related activities. Some of the goddesses were the embodi-
ment of powerful elements of the state and universe, such as
the throne, justice, and the heavens. While most priests were
men, women were priestesses in the cults of Hathor, Th oth,
Nut, and Neith. Th e cult of Hathor was restricted to women
priestesses. Royal women held such titles as “great royal wife,”
“God’s wife,” and “divine adoratrice.” In fact, during the New
Kingdom (1550–1070 b.c.e.), the great royal wife lived sepa-
rately from her husband, though the couple would still meet
frequently.
Women could also be scribes, prophets, and funerary
priests, jobs typically belonging to men. Musician priest-
esses used music to praise the gods and goddesses and to pro-
vide accompaniment to the religious rituals and recitations.
Women could also be professional mourners. A woman could
obtain titles through her husband if he were a priest; such
titles might include “songstress of Amon” or “chief concubine
of Amon Re.” While the eldest male child was expected to
oversee the funerary plans, women in the family or a priest
could do so if necessary. Most common women participated
in temple cults, even if they did not hold a religious title.
Marriage in ancient Egypt was surprisingly equitable,
especially when compared with other parts of the ancient
world. Th ere was intimate and playful love poetry in ancient
Egypt, and the poetry suggests that sexual intimacy occurred
before marriage and that virginity was not a prerequisite to
marriage. Some tomb reliefs portray naked young women at
banquets and festivals, and other erotic papyri suggest that
sex was not taboo. However, homosexuality was discouraged,
and adultery was seen as a terrible crime. While royal men
took more than one wife, common men and women were
supposed to have monogamous unions.
Ancient Egyptian couples with formal marriages had
marriage contracts. Men and women also practiced com-
mon-law marriage by way of cohabitation. In these marriage
contracts a woman came to a marriage with some property,
while the man was supposed to supply the house. A married
woman could own her own property—she did not forfeit her
property or her wages to her husband. She could have her
own income and could sell, lease, or loan her property, land,
and money without the permission of her husband or a male
relative. Both men and women could sue, adopt children, or
initiate a divorce. A woman could receive spousal support. If
a woman’s husband died, she received one-third of his estate
while the children received two-thirds of the estate. A man
could also “adopt” his wife to make her the sole heir of his
property.
In Egyptian art and statuary, men and women are usu-
ally depicted in the ideal physique for their gender. Men are
shown with reddish skin, probably as a result of their work-
ing outdoors. Th ey are portrayed as muscular and youth-
ful. However, older men are sometimes shown as portly to
emphasize their wealth and position. Women, however, are
portrayed with yellow skin and are mostly shown as young
and thin, wearing tight-fi tting clothes that emphasize their
taut abdomens and slender hips and that accentuate the pubic
area, perhaps to refl ect their childbearing potential. Statues
portraying common people, however, are much less idealized
and represent all types, even humpbacks and dwarfs. Men
and women are sometimes depicted as the same size, but men
are oft en shown as taller and closer to the center of the scene
to emphasize their dominance.THE MIDDLE EAST
BY KAREN RADNER
From the mid-third millennium b.c.e. to the Hellenistic Pe-
riod (323–31 b.c.e.) the predominant writing materials in Mes-
opotamia were extremely durable clay tablets inscribed in the
cuneiform script. Hundreds of thousands of such texts have
been unearthed in the ancient cities of modern Iraq, Syria,
and Turkey, making Mesopotamia the best-documented area
for gender and structure roles of the ancient Near East. In-
formation gained from the Bible indicates a broadly similar
pattern of gender structures and roles for Israel and Judah in
the fi rst millennium b.c.e., as suggested by the more limited
documentation available for other parts of the Middle East,
namely Anatolia, Iran, and the Levant.
While many languages of the ancient Near East distin-
guish grammatically between masculine and feminine, for
example, the Semitic languages Akkadian, Old Hebrew, Old
Aramaic, and Phoenician and the Indo-European languages
Hittite and Old Persian, some do not, most prominently the
Sumerian language, which was widely spoken in Babylonia
during the third millennium b.c.e. and remained the domi-
nant language of learning until the last centuries of the fi rst
millennium b.c.e. Sumerian is found in two distinct forms
that use separate vocabularies and diff er profoundly in pro-
nunciation: One form was spoken by men and called the “na-
tive tongue,” and the other was spoken by women and called
the “high-pitched tongue.” Long aft er Sumerian ceased to be
used as a colloquial language, lamentations—songs of mourn-
ing and despair—addressed to the gods in the course of tem-
ple worship were exclusively performed in the high-pitched
tongue, albeit by men, who thereby assumed the traditional
female gender role of mourning and keening. Th is example
demonstrates the diff erence between gender and sex, gender
being a socially defi ned category and, hence, far more fl exible
than the physical characteristics of a person’s sex.
Written scripts also off er some insight into gender roles
and stereotypes. In the cuneiform script used to record Su-
merian, Akkadian, Hurrian, and Hittite, the sign with the
meaning “man, male” depicts an erect penis, while the sign
with the meaning “woman, female” shows the pubic tri-
angle. Th e gender stereotypes of warrior and spinstress are
endorsed by another system of categories—magic. Th e items
representing men and women in magic rituals recorded in
texts from Mesopotamia and also second-millennium Ana-
tolia are weapons and spindles and other tools for textile pro-
duction, respectively. Th is makes it very plain that the place496 gender structures and roles: The Middle East