Women in Ancient Mesopotamia: The History of the Lives and Social Roles of Mesopotamian Women

Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers, occupied the floodplain of the Tigris and the Euphrates in what is now Iraq. It was not a single state or a single group, but a succession of them, spread across 3,000 years. The Sumerians built the first cities there in the 4th millennium B.C. at Uruk, Ur, and Lagash, and they invented writing, a wedge-shaped cuneiform script pressed into clay, around 3300 B.C. The Akkadians under Sargon built the first major empire in the 24th century B.C. The Babylonians under Hammurabi codified the most famous of ancient law collections in the 18th century B.C., and the Assyrians built a vast and brutal military empire in the north in the 1st millennium B.C. The Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians all had different civilizational characteristics, and the position of women in those societies was not the same among all of them, and those differences could be quite distinct.

What unites the whole, and what makes the history of women possible to study at all, is the clay. The Mesopotamians wrote on tablets of damp clay that hardened and survived, and they wrote in staggering quantity, not only through royal inscriptions and religious hymns, but also the ordinary paperwork of daily life, contracts, receipts, loans, marriage settlements, wills, court records, and private letters. Hundreds of thousands of these tablets survive, and a great many of them concern women, from the business letters of Assyrian merchant wives to the property contracts of Babylonian priestesses, the will of a Sumerian widow, the marriage law of Babylon, and the correspondence of a queen of Mari. The documentary record of Mesopotamian women is one of the richest the ancient world left, and it allows historians to see them not only as the idealized figures of art and myth but as litigants, lenders, weavers, and traders going about their lives.