Women's Writing of Ancient Mesopotamia

Abstract

Describing women as a separate topic of study has its problems. Women are not a "special issue," but form half of the population. Furthermore, we face the obvious problem of scope: Mesopotamia covers a huge area, over a period of three thousand years, and there was considerable variation in the roles of women within this geographical and chronological framework. Additionally, textual evidence from Mesopotamia is very uneven. Some areas and time periods are very well documented but there are also huge gaps. However, we can begin to fill in some of these gaps with information from the archaeological record and iconographic evidence. Despite these challenges, we felt it was necessary to give the reader some basic background information regarding some of the most salient features in Mesopotamian women's lives. Thus, the following identifies some features of women's lives which werein most places and timescommon denominators for them. In this chapter, we first outline women's position in society, followed by a discussion of women in and out of matrimony. Finally, elite women's lives in some specific periods and places are described. 1 1 Several studies have been published regarding Mesopotamian women. In addition to those mentioned in the footnotes of this chapter, some of the most relevant and/or most recent volumes include: Mark Chavalas (ed.

Finding Our Missing Pieces—Women Technical Writers in Ancient Mesopotamia

“…According to Halton and Svard (2018), a writer is an instrumental agent of the act of writing when she copies existing works of writing. When a scribal student copied a known work of literature, she was an instrumental agent of writing because her copy was instrumental in preserving the work.…”

“…Durack (1997) argues that to find evidence of women’s technical writing, we must look outside of traditional male spaces—a position criticized by Zainab Bahrani (2001), who argues that such a position relegates women’s history to that which is inherently feminine: childcare and cooking. Charles Halton and Saana Svard (2018) support this position, believing the goal of textual analysis should not be to identify the “essentially female features” (p. 27) of a piece of writing but to understand how the web of gender within the women’s culture determined their authorship as women. Clearly, we should continue to analyze women’s texts written about women’s issues, but we should not assume that women historically wrote only about women’s issues because an analysis of the first writings produced by women proves this assumption wrong.…”

“…The first systems of writing were developed by four distinct cultures: Mesopotamian and Egyptian (3300–3200 BCE), Chinese (late 13th century BCE), and Mesoamerican (300–200 BCE). However, only the Mesopotamian culture produced examples of literature known to have been written by women (Halton & Svard, 2018, pp. 3–4).…”

“…3–4). Sadly, women’s writing was not as common as men’s; however, “within an environment in which hardly anyone—male and female alike—could write, more than a few women learned this skill and produced a sizable number of documents” (Halton & Svard, 2018, p. 4). Even more importantly, a large majority of the texts written by the women of ancient Mesopotamia were not about traditional women’s issues; they wrote for business purposes and instructional purposes.…”

“…An analysis of the writing produced by women clearly proves that the first written documents of historical significance were not produced by Homer. Long before the works of Homer, were the works of Enheduanna—the first woman writer and the first nonanonymous author ever identified (Halton & Svard, 2018). Enheduanna wrote many of the period’s great poems, and in the most well known of her poems, A Hymn to Inanna , she employs the use of an instructional writing style to create a persuasive and intentional argument about the power of the word and how women can harness that power.…”