ring to dead siblings whom they had replaced. For example,
the meaning of the name of the Assyrian king Sennacherib (r.
704–681 b.c.e.), the Old Testament’s rendering of Sin-ahhe-
eriba, means “Th e god Sin has replaced the (dead) brothers.”
As the French historian Philippe Ariès fi rst recognized
in 1960, the idea of childhood as a distinct phase of human
life is a modern Western concept, developed as late as in
the 17th century. It is therefore not surprising to fi nd it a
concept alien to the cultures of the ancient Near East, in-
cluding Mesopotamia and Persia. Th ere is no specifi c term
for “children,” from birth to adolescence, and this fact is
best refl ected in Near Eastern art, where children are sim-
ply depicted as miniature adults, without any evidence for
a special dress code or hairstyle and without any attempt to
emphasize a childlike physique, other than simply showing
them to be of small size. Good examples of this can be found
in the reliefs from Sumerian temples of the mid-third mil-
lennium b.c.e. as well as from Assyrian royal palaces of the
ninth to seventh centuries b.c.e.
Only young children, up to the age of four years, were per-
ceived as diff erent from the rest of humankind: In art they are
shown as bald and naked and usually in closest proximity to
their mothers. While there is no general word for child, there
are specifi c terms referring to babies and toddlers. Babies were
called “he of the milk” or “she of the breast,” referring to the
fact that they were breast-fed; the available sources as well as
ethnographic comparisons, derived from the study of contem-
porary cultures in Africa and Asia, suggest that babies were
weaned relatively late, at the age of two years or even later.
Th e word used for toddlers refers to the termination of breast-
feeding and means literally “separated one,” indicating that
they were no longer physically inseparable from their mother.
Babies and toddlers were normally never parted from their
mothers: Slave sale contracts, for example, show that mothers
were sold together with their young off spring, and adminis-
trative lists, enumerating the workforce of large institutions
such as temples and palaces, list mothers with their small chil-
dren; both text types date to ca. 2200 to 100 b.c.e.
A group of texts that were used to calm down a crying
baby shows that this was thought to be as great a challenge
to Mesopotamian parents as to modern ones. One such text
that was found in a library in the city of Assur, the capital
of ancient Assyria, begins like this: “He who lived in dark-
ness, where it is not bright, came out and saw the light of the
sun. Why is he weeping so that his mother cries, so that the
goddess Antu sheds her tears in heaven?” While the texts are
called magical incantations, invoking the help of the gods,
they may well have worked also as simple lullabies, as they
were chanted rather than just spoken.
A female demon called Lamashtu, mentioned in Assyr-
ian and Babylonian ritual texts of the second and fi rst millen-
nium b.c.e., was thought to prey on pregnant women, young
mothers, and babies, and amulets depicting this monstrous
creature were used to ward her off. When a baby’s mother
died, a wet nurse had to be found quickly to provide milk for
Terra-cotta fi gurine of a woman with a child, Cyprus (1450-1200
b.c.e.) (© Th e Trustees of the British Museum)children: The Middle East 191