Reconceiving the House of the Father: Royal Women at Ugarit
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Reconceiving the House of the Father: Royal Women at Ugarit The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Thomas, Christine Neal. 2014. Reconceiving the House of the Father: Royal Women at Ugarit. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12274554 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Reconceiving the House of the Father: Royal Women at Ugarit A dissertation presented by Christine Neal Thomas to The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts September 2013 © 2014 Christine Neal Thomas All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Peter Machinist Christine Neal Thomas Reconceiving the House of the Father: Royal Women at Ugarit Abstract Every father is the son of a mother. While this would appear to be a commonplace, studies of patrimonialism as a political system in the ancient Near East have rarely considered its implications. Royal women, as objects of exchange and as agents of political action, played a central role in negotiations between Late Bronze Age states and in dynastic struggles within these states. The relative positions of royal men were shaped by their relationships to royal women. In three case studies of texts from Ugarit, this dissertation elucidates the instrumentality and agency of women in the reproduction of royal households and in the formation of interdynastic alliances. The first case study considers Ugaritic letters from kings to their mothers. The letters reveal that royal women could maintain their positions as queens from the reigns of their husbands into the reigns of their sons. Furthermore, the forms of address and self-identification the king used in relationship to his mother suggest a reciprocity in their political status. The second case study examines Hittite imperial verdicts concerning two pairs of royal mothers and sons. The first set of verdicts demonstrates that a royal woman’s ability to maintain her tenure as queen after the death of her husband benefited both herself and iii her son. In the second set, a royal woman’s loss of position as queen undermined her son’s and her male kinsmen’s positions. The third case study analyzes the Hittite imperial verdicts and regional accords between Ugarit and Amurru that document the divorce, exile, and execution of the wife of the king of Ugarit. This woman, the daughter of a king of Amurru and a Hittite princess, embodied the intersection of imperial and interregional alliances across three generations. By stripping her of her status as a royal wife, daughter, sister, and mother, the king of Ugarit circumscribed the authority of her son and brothers and asserted his will within the Hittite imperial system. Patrimonial rule depended on the political polyvalence of women. The royal “House of the Father” was not a system revolving around one powerful man, but a network of alliances under constant negotiation by royal women and men. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 Ugarit in its World: Situating the Texts 19 Women at Amarna, Women at Ugarit 29 The House of the Father 38 CHAPTER ONE ROYAL MOTHERS AND SONS IN THE UGARITIC LETTERS 51 “Your Son, the King”: Patterns of Royal Relationships 57 “My Mother, the Queen”: Royal Mothers and Diplomatic Relations 68 Mothers and Sons, Fathers and Daughters: RS 34.124 as a Pivotal Text 86 Conclusion 102 CHAPTER TWO ROYAL MOTHERS AND SONS IN IMPERIAL PERSPECTIVE 105 A∆atumilki and the Daughter of Bente¡ina 110 “A∆atumilki, Their Mother, Queen of Ugarit”: The Making of Kings 123 “If He Says, I Shall Follow My Mother”: The Unmaking of a Queen 140 Conclusion 162 CHAPTER THREE THE DIVORCE OF THE DAUGHTER OF THE GREAT LADY 165 Defining the Corpus, Identifying the Woman 168 The Daughter of a King and the Daughter of a Great Lady 188 Hittite Vassal Marriages as Imperial Strategy 213 Conclusion 226 v CHAPTER FOUR “HER BROTHER MAY NOT SPEAK WITH HER”: EMBATTLED KINGSHIP 230 Patrimonial Language in the Imperial Verdicts 234 The Accords between the Kings 244 The Sons of the Great Lady 259 Conclusion 266 CONCLUSION 268 ABBREVIATIONS 276 BIBLIOGRAPHY 277 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to my mentors and my colleagues, my friends and my family, who have supported me through the work of writing this dissertation and who have sustained and inspired me throughout my years at Harvard. As I move on to the next stage of my professional life, I am more conscious than ever of the privilege I have enjoyed in being part of this intellectual community and of having had available to me all the resources which the university provides. In this spirit, I would first like to thank the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies and its donors, who have so generously supported me through all my years in this program. May the training in which you have invested bring back benefit to the community (Isaiah 55: 10-11). My advisors Peter Machinist, Susan S. Lanser, John Huehnergard, and Jo Ann Hackett exemplify the ideal of scholarship that sustains and nurtures a community. I am grateful to be among the students whom they have mentored and to have enjoyed their generosity to me personally as well as the collegiality they inspire among their students. Their excellence as scholars, their dedication to their fields, and their abundant kindness are a model of what is finest in this profession. Without their encouragement, their investment in this project, and their careful reading of my work, I could not have brought it to completion. One of the chief pleasures of this project has been the opportunity to engage in new fields of study and to build relationships with scholars working in these fields. Gary vii Beckman, Richard Beal, and JoAnn Scurlock have been extraordinary in their intellectual and personal generosity and their encouragement of my work. My colleagues and friends have supported me in ways too numerous to name. My heartfelt thanks to Eve Levavi Feinstein, Suzie Park, Rebecca Hancock, Katherine Shaner, Mary Ruth Windham, Hilary Kapfer, Vivian Johnson, Ari Finkelstein, Jennifer Jensen, Jonathan Kline, Joanna Greenlee Kline, Nicola Carpentieri, John Noble, Brian Doak, Michael Lesley, Chuck Haberl, Ely Levine, Aaron Brody, Emily Gardel, Nicole Mushero, Julia Herzig, and Liza Piper. Kynthia Taylor has been a friend, colleague, and teacher without whom I could not have done the work this dissertation required. My family have loved and supported me in this work as in all things. My father David Thomas, my sisters Carol and Kathryn Thomas, my brother-in-law Douglas Armstrong, my honorary sister Andrea Talis, my nieces Hallie, Sarah, and Caroline, and my nephew Graham are a constant source of joy. They have been joined in the past seven years by my Freedberg family: my father and mother-in-law William and Sarah Freedberg, my sister and brother-in-law Rebecca and Matthew Nuernberger and their children Teddy and Nora, and my sister-in-law Sassie Freedberg. My deepest gratitude I owe to my wife Hannah Freedberg. Her grace and love, her faithfulness and humor, and the boundless support she offers me daily are a marvel. This work is dedicated to her. Christine Neal Thomas Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion Cincinnati, Ohio viii INTRODUCTION Every father is the son of a mother. While this would appear to be a social and biological commonplace, studies of patrimonialism as a political system in the ancient Near East have rarely considered its implications. Royal women, both as objects of exchange and as agents of political action, played a central role in the negotiations between Late Bronze Age territorial states and in the dynastic struggles within these states. The interdynastic marriage alliances intended to forge political bonds between royal men depended on individual women functioning in several positions at the same time: as daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers. Within royal households a woman's status relative to other royal women, the status of her father, and her relationship to the king determined her ability to advance her own interests and the interests of her son. These dynamics among and within royal households are apparent in texts from the Late Bronze Age site of Ugarit. In a series of three case studies of letters and legal verdicts from Ugarit, this dissertation will examine the instrumentality and agency of women in the reproduction of royal households and in the formation of interdynastic alliances. I argue that not only did royal women have significant roles in these arenas, but the relative positions of royal men were shaped by their relationships to royal women. Ugarit provides rich resources for such a study because of its place in the political system of its time. Ugarit was a commercially vibrant city-state situated on the Levantine coast, bordered to the north by the expanding territorial state of Hatti and to the southeast by the kingdom of Amurru. Texts discovered at Ugarit document its history from 1 approximately 1350 BCE to its destruction around 1190/85 BCE. Prior to the mid-14th century Ugarit was in the sphere of Egyptian dominance, as attested in the letters from the Amarna archive.1 The military campaigns of Šuppiluliuma I in Syria in the mid-14th century made Ugarit, like its neighboring polities, a vassal state of Hatti.