not explicitly identified as wives evidently recited sexual potency incantations in order
to obtain sexual pleasure from male partners, and these texts often express jealousy
of other women (Biggs 1967 , 2002 ); thus “it is clear that [the incantations’] use was
not limited to married couples” (Bottéro 1992 : 190 ). Likewise, women appear as the
initiators in a variety of sexual situations envisioned by tablets 103 and 104 of the
first-millennium ˇumma alus divinatory series (CT 39 ). One omen predicts that “if a
man is with a woman (and) while facing him she repeatedly stares at his penis,
whatever he finds will not be secure in his house” (Guinan 1997 : 5 ; Guinan 2002 :
188 ), while another more succinctly warns that “if a man, a woman mounts him, he
will lose his vigor.” Ultimately, however, both the omens and incantations focus on
malesexuality and ability (cf. Biggs 2002 : 72 ): as A. Guinan ( 2002 : 199 ) observes,
the omens oppose male public persona and male/female eroticism in such a way
that the denial of one is the assertion of the other. When a woman directs sexual
action toward a man, it is inauspicious.... Issues of desire and behavior become
questions of masculine agency.The value of the omen texts for social history is limited as well by their preoccupation
with “sexual acts that... stand out from the non-signifying background of everyday
life [insofar as] they deviate in some way from the norm” (Guinan 2002 : 196 ).^13 An
equally complicated view of female sexuality is provided both by literary texts, such
as the “steamy” Inanna-Dumuzi texts of the Old Babylonian period (Assante 2002 :
39 ) and the famous epics compiled in the first millennium (cf. Leick 1994 ), and by
the visual arts (cf. Bahrani 2001 ). Among the most intriguing examples of the latter
are a number of Old Babylonian terracotta plaques representing couples lying in bed
or copulating while standing; Assante ( 2002 ) has interpreted these as representing
Inanna and Dumuzi, though she stresses as well their magico-apotropaic significance
in a domestic setting.
Not surprisingly, most middle-class married women in Babylonia were occupied
with the bearing and raising of children, with the organization of the household,
with the maintenance of the domestic religious practices (van der Toorn 1994 ),
and with some organization of family business and production of goods for use or
sale outside the home.^14 Regarding the latter, we have some evidence from contracts
and letters, especially in the Neo-Babylonian period, that women were at least well
acquainted with their family’s financial business (cf. Beaulieu 1993 ). The role of
women in the production and trade of textiles is most clearly demonstrated, however,
by a number of Old Assyrian letters discovered at the entrepôt (karum) of Kanish in
present-day Turkey. In regular correspondence with their distant husbands, wives
in Ashur discussed the quantity and/or quality of textiles that apparently were to be
produced by the women of their households – aided, perhaps, by paid employees in
some cases – and delivered to Kanish (Larsen 1976 ; Dercksen 1996 ). During their
husbands’ absences, Old Assyrian wives took on the responsibility of running the
household and of managing many of the family affairs; thus, “if financial disaster
struck – as it did occasionally as a result of bad deals or unwise investments – it
seems that women bore the brunt of the consequences” (Larsen 2001 : 285 ). It appears
as well that women of the Old Babylonian and later periods were no longer able to
take up certain professions practiced by at least some women in earlier times; indeed,
— Women and gender in Babylonia —