not only belittled the power-hungry “kings of Kish”, but also bespeaks the attitude
towards women in the male-dominated early Mesopotamian establishment. From their
inception, inscriptions on dedicatory objects and seals identify women through their
husband or father. Stereotypical gender roles existed at least since the mid-third
millennium BC: in a birth incantation from Fara, the great midwife brings the girl to
the world with a spindle and needle(?) and the boy with two types of weapons
(Krebernik 1984 : 36 – 47 ). These symbols of femininity and masculinity were not only
used in magic rituals, but are also attested in literature and to some degree in grave
goods: men were given weapons, women jewellery.^1 They related men to the public
and women to the domestic sphere, a division still propagated by twentieth-century
dictators.
Although queens and princesses were not excluded from the public sphere, they are
less visible in the surviving monuments than kings and non-existent in royal
inscriptions and hymns. The fact that they figure as heads of estates in administrative
texts should not seduce us into concluding that the organisation of the state “was the
product of a strategy implemented by men and women in which women at the highest
levels of society were on a par with their male counterparts” (Wright 2008 : 272 ). Tonia
Sharlach ( 2007 ) rightly questions whether Shulgi-simti’s archive, for example, was a
woman’s archive when men wrote the tablets and men ran the livestock foundation.
This queen’s estate was more likely an institution tied to her official role as one of
Shulgi’s wives than a reflection of her personal choices or her individual piety. The
rationale behind economic units nominally headed by royal women was doubtlessly
to expand the crown’s control over the economy.
Royal women formed part of the elite. Accordingly a man could, in exceptional
cases, be identified through his affiliation with a royal woman rather than through his
father (Weiershäuser 2008 : 274 ). Elite status, however, should not be confounded with
direct political influence. Even if royal women had power behind the throne, they
remained subservient to the establishment. Thus Enheduana prayed for her nephew
Naramsin in order to regain her office of Nanna’s high priestess in Ur, from which she
had been chased away by the rebelling local governor.^2 The polygamy of kings attested
since Shulgi, and possibly in existence before that (Weiershäuser 2008 : 271 ), must have
diminished the role of queens, whose principal task was to produce royal heirs.
Princesses were married off to high functionaries of the government, major gods of the
realm or rulers of peripheral regions. All these marriages were driven by political
motives in the service of the establishment (Michalowski 2003 ). This is particularly
obvious in name changes of some princesses when they were betrothed to foreign
rulers, turning them into signs of power and prestige (Michalowski 2010 ).
REPRESENTATION AND REALITY
In a recent study on Cyrus the Great of Persia, Amélie Kuhrt ( 2007 ) revealed the
discrepancy between this king’s image and reality: rather than the liberator, the wise
and tolerant statesman which he stylised himself as and which continues to dupe his
audience today, he actually treated his enemies in much the same way as his imperial
predecessors and successors. For the more distant early Mesopotamian kings and
queens, it is harder to distinguish between representation and reality. The remnants
that have survived of this remote time are utterly fragmentary. Neither history writing–– Claudia E. Suter ––