Royal Women and the Exercise of Power in the Ancient Near East

Abstract

Using examples from different periods and areas of Mesopotamia, this chapter concentrates on royal women, who are better represented than lower status women. In all periods of ancient Near Eastern history, women had legal rights Royal women are rarely depicted on public monuments or mentioned in inscriptions, but when occasionally they do appear, they are subordinate only to the king or divinities. They fulfilled important cultural roles, but their official duties are much more difficult to determine, since they varied according to whether the context was administrative, political or religious. Although women could be important in civil administration, in the political arena their roles were more restricted. The number of women in the king's household demonstrated his financial power and masculinity. Women did wield power right alongside men, but they had different roles, different means of exercising influence, and different avenues of authority from men.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.