Marten Stol WOMEN IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST Marten Stol Women in the Ancient Near East Marten Stol Women in the Ancient Near East Translated by Helen and Mervyn Richardson ISBN 978-1-61451-323-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-61451-263-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0021-3 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/3.0/ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. Original edition: Vrouwen van Babylon. Prinsessen, priesteressen, prostituees in de bakermat van de cultuur. Uitgeverij Kok, Utrecht (2012). Translated by Helen and Mervyn Richardson © 2016 Walter de Gruyter Inc., Boston/Berlin Cover Image: Marten Stol Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde Printing and binding: cpi books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Table of Contents Introduction 1 Map 5 1 Her outward appearance 7 1.1 Phases of life 7 1.2 The girl 10 1.3 The virgin 13 1.4 Women’s clothing 17 1.5 Cosmetics and beauty 47 1.6 The language of women 56 1.7 Women’s names 58 2 Marriage 60 2.1 Preparations 62 2.2 Age for marrying 66 2.3 Regulations 67 2.4 The betrothal 72 2.5 The wedding 93 2.6 Marriage and magic 110 3 The marriage gifts 112 3.1 General remarks 112 3.2 The bride-price 117 3.3 The dowry 134 3.4 Gifts from the man 145 4 The family 147 4.1 Impotence 148 4.2 Children 152 4.3 The mother 155 4.4 Bereavement 159 4.5 Childlessness 160 4.6 Repudiation of a childless wife 163 5 A second wife 165 5.1 A slave-girl 168 5.2 Initiating the transaction 170 VI Table of Contents 5.3 The second wife in the Old Assyrian period 182 5.4 The second wife in later periods 188 5.5 The position of the second wife when the first wife is ill 191 6 Concubines 193 7 Marriage between equals 200 8 Marriage to a slave 205 9 Divorce 209 9.1 In Babylonia 210 9.2 In Assyria 216 9.3 In the Neo-Babylonian period 220 9.4 In Syria 223 9.5 Motives for divorce 223 9.6 Predictions 230 9.7 Reconciliation 232 10 Adultery 234 10.1 Women who initiate adultery 235 10.2 Were both lovers treated equally? 239 10.3 Caught in the act 243 10.4 Punishment 244 10.5 Accusations of adultery 245 10.6 The Mother of Sin 250 10.7 An adulterous princess? 250 11 Rape 254 11.1 Slave-girl 255 11.2 Unmarried girl 258 11.3 Married woman 261 11.4 The locations 263 11.5 In myths 264 11.6 The right of the first night 265 12 Incest 268 12.1 Promiscuity 268 12.2 Incest 270 Table of Contents VII 13 The widow 275 13.1 Poor widows 278 13.2 Arrangements made for widows in wills 282 13.3 Powerful widows 284 13.4 Remarrying 288 13.5 Cohabiting 290 13.6 Widows with children 292 14 Levirate marriage 296 15 Women’s rights of inheritance 300 16 Women-trafficking under the guise of adoption 304 16.1 The Old Babylonian period 304 16.2 Nuzi 306 17 Women robbed of their freedom 311 17.1 Security for a man’s debts 311 17.2 The woman as guarantor 319 17.3 Imprisoned for murder 323 17.4 The sale of children in time of need 324 17.5 Dedicated to a temple 326 17.6 Prisoners of war 331 18 Women and work 339 18.1 Working outside the home 341 18.2 Weavers 344 18.3 Grinding flour 350 18.4 Women as musicians and singers 353 18.5 The female innkeeper 363 18.6 Scribes 367 18.7 The female doctor 371 18.8 Wailing women 372 18.9 Women involved in childbirth 375 18.10 Business women 381 18.11 Women’s seals 387 18.12 Women as witnesses 389 19 The witch 391 VIII Table of Contents 20 Prostitution 399 20.1 Where she worked 399 20.2 Dressed for work 405 20.3 Slave-girls 409 20.4 The risk of pregnancy 410 20.5 Forced into prostitution 413 20.6 Marriage 414 20.7 Social esteem 416 21 Temple prostitution 419 21.1 Internal evidence 419 21.2 The kezertu 422 21.3 Devaluing old titles 426 21.4 Income 426 21.5 Goddess and whore 427 21.6 A wild celebration 435 22 Her physical life 436 22.1 Physiology 436 22.2 Menstruation 438 22.3 Diseases 441 22.4 The old woman 451 22.5 Dead and buried 456 23 The court and the harem before 1500 BC 459 23.1 The Sumerians 461 23.2 Ebla 464 23.3 Funerals 471 23.4 The Old Akkadian period 475 23.5 The kingdom of Ur III 476 23.6 The Old Babylonian period 487 24 The court and the harem after 1500 BC 512 24.1 Babylonia 512 24.2 Assyria 514 24.3 Nuzi 518 24.4 The Hittites and Egypt 519 24.5 Ugarit 526 24.6 The Neo-Assyrian period 529 24.7 The Neo-Babylonian period 548 Table of Contents IX 24.8 The Persian period and later 552 24.9 Arab queens 554 25 Priestesses 555 25.1 The high priestesses 555 25.2 Priestesses in Mari 578 25.3 Priestesses in the Old Assyrian period 580 25.4 Priestesses after the Old Babylonian period 581 26 Old Babylonian convents 584 26.1 Words for a ‘nun’ 586 26.2 The nadîtu 587 26.3 Inauguration 590 26.4 High status 594 26.5 Duties 597 26.6 Care in old age 600 26.7 The demise of the convent 601 27 Married holy women 605 27.1 The nadîtu of Marduk the god of Babylon 605 27.2 The holy woman, the qadištu 608 27.3 The kulmašītu 615 28 Soothsaying 617 28.1 Dreams, prophecy and ecstasy in Mari 620 28.2 Prophecy in Assyria 623 29 Women and worship 627 29.1 Offerings for the dead 628 29.2 Making intercession 631 29.3 The woman and her goddess 638 29.4 The mourning for Tammuz 640 30 The Sacred Marriage 645 30.1 Poetry 647 30.2 The reality of the situation 650 30.3 The function of the ritual 652 30.4 The Assyrian period and later 655 30.5 The demise of goddesses 657 X Table of Contents 31 The Middle Assyrian law-book about women 662 32 The value placed on women 683 32.1 Positive views 683 32.2 Negative views 685 32.3 Women compared with men 690 Bibliography 692 Indexes 693 Introduction We are about to see a long line of very different women passing before our eyes. One of them is shuffling along, but another is sashaying around across stage. They are all to be found in the pages of this book, from the lowliest slave to the powerful queen. They are linked primarily by their distinctive biology, by what sociologists call their ‘sex’ rather than their ‘gender’ which indicates their place in society. So we have chosen ‘Women’, not ‘Woman’ of the Ancient Near East as our title, for their roles are far too diverse to use a singular noun. The richest sources of the Ancient Near East are found in Babylonia, Mesopotamia, so we we will concentrate on them. Babylon was the most important town of what used to be called the land of Mesopotamia. That name is derived from Greek to signify a land ‘between two rivers’, those being the Tigris and the Euphrates. This area corresponds to pres- ent-day Iraq and the eastern part of Syria. It was here that we find the first evi- dence of cuneiform script, developed first by the Sumerians, and perpetuated from around 3100 BC until far into the Greek period, which began in 330 BC. Scribes normally used a reed to impress cuneiform signs on tablets of soft clay. We also have royal inscriptions, where the achievements of the ancient kings were recorded for posterity by being chiselled out in the same script on stone monu- ments. The material adduced in this book relies on that vast body of documents from thousands of years ago. They themselves were written over a period of almost three thousand years. Scholars have published hundreds of thousands of them already, and tens of thousands of others are waiting in museum drawers for the attention of today’s specialist researchers. And we know that there are countless more still underground waiting to see the light of day. A recent survey, limited to the published archival texts, estimated that at present we have available for study 246,000 texts from Babylon and Assyria containing some 10,000,000 words. This amounts to twice as many known for ancient Egyptian. Only in ancient Greek has more writing survived, most of it coming from thousands of Greek papyri recov- ered from the sands of Egypt.¹ As for cuneiform, we have still 100,000 more texts from archives, earlier and written in Sumerian, containing up to three million words.