A Companion to Women in the Ancient World

Sharon L. James, Sheila Dillon, Sharon L. James, Sheila Dillon

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781444355000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A COMPANION TO WOMEN IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

A Companion to Women in the Ancient World is the first interdisciplinary, methodologically based collection of readings to address the study of women in the ancient world while weaving textual, visual, and archaeological evidence into its approach. Prominent scholars tackle the myriad problems inherent in the interpretation of the evidence, and consider the biases and interpretive categories inherited from centuries of scholarship. Essays and case studies cover an unprecedented breadth of chronological and geographical range, genres, and themes.

Illuminating and insightful, A Companion to Women in the Ancient World both challenges preconceived notions and paves the way for new directions in research on women in antiquity.

Part I

Women Outside Athens and Rome

This section brings together the earliest evidence for women, across a very wide chronological and geographical range. We begin with an issue that is foundational to the modern study of women in the ancient world, namely the Mother Goddess. As Lauren Talalay demonstrates in Case Study I (“The Mother Goddess in Prehistory: Debates and Perspectives”), there was a desire among scholars, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, to locate a period in the distant past in which women were not secondary, when female power was celebrated, and when an overarching Mother Goddess was the primary divinity. This myth continues to have great appeal, as witnessed in “goddess-tourism” in the Mediterranean even today. While it is no longer an active scholarly theory, the issue of the Mother Goddess continues to be an exemplar for the problems of studying women in antiquity: mysterious images disembodied from their contexts, multiple scholarly biases and motivations, and conflicting interpretations of the scanty and fragmentary evidence.

A common aim of these chapters is to use the mostly, though not exclusively, visual materials to explore the social and political place of women in the earliest periods of the ancient world. Much of the evidence focuses on elite women, as is the case throughout the volume, but the large population of laboring women, both free and enslaved, is broadly perceptible, as Cristiana Franco and Marianna Nikolaïdou demonstrate. In “Hidden Voices: Unveiling Women in Ancient Egypt” (Chapter 2), Kasia Szpakowska analyzes ancient physical evidence, noting throughout that unexamined assumptions and biases in scholarship have led to unsupportable, sometimes illogical, conclusions; she particularly urges us to defamiliarize ourselves from Egyptian artistic evidence, which is easily recognized but not so easily understood. In “Women in Homer” (Chapter 4), Cristiana Franco draws on approaches from anthropology to reader-response literary theory. In “Women in Ancient Mesopotamia” (Chapter 1), Amy R. Gansell studies mortuary evidence from elite funerary contexts to pursue what can be understood from such materials, particularly about the social and public roles of women in this class; she reminds us that much remains to be excavated, and that our understanding will be modified in the future. In “Looking for Minoan and Mycenaean Women: Paths of Feminist Scholarship Towards the Aegean Bronze Age” (Chapter 3), Marianna Nikolaïdou considers how women participated in the continuous technological developments of Minoan and Mycenaean society. In “Etruscan Women: Towards a Reappraisal” (Chapter 5), Vedia Izzet takes a skeptical look at the evidence for Etruscan women, concluding that many of our conventional beliefs about them are close to baseless and that we must start afresh from these materials, without prejudices and ideas inherited from prior scholarship as well as from biased Greek and Roman sources.

These early periods are those for which it has been most tempting to recreate for women a prominent public role and wider-scale participation in society, rather than strict limitation to the domestic realm. The mysterious and striking visual materials engender unanswerable questions; for example, who are these bare-breasted Minoan women? Were Etruscan women really prominent, as they seem to be in funerary depictions? Without attempting to answer such questions, which may well reflect post-classical rather than ancient categories and issues, the essays here study multiple forms of evidence and thus provide an exemplary opening for this volume's interdisciplinary mission.

Case Study I

The Mother Goddess in Prehistory: Debates and Perspectives

Lauren Talalay

For over a century, archaeologists, mythographers, poets, psychoanalysts—and many others—have debated the existence and meaning of a so-called Mother Goddess in prehistory. Often contentious, the debate has fallen into two basic camps. On one side are “Goddess movement” proponents who claim that early Mediterranean, Egyptian, and Near Eastern societies worshiped an all-powerful female deity, celebrated nature, and embraced an egalitarian ideal within a matriarchal social structure. Supporting evidence for the worship of the Goddess, it is argued, derives from two sources: the myriad female figurines recovered from archaeological contexts dating from approximately 40,000 years ago to 3500 BCE, and the existence of later Mother Goddess types (e.g., Ishtar, Astarte, Cybele, and the Roman Magna Mater), all of which are thought to represent vestiges of these earlier female divinities. In the opposing camp stand academic archaeologists who discount these “meta-narratives” as an invented past. They argue that such ideas find little support in the archaeological record, cast religion as static despite momentous social changes over the millennia, and are politically driven, most recently by the feminist movement. The academic side is also quick to observe that, even if evidence for a primal Mother Goddess were unassailable, arguments linking the theological realm to the social structures of these early communities are weak. Worship of a nurturing Mother Goddess who oversees cosmological creation, fertility, and death does not necessarily entail or reflect a pacific matriarchy and female power in society.

The debate is complex and sprawling, encompassing issues that extend beyond the topics of religion, prehistoric theology, and the precise roles of such a goddess in prehistory. Over the years, discussions have been shaped by political agendas; discourses of power, sex, and gender in the ancient world; and changing fashions within the academy. Given the larger forces at play, however, the debate provides fertile ground for probing subjects such as the notion of “the feminine” (as opposed to “the masculine”) in early theological systems, definitions of “religion” and “goddess” in prehistoric contexts, and relationships between the concept of a female divinity and the social roles of women in antiquity (Talalay 2008).

It is impossible to do justice to the multiple, thorny layers of the debate in this short introduction (for good summaries, see Goodison and Morris 1998b and Eller 2000: 30–55). Instead, I provide a simplified history of the Great Goddess debate and then extract from that history some general questions and thoughts, many of which have a bearing on the following chapters.

* * *

The genealogy of the Mother Goddess debate is usually traced back to Johann Jacob Bachofen, a Swiss jurist and classicist. In 1861, Bachofen published a landmark book, Das Mutterrecht, in which he argued for an evolutionary unfolding of human history. He proposed that society moved from an early stage of sexual promiscuity and communal property through a time when women ruled supreme, and then finally to a patriarchal culture. His thesis was supported by several well-known anthropologists, many of whom also espoused evolutionary paradigms (e.g., Tylor 1871; Morgan 1877). Although a few of these writers discussed the worship of some type of Mother Goddess during the matriarchal stage, many decades ensued before scholars and various specialists fully explored the notion of an all-powerful, divine female archetype. Not until the 1950s and 1960s did books such as The Great Mother (Neumann 1955) and The Cult of the Mother-Goddess (James 1959), begin to appear. These publications, written by experts from an array of disciplines, contained much speculation on prehistoric goddess worship, mythology, and symbology.

Mother goddess inquiries took a more transparently political turn in the late 1960s and 1970s when feminist writers, usually from outside the academy, entered the scene. Picking up earlier threads that extended back to Bachofen, these authors focused not only on the generative and nurturing powers of an alleged “Mother Creatrix” but also on the transformation of society at the end of the Neolithic Age into a patriarchy (see e.g., Stone 1976). Many of these writers sought academic support in the publications of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (e.g., 1974, 1989), who wrote extensively about the prevalence of women in the prehistoric iconography of eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, and an alleged invasion from the north Black Sea steppes of male, nomadic warriors, who effectively terminated the earlier, pacific, and more egalitarian ways of life.

While the feminist perspective was hardly uniform—some feminists claimed that the Goddess had a darker, more destructive side—most Goddess proponents from the 1960s onward held a common view: there was a time when the nurturing capacities of women, “the feminine,” and nature were celebrated, and when authority and power were more evenly distributed between the sexes. The Goddess movement became a “manifesto for change” (Eller 2000: 7), with a desire to reinstitute this lost world.

Although academics largely ignored the popular Goddess movement, several publications surfaced in the late 1960s that challenged its core premise. Most seminal were Peter Ucko's (1968) volume on figurines from prehistoric Egypt and Neolithic Crete, and Andrew Fleming's article “The myth of the mother-goddess,” which ended with the statement, “The mother-goddess has detained us for too long, let us disentangle ourselves from her embrace” (Fleming 1969: 259). Both publications stressed the failings of an overarching Mother Goddess theory, pointing out in some detail that it was inadequately supported by the archaeological evidence.

For a while the Great Goddess debate appeared all but dead. Then, beginning in the 1990s, renewed interest in anthropomorphic images, identity, gender, reception theory, and postprocessual paradigms produced a wave of books and articles that re-examined, among other things, the foundations of the debate. These publications, mostly from academic circles, problematized the notion of fertility, explored new ways to analyze figurines, and reconsidered theories of representation and the material expression of divinity (e.g., Talalay 1994; Conkey and Tringham 1995; Meskell 1995, 1998; Goodison and Morris 1998a; Tringham and Conkey 1998; Eller 2000). The resulting scholarship has been both lively and problematic, generating more questions than answers. Some suggest that at certain times in Mediterranean prehistory the divine may not have been personified as an anthropomorphic being (Goodison and Morris 1998a: 119). Others reconsider the political implications of the Mother Goddess debate, arguing that the popular Goddess literature essentializes women by confining their powers to reproductive capabilities. Worse still, these scholars point out, if reproduction has long been viewed cross-culturally as marginal to the processes of larger cultural change, then the Goddess narrative has unwittingly relegated women's status to that of cultural object rather than cultural agent (Talalay 1994, 2008; Tringham and Conkey 1998; Conkey and Tringham 1995; Meskell 1995).

This recent round of debates has produced instructive criticisms, cautions, and questions. Not surprisingly, the overriding message from the academic side is a demand for greater analytic rigor. Academics observe that the apparent abundance of female figurines does not necessarily support the idea of a goddess pantheon, let alone an all-encompassing Mother or Great Goddess. The basic question remains, how do we identify a deity in the prehistoric record? Even if we can, how do we determine the nature of its divine powers? Moreover, it is argued, assigning unitary significance to these depictions is unwarranted; the portrayals vary in form, detail, levels of abstraction, and sexual indicators. Although relatively few are clearly male, many figurines have no sexual features, some are sexually ambiguous, and a handful indicate both sexes. The common belief, therefore, that the prehistoric production of human images was monolithic, confined almost exclusively to forming female images and the occasional male consort, is unfounded. Such variability, however, is instructive. Recent scholarship has explored the fluid and non-binary nature of gender and sex in prehistory (e.g., Hamilton 2000), a particularly challenging topic but one that continues to warrant scrutiny. Just as importantly, academic researchers criticize the tendency to equate possible female authority in divine realms with an elevated status of women in society. Indeed, female authority in the theological sphere of many modern societies often belies the subordinate status of women in socio-political life. At the heart of this observation is the complex issue of how researchers can convincingly move between evidence that might be keyed to ancient theological realms and daily social action.

Archaeological context and figurine production have, until recently, been largely understudied axes of analysis. Academics and non-academics alike have sometimes glossed over contextual data on figurines and failed to pose more penetrating questions, particularly those that are routinely asked of other kinds of data. Were figurines recovered from burials, rubbish pits, or domestic deposits? Do any derive from cultic areas and how are those defined? Were anthropomorphic images deliberately or accidentally deposited or broken? When figurines appear in rubbish deposits, as is common, what kinds of other objects accompany them and what kinds are absent? Can we determine whether figurines took part in any kind of performance, broadly defined? How were figurines formed, with what materials, and how do those differ from other objects? (See Goodison and Morris 1998b: 15; Tringham and Conkey 1998: 28.)

Finally, archaeologists are beginning to deconstruct commonly used terms such as “temple,” “shrine,” “ritual,” “public,” “private,” “mother,” and “goddess.” These and other words frequently used in the literature tend to predetermine analytic frameworks, often reflecting modern Western ideas that may not have been valid in the prehistoric world (Tringham and Conkey 1998: 40–3).

The popular literature, conversely, has underscored other significant issues, providing an antidote to overly cautious intellectual constraints. Spirituality and a concept of the divine are central to much of this literature, and are indeed likely to have been part of prehistoric life in the Mediterranean, Egypt, and the Near East. Worship of a Great Goddess may well be a myth, but coping with the vagaries of birth, death, and fertility were, we must imagine, major concerns in prehistoric cultures. How those organizing principles were conceived and expressed in the material record is a vexing and elusive topic for prehistorians. These difficulties notwithstanding, speculation and provocative arguments should be welcomed, provided they are reasonable and informed.

In sum, the Great Goddess debate has produced spirited—sometimes acrimonious—and thoughtful discussions, both within and outside the academy, that raise a host of important questions for the general exploration of women, gender, and female deities in the ancient world. It may be impossible to ever prove one way or the other that a Great Goddess existed in prehistory. As the essays that follow suggest, what is more likely is that interpretations of female deities, their intersection with the roles of women in antiquity, and the place of these debates in modern society will be rewritten many times in the future.

Chapter 1

Women in Ancient Mesopotamia

Amy R. Gansell

Ancient Mesopotamian texts and images carved into sculptures, cliffs, and palace walls monumentalized the primacy of the male ruler. Complementing such large-scale media, thousands of intaglio seals, and their innumerable impressions, legitimated male power through depictions of the ruler in audience with gods and goddesses. Indeed, a patriarchal power structure sustained Mesopotamian civilization. Even so, women played vital roles in all levels of society. In addition to their domestic and reproductive functions as mothers, wives, and daughters, elite women contributed to the male-dominated spheres of the arts, economy, religion, and government.

Information about ancient Mesopotamian women of diverse social classes survives in cuneiform documents (including legal, economic, labor, marriage, adoption, and temple records, a...