Studying Gender in the Ancient Near East

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Theoretical Approaches, Gender, and the Ancient Near East: An Introduction

Agnès Garcia-Ventura and Saana Svärd

From La Femme to Multiple Sex/Gender

Julia M. Asher-Greve

Gender in the Tale of Aqhat

Stephanie Lynn Budin

Gender, Personal Adornment, and Costly Signaling in the Iron Age Burials of Hasanlu, Iran

Megan Cifarelli

When Women Get Ill: Gendered Constructions of Health and Disease in Cuneiform Texts on Healing

M. Érica Couto-Ferreira

Puppets on a String? On Female Agency in Old Babylonian Economy

Katrien de Graef

In Pursuit of Neo-Assyrian Queens: An Interdisciplinary Methodology for Researching Ancient Women and Engendering Ancient History

Amy Rebecca Gansell

Postfeminism and Assyriology: An (Im)possible Relationship?

Agnès Garcia-Ventura

Gender Experiments in Hellenistic Babylonian Figurines

Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper

Gender and Methodology in the Study of 2nd-Millennium B.C.E. Family Archives

Brigitte Lion

Neo-Assyrian Women, Their Visibility, and Their Representation in Written and Pictorial Sources

Natalie N. May

Factors Complicating the Reconstruction of Women’s Lives in Iron Age Israel (1200–587 B.C.E.)

Beth Alpert Nakhai

Empire of the Surveilling Gaze: The Masculinity of King Sennacherib

Omar N’Shea

Rethinking Gender Relationships in a Sociopolitical Context during the Time of Zimri-Lim

María Rosa Oliver and Eleonora Ravenna

Building Up a History of Art of the Ancient Near East: The Case of Ebla and the Third-Millennium b.c.e. Court Ladies

Frances Pinnock

(Re)constructing the Image of the Assinnu

Saana Svärd and Martti Nissinen

After “Profits”: Methodological and Historiographic Remarks on the Study of Women, Textiles, and Economy in the Ancient Near East

Allison Karmel Thomason

Marriage Policy in Mari: A Field of Power between Domination and Resistance

Luciana Urbano

Gender Studies and Assyriology: Expectations of an Outsider

Niek Veldhuis

Analyzing Constructs: A Selection of Perils, Pitfalls, and Progressions in Interrogating Ancient Near Eastern Gender

Ilona Zsolnay

Gender and Methodology in the Ancient Near East: Final Thoughts

Amélie Kuhrt

Contributors

Index of Authors

“This volume succeeds in the editors’ broad goal of moving gender studies in the ANE forward. The editors deserve praise for organizing the workshops that led to this volume and publishing a collection of strong papers written by such a diverse group of scholars. One can only hope that the tools offered here will be adopted broadly and not only by researchers—most of them women—with a specific interest in gender issues.”

—Jennie Ebeling, Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies