Are there homosexuals in Mesopotamian literature?

• Author: Nissinen, Martti

Same-sex interaction is not a frequent topic in Mesopotamian literature, but neither is it unknown: the Epic of Gilgames, the Middle Assyrian Laws, excerpts from omen literature, and texts referring to people with ambiguous sexuality are regularly mentioned when the issue of homosexuality is raised with regard to cuneiform sources.

These sources suggest that love between male persons, as well as some kind of intimate interaction between males (much less often between females), was quite as thinkable in the world of the audience of Mesopotamian texts as it is worldwide in different times and cultures. The question is rather how this interaction was interpreted by the ancient readerships and by modern scholarship; in other words, what conception of gender is implied in the understanding of relationships between people of same sex? The title of this paper indicates that in the language of modern scholarship there is a category of "homosexuals," that is, a definable class of human beings whose common denominator is that they are sexually oriented towards their own rather than the opposite sex. The underlying assumption here is that of an individual sexual orientation, whether due to "nature" or "nurture," that has a fundamental effect on the sexual behavior of the person in question. This, again, rests on the idea of an individual "sexuality," a deep-seated domain in human body and mind that presides over the person's life from her cradle to her grave and is only partially controlled by the person herself.

It is well known that the idea of "sexuality" is based on sexological research since the last part of the ninteenth century C.E. (I use the term "sexology" as a shorthand for the psychiatric, psychological, and social-scientific studies on human sexual conduct and its causes; cf. Crozier 2008). The modern categories of homo- and heterosexuality, as well as the fully developed differentiation implied by the acronym LGBTQ, make perfect sense today when sexological categorizations of people have become self-determining classifications of their identity, life-style, and self-conception. It is equally well known that ancient written sources were not composed with the above-described idea of "sexuality" in mind and do not categorize human gender and its manifestations accordingly. Hence the title of this essay is a conscious anachronism.

In my Homoeroticism in the Biblical World (Nissinen 1998), published more than a decade ago, I attempted to investigate the "cases" of same-sex intimate interaction in biblical and other ancient literature from a perspective that challenged the anachronistic imposition of sexological categories onto ancient texts. Greatly influenced by the work of Michel Foucault (1978) and David Halperin (1990), I interpreted the construction of gender in the ancient sources as based on a distinction between the active and passive roles in sexual relationships, which produced a hierarchical structure, rather than seeing the persons involved in the available "cases" as homosexuals or heterosexuals. In the wake of the growing body of studies on gender in ancient sources since the 1990s, the traditional sexological categories have been reassessed in many other studies of same-sex eroticism in biblical and other ancient literature, either from an ancient Near Eastern (e.g., Cooper 2002; Ackerman 2005), classical (e.g., Williams 2010), or...