ABSTRACT
Queens and royal women played an important role in Mesopotamian history, if only due to their privileged access to the most powerful man of their times; however, as the textual evidence focuses on the king and his deeds, our evidence for the active political engagement of royal women is somewhat limited. This chapter gives a short overview of the Mesopotamian textual evidence and then presents several case studies of Mesopotamian royal women. The representation of two prototypical female goddesses, the mother-goddess Ninsun and Ishtar, goddess of love and war, is taken as a starting point to approach the Mesopotamian conceptualization of royal women. The main part of the chapter is devoted to case studies of several royal women (Ku-Baba, Enheduanna, Sammu-ramat, Naqi ͗a and Adad-guppi).
