized and whorshipped male deities. On their emigration movements from the steppes in the east they wiped out many and the rest might have thought that it is better to whorship powerful deitys like the riders do...

www.buecher.de/shop/Buecher/Homo-Sapiens-und-fruehe-Hochkulturen-Von-40000-bis-1000-v-Chr-/Gebundenes-Buch/products_products/detail/prod_id/23825338/

[amarsin]

Sheshki, my own look into the topic suggests that this notion of a mother goddess being phased out is really based more on wishful thinking more than anything else. I mean, in our historical documents-- when we have writing-- there isn't any evidence to suggest a dominant (or even once-dominant) matriarchy. Or at least, not any I'm aware of.

Thus, we're left looking at prehistorical data, like from Çatalhöyük. And there, you typically have pro-matriarchy people (not surprisingly) interpreting the data as showing some matriarchal society with mother goddess worship and all the rest.

I just don't see the hard evidence for this shift.

[us4-he2-gal2]

Your source Sheshki is probably just fine as a broad anthropological commentary, though of course Amarsin's prejudice is that of the Assyriological field - they won't quite accept input about their studied people from an outside source, and given that we are bound to admire the level of detail and cultural insight that can only come from a cuneiform scholar, we will likely end up adopting the same prejudice.

As for the topic of the matriarchal situation of early Mesoptoamia, I have found Amarsin's comment about inaccurate scholarship to be the case sometimes - as for example on the Gender in Mesopotamia thread, I reviewed an article published in the Journal of Feminist studies which quite determinedly pushed for matriarchal early society, but maintained this position with grossly inaccurate scholarship (see reply # 7). Though I still haven't focused much on Gender studies since that time, I had also come to a comment of Pollock's which seems to put forward a more learned and cautious tone concerning any changes of women's statues in Mesopotamia over the millennia. Her opinion (see reply # 10) 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, uni-directional 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."

I think with the Mesopotamian context, Anthropological of Feminist commentators have used the observation of increased patriarchal authority to jump to the conjecture of some far off and injured matriarchal authority when there is no real evidence for such in the Mesopotamian context. But I will leave comments on this subject to members more qualified and interested in Gender studies. Perhaps our new member we apply her weight on this topic further.

[adante]

I thought I had replied to this thread once before. Oh well.

I have a theory that women would not have been treated any better or worse than men, that this would have evolved over time for various reasons, one being that people began to settle down and communities grew bigger.

I have just downloaded an article which would seem to give some weight to my theory. I downloaded a March 2005 copy of Scientific American, which looked at ancient cultures. One of these was entitled 'Stone age equality'. It covers the archeological dig at Catalhoyuk, in central Turkey. The culture being looked at is a neolithic one, around 9,000 years old.

Basically, they can draw no definite conclusion, however, what evidence they can find points to men and women being seen pretty much as equals within society. Not necessarily doing the same tasks, but not seen as inequal either.

The article I downloaded from scribd.com and the link is:
www.scribd.com/doc/10384256/Mysteries-of-the-Ancient-Ones

What does this say about Sumer? Nothing. We can't say because one society was a particular way, all societies were and certainly not ones that came along around 5,000 years later. What it might point to is at the time humans were just starting to give up their nomadic ways and settle down in tribes, men and women were seen as no different in terms of importance to the survival of the community. This would then seem to support the idea inequality developed over time.

It also has an article about Mashkan-sapir

I may not be an academic yet, but I do have a brain.

[ninurta2008]

Wasn't there an Ancient Assyrian Law against homosexuality? I could have sworn there was, but I may be wrong. I will look. But I am clueless of Babylonian views and sumerian views of homosexuality. I know that in the temple it was okay, so like prostitution I can only assume it was okay outside the temple.

[enkur]

The very fact that there was a deity like Enki combining libido and intelligence speaks much to me. I feel the Sumerian south had some more liberal attitude as regards sex and genders prior to the Akkadian conquest. There is nothing erotic in Enheduana's hymns to Inana who is addressed in her warrior aspect only. I think it was the consequent Semite nomadic waves from the desert whose culture was warrior-patriarchal, who brought more and more puritan moral in Mesopotamia. It comes quite naturally to the desert people to save their bodily fluids and use them to the purpose only - i.e. sex for pleasure etc. is frowned on. The sublimation of the excessive sexual energy is a common feature of the most warrior cultures.

[us4-he2-gal2]

Enkur


This post is nicely thought out, and I would have to agree with all of it - a combination of deduction and intuition produces some of the most interesting and provoking commentaries on the Ancient World, even as many scholars admit only deductive results.

[enkur]

I think something similar happened with the river Ind's civilization (Mohenjo Daro etc.) in about 1500 b.c.e. when the warrior Aryan culture penetrated there.

[creyente]

Sept 28, 2010 8:59:21 GMT -5 enkur said:

I think something similar happened with the river Ind's civilization (Mohenjo Daro etc.) in about 1500 b.c.e. when the warrior Aryan culture penetrated there.

no pun intended i asume...  i think that, if we take into acount, that sumerians were mostly about working the land, they probably had "sexual inspiration" so to speak, from the natural world, wich we can see have two different traits that repeat over animals and plants alike... it does not always work as a mean of reproduction, and when it does its in a seasonal moment... so... dogs might have sex, even homosexual sex... at any time, "just for fun"...and have it for reproductive reasons, in certain seasons... some plants need the seed to be treated... like been eaten by a bird, or something like that, but t can be released without getting to where they should, and there would not be a new tree, and it does not seem as something wrong, the tree will throw a lot of other seeds...

from that point of view, they shouldnt have any problem with it... and i think i got an article about a letter or something to a king who didnt respect the transgender priests of inanna, and it was seen as something awful that he didnt... so i asume it was at least ok, if not divine to be transgender...