legal punishment; victims of crimes could enslave or sell into slavery the family of the
guilty party. Women slaves could have property, make transactions, and buy their
freedom but more often were set free without payment.
Concerning ownership of arable land, different rules existed in Sumer (region south
of Nippur) and in Akkad (region north of Nippur). In the south, arable land was
owned by state institutions and were forbidden to sell it, whereas in the north,
institutional land was insignificant. As women in the Ur III empire owned real estate,
those living in the Akkadian region may have held more arable land than those in the
Sumerian region where private ownership of land was restricted to orchards and urban
real estate.
Evidence of women’s agency is ambiguous, particularly below the ranks of royalty.
For no obvious reason, women’s agency differs independently of civil status. That
Shuruppak advised his son not to marry a rich woman, may indicate rich women
had more agency than women with less property. The degree of agency apparently
depended on various factors, of which rank, status, and access to property were the
most decisive. There is no evidence that Sumerian women had more rights, freedoms,
or access to resources than Akkadian women, perhaps the reverse was true.
After the fall of the Ur III empire, conditions for women deteriorated. This
coincided more or less with the changing status of many goddesses (Asher-Greve and
Westenholz forthcoming), but the causes of changes in religion are different from those
for gender roles and regimes. The process may have been slow, but in the code of
Hammurabi (c. 1792 – 1750 ) women are second-class citizens. It seems likely that at least
some paragraphs were based on Amorite concepts on women. Although we cannot
trace this development, apart from laws restricting women’s agency, there is other
evidence of change, in particular much reduced visibility of royal wives, termination of
the office of en-priestess, women including princesses living in cloisters (nadı ̄tu), and
the disappearance of women from seal imagery with the exception of a generally small-
sized nude female figure. Images of women are also signs of their agency and potential
models for identification; with the disappearance of women in imagery, they became
symbolically invisible.
NOTE1 Issues connected to sexuality are highly controversial. However, third millennium sources contain
no information on the sexuality of ordinary women (see most recently Wiggermann 2010 ).
2 There is evidence from the ED/Early Agade period that royal women had substantial agency and
power (Archi and Biga 2003 ; Tonietti 2010 ).
BIBLIOGRAPHYFor a comprehensive bibliography, see J. M. Asher-Greve, 2002 Women and Gender in Ancient Near
Eastern Cultures: Bibliography 1885 to 2001 AD. NIN – Journal of Gender Studies in Antiquity 3
( 2002 ): 33 – 114.
Algaze, G., 2008 Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization. The Evolution of an Urban
Landscape. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Alster, B., 2005 Wisdom of Ancient Sumer. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press.
Archi, A. and M.G. Biga, 2003 A Victory over Mari and the Fall of Ebla. JCS 55 : 1 – 144.
–– Julia M. Asher-Greve ––