public places, and they could vote during assembly meetings.
In most places women were now excluded from these rights.
Th e wardum were slaves. Th ey consisted mostly of prisoners
of war who were forced to work for the government in public
works projects or were sold to private citizens. Sometimes free
people were sold into slavery. Th e head of an oikos could sell
family members for money; a father could sell his children or
his wife or even himself to escape poverty or debts. Slaves had
few rights, and everything they made belonged to their own-
ers. In a social practice that continued at least through the
Old Babylonian Empire of about 2000 to 1600 b.c.e., mem-
bers of one of these classes could move to another. A member
of the awilum could join the mushkenum by selling all his
land, and a member of the mushkenum could become part of
the awilum by purchasing land. Slaves had to be freed fi rst but
then could join either of the classes of free people.
Women held on to one principal source of power, reli-
gion. In what was probably a relic tradition of the past, cer-
tain rituals had to be performed by women. In a practice that
lasted at least through the Old Babylonian Empire, women
could join a gagum. A gagum was a cloister for women whose
lives were devoted to the priesthood. In the Uruk Period, if
these women gave birth to children it probably would have
been seen as a blessing, a sign of their fertility in service to
the gods and therefore a good omen for the city. Aft er women
had lost most of their civil rights, however, members of a
gagum were forbidden to have children. In a patriarchal cul-
ture, denying them the right to bear children was a means
of symbolically taking away their creative power in religious
life. A member of a gagum who even visited a tavern was put
to death because taverns were where people oft en met to fi nd
partners for sexual relations. Th e women of the cloisters may
have had a small victory over their oppressors, however: Th ey
were avid writers and many, possibly most, of the writings
surviving from the Old Babylonian Empire are theirs and re-
fl ect their view of their society.
Sexuality was an important part of civic life in southern
Mesopotamia. Every city was believed to be sacred, and the
cities themselves were worshipped. One way to increase the
health of a city was to have sexual relations in it. Th is was
considered to be a joyful activity, and people were discour-
aged from having sexual relations in private. Indeed, some
ancient writers bemoaned the antisocial behavior of young
lovers who had sex in private rather than out in the street as
proper people did. On the other hand, childbirth was an oc-
casion for anxiety because only about one in two babies lived
long aft er birth. Women giving birth were subjects for artists,
probably because giving birth was an affi rmation of life in the
city and among its people.THE HITTITES
Archaeologists disagree greatly about when the Hittites mi-
grated from southern Europe into Anatolia (modern Turkey),
dating it to between 2750 b.c.e. and 1700 b.c.e. In any event,
by the 1600s b.c.e. the Hittites were expanding their domain,attacking their neighbors and raiding deep into the lands of
Babylon. Th eir kings were remote and usually inaccessible to
ordinary people, with a large bureaucracy between them and
commoners. Th e king’s palace was its own community within
the broad community of the empire, with its own priests,
physicians, craft speople, and animal tenders. Princes lived
within the palace’s compound but in a house separate from
the king’s residence.
Th e apex of society was the king and queen. If the king
died, the queen became the ruling monarch. Even while he
lived, she exercised considerable control over the government
bureaucracy and public ceremonies. Possibly this queenly
power was a legacy of earlier matriarchal cultures in the Ana-
tolian region, adopted by the Hittites in order to provide sta-
bility for their government: If a king died prematurely, he was
succeeded by someone who already had experience of rule.
Beneath the monarchs in social standing were nobles and
beneath them government offi cials. Next in line came craft -
speople and tradespeople: manufacturers of ceramics, black-
smiths, weavers, carpenters, sculptors, and the like. Farmers
ranked below the craft speople and tradespeople, and below
them were slaves.ARABIA AND ISRAEL
While the Hittites were building their empire in the north-
western Near East, another culture was making itself felt in
the south. Th ese were the people of the Arabian Peninsula. By
1154 b.c.e. the Arabs had become a signifi cant distraction to
the Kassite Dynasty (ca. 1530–ca. 1155 b.c.e.) of Babylon. Th e
Kassite kings devoted so many resources to coping with the
Arabs that the kingdom of Elam was able to invade Babylon
and overthrow the Kassites.
Th e peoples of Arabia were nomads, herders of sheep.
Th ey raided their neighbors for food and wealth. Sometime
before 1000 b.c.e. one of these groups, known as the Sabeans,
settled in the region of modern-day Yemen. (Th e biblical
place-name Sheba is derived from Sabea.) Th e Sabeans were a
mercantile people, specializing in being go-betweens for the
shipping of goods from Africa and the Near East to southern
Asia, especially India, as well as for the return trade. Th ey
formed part of the kingdom of Axum, named for its capital
city in eastern Africa.
Little is known about the social organization of the Sa-
beans, partly because their written language has yet to be
translated and partly because during the 20th century their
buildings and canals in Yemen were dismantled, the stones
and bricks being used for modern house building. Th ey had a
long tradition of rule by queens and seem to have been a fairly
open society for women, allowing them to become merchants
as well as members of the ruling elite. Ethiopian oral tradi-
tion says that around 955 b.c.e. this legacy was abandoned
when Queen Makeda was succeeded by Menelik, her son by
King Solomon. Th ereaft er, so the oral tradition says, only men
could rule. Women seem to have been limited to offi ciating in
the worship of female gods.social organization: The Middle East 10210895-1194_Soc&Culturev4(s-z).i1021 1021 10/10/07 2:30:47 PM