these precautions did not always guarantee a safe delivery is lamented in a famous
dialogue:
On the day I bore fruit, how happy I was,... [but] on the day I gave birth, my
eyes became cloudy.... [In] those days I was with my husband, I was living
with him who was my lover, When death crept stealthily into my bedroom.
(translation in Stol 2000 : 140 – 141 )When the outcome was successful, infants would breast-feed for roughly three years;
in the Old Babylonian period in particular, upper-class women frequently relied on
slave women or employed wet-nurses to nurture their children (Gruber 1989 ). See
generally M. Stol’s comprehensive monograph ( 2000 ) for very detailed discussions of
pregnancy, birth, infancy, contraception, and infertility.
This portrait of married life is most relevant for women who were in the free-
citizen (awı ̄lu) class described, for example, in the LH. Somewhat different rights and
responsibilities likely applied to women of the free commoner (musˇkenu) class in the
Old Babylonian period; and the living conditions of queens and of the elite are of
course to be distinguished from those of the working classes. Letters from Mari that
are contemporary with the Old Babylonian reign of Hammurabi demonstrate that
Shiptu, wife of Zimri-Lim, played a key role in public policy and diplomacy, in
addition to her duties as supervisor of the palace household and workshops (cf. Harris
1989 : 146 – 147 ). We lack comparable documentation from the Neo-Babylonian
period: in a “fictional autobiography” commissioned by Nabonidus for the funeral
monument of his mother, Adad-Guppi, the king’s rise to power is attributed to her
influence (Longman 1991 ); but we have no other record of her status in the royal
household (Beaulieu 1993 : 9 ). As I noted above, elite women in the Neo-Babylonian
period often owned property and conducted business in their own legal right, even
though it appears that they were unable to act as full witnesses to contracts, and
there is no evidence of literacy among women (Greenfield 1987 ; Beaulieu 1993 ).
OTHER UNMARRIED FREE WOMEN:
“PROSTITUTES,” WIDOWS, AND PRIESTESSESSeveral texts suggest that the antithesis of traditional marriage for a free woman was
harimu ̄tu, traditionally understood to mean “prostitution.” This understanding recently
has been called into question by J. Assante ( 1998 ), who argues at length and with a
great deal of evidence that the term refers instead to a social class comprised of “single”
women who had left their ancestral household, not all of whom were paid prostitutes.
In none of the extant texts is a harimtudemonstrably subject to the authority of any
head of household, e.g. father, husband, brother, husband’s family, or almattu-widow,
and in only two literary texts is a harimtuexplicitly identified as a sex professional.
Indeed, it is not surprising that harimtu status might have been a social rather than
a professional designation, because only a few female professions are recorded from
the Old Babylonian period onward (cf. Assante 1998 : 63 ). The next scholarly challenge
will be to determine what exactly harima ̄ tu did for a living, if not sex work.^17 Certainly,
harima ̄ tu are often mentioned together with practitioners of witchcraft and with other
marginal members of society, and they were considered to be poorly trained for
— Women and gender in Babylonia —