ABSTRACT

No historical discipline can take itself seriously today without paying attention to the issue of gender. Ancient Mesopotamian history is no exception, and even though it has not taken a lead in any theoretical considerations in this research, it has to a certain extent, and with some delay, followed the general trends in gender scholarship. This scholarship has moved from a primary concern with the place of women in history to a study of the construction of gender, so I will use this broader term here, although much of Mesopotamian scholarship has been concerned with the identification of women in the record. As Mesopotamia is a civilization of the distant past and located in the Middle East, the study of gender is often colored by preconceptions and a priori assumptions based on ideas on women in classical antiquity and in the Islamic Middle East. This is especially visible in the use of such terms as harem and veil, or the assumption that women were necessarily economically dependent on men. Such preconceptions need to be resisted, as the position of women needs to be studied within the particular cultural context of Mesopotamian society.