CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

WOMEN AND AGENCY:

A SURVEY FROM LATE URUK

TO THE END OF UR III



Julia M. Asher-Greve

A

gency, the capacity of acting, of a person or group, depends primarily on access
to social and cultural resources, and secondarily on gender and status. Also critical
is if a person or group can influence the creation and interpretation of symbols and
symbolic representation. Status may change quickly, but gender regimes are of longue
durée. Change is often caused by socio-political upheaval, revolt or revolution and
particularly war, whether victor or vanquished. Ancient Mesopotamians recurrently
experienced upheavals, but fragmentary and uneven chronological and geographical
distribution of sources preclude comprehensive reconstruction of the history of
Mesopotamian women. In addition, scholarly interpretation of texts and images is
often controversial and conditional.^1
The social forces of urbanism – transition to city or state economies, new tech-
nologies, division of labor, erosion of extended families, and increasingly complex
and stratified social structures – also changed the lives of women. The economic
foundation of Mesopotamian polities was agriculture and animal husbandry; most
Sumerians and their Semitic neighbors were rural, but nearly all our sources come from
cities. Based on anthropological research, women’s life in farming communities differs
from that in cities, but village structures vary. For example, matrilocal village
communities still exist in India.
Because of non-Sumerian names occurring in Sumerian texts and discontinuities
in the archaeological and epigraphic records, some scholars believe Sumerians may have
come to southern Mesopotamia after the Uruk period, around the turn from the fourth
to the third millennium. However, similarities between Late Uruk and Early Dynastic
architecture, art, and administrative records suggest Sumerians were the dominant
ethnic group in southern Mesopotamia (south of Nippur) in the Late Uruk period.
The Sumerian language, contrary to Semitic Akkadian, does not differentiate
grammatical gender; even personal names are often not gender specific. Persons listed
by name are occasionally summarized into gender category groups such as “they are
women” (munus-me) or “they are men” (nita-me). Women may also be distinguished
from men by adding the suffix “mí/munus” (women) – for example, daughter (dumu-
mí) – whereas gender-neutral “dumu” often means son. Spouse (dam) is usually written
in gender neutral form, but even then translated as “wife” when the personal name of
the alleged husband could also be that of a woman. Gender ambiguity is also evident
in visual representations, suggesting that Sumerians were not particularly interested in