Neo-Assyrian royal women and male identity: status as a social tool.

• Author: Melville, Sarah C.

For the three centuries between approximately 900 and 600 B.C., Assyria was the major power of the Near East, ruling over the largest empire the world had ever seen. Having become rich with the spoils of war and tribute of subject nations, Assyrian kings built cities, palaces, temples, and public works as expressions of their power. The abundant monuments and textual records from this period reveal a male-oriented society in which politics, military affairs, religion, and commerce belong primarily to the male sphere of influence. As a result, we are relatively well informed about these kings, the events of their reigns, and the officials who served them, but the women of the period remain obscure. Most Assyrian texts, which were created by men for the public expression of royal ideology (itself inherently male), belong to well-established categories and thus follow strict formulae. Assyrian ideology pervades most textual material and tends to subsume the individual personalities of both men and women in the stock roles it creates for them. (1) With few exceptions, women of the royal household appear in official sources only tangentially. Not only are we denied any access to women as individuals, but even their appointed roles are difficult to discern clearly. For this reason, it is necessary to identify both how the Assyrians ranked women within the domestic quarters, and the way they publicly expressed the status of royal women, before we can determine how women's status acted as a function of royal ideology and a social tool.

The Neo-Assyrian kings enjoyed enormous wealth and used it to build--among other things--palaces for themselves and their dependents. The king maintained residences at various cities in Assyria and most of these contained a separate court complex for women. Textual evidence attests to women's quarters in palaces at Nimrud, Nineveh, Kilizi, Tarbisu, Khorsabad, Assur, Ekallate, and numerous other cities around the empire. (2) Some of these palaces have been excavated, but it is the artifacts recovered in them, rather than distinctive architectural features, that allow us to identify the women's quarters. Domestic quarters have been located with some certainty at the southwest palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh, the northwest palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, and the ekal masarti at Nimrud. (3) It was common for Assyrian kings to have multiple residences in a single city, as at Nimrud during the ninth century, where Shalmaneser III occupied two palaces (northwest palace and the arsenal, "Fort Shalmaneser"), each of which included a special area for women; or at Nineveh, where, roughly half a century later, Sennacherib kept three royal palaces, each with its own special women's area. (4)

Personnel and distribution lists from different periods indicate that the women associated with any given king could number in the hundreds, (5) a situation that necessitated the distribution of at least some women and their support staff among the royal residences. (6) Unfortunately, the principles and/or traditions that governed the marriage practices of Assyrian kings remain unknown and little evidence survives to elucidate either the organization of the women in the king's household or their status relative to one another. However, seven groups of royal women appear in the cuneiform sources: MI.ERIM.E.GAL (sekret ekalli, "concubine"), MI.GAR (sakintu, "administrator [of the women's quarters]"), DUMU.MI LUGAL (marat sarri, "daughter of the king"), MI.NIN LUGAL (ahat sarri, "king's sister"), MI.E.GAL (issi ekalli/segallu, (7) "wife, consort"), and AMA LUGAL (ummi sarri, "mother of the king"). (8)

Diverse, complex, and often fragmentary, the documentary evidence for Assyrian royal women is difficult to interpret. Because sources are scattered unevenly through time (many more date to the end of the three-hundred-year period covered here than to its beginning), we must be particularly careful about drawing general conclusions from them. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Assyrian texts vary a great deal in the way they refer to individuals. The function and intended audience of any given text largely determine the degree of individual identity granted to people mentioned in it. (9) The sources that refer to royal women are easily grouped into four categories, each with its own conventions for naming individuals: canonical (e.g., legends of Semiramis), monumental (royal inscriptions and public monuments), archival (legal, administrative, and most Neo-Assyrian letters) and personal (inscriptions on personal items such as bowls, beads, and mirrors). (10) In monumental inscriptions, the king is always identified by name, but other people are rarely named. In archival documents, the opposite is true: individuals are frequently identified by name, but kings are not. Similar conventions are employed for the royal consort, but with one key difference: unlike the king, the consort does not normally appear either by name or title in monumental texts. In archival texts, the consort, like the king, is referred to by title only.

For other women, the standard usage regarding archival texts is less certain. Sometimes women are identified by name and title, sometimes by name only, and sometimes by title only. Of course, anyone, including the king and consort, could be named on personal belongings. The naming conventions used in Assyrian texts obscure whatever ranking actually existed for the women who lived in the palaces; and before we discuss the relationship between male identity and women's status, it is essential to clarify as much as possible the different groups of palace women and their relationships to each other.

Archival texts from the courts at Nineveh and Nimrud provide most of our information for the status of women living in the domestic quarters of the palace. These texts make it clear that women were not only ranked according to their relationship with each other and their relationship to the king, but also that they considered these rankings to be very important. Women who could not claim a connection to the king called upon their relationship to other women to lend them prestige. For example, in separate legal documents, Abi-rahi identifies herself as the sister of the sakintu and Abi-rami describes herself as the sister of the queen mother. (11) The closer a woman's relationship was to the king and the more kings with whom she could declare a relationship, the greater her claim to status. In a text documenting her purchase of land, Sadditu marks her relationship with two kings, her father and brother; whereas Esarhaddon's daughter, Serua-eterat, expresses the importance of rank especially well as she writes to her sister-in-law, Libali-sarrat, explaining that as a king's daughter she outranks the king's daughter-in-law. (12) A woman such as Sammu-ramat, who could claim to be the daughter-in-law of a king, wife of a king, and mother of a king, achieves the highest rank of all. (13) In the next section we investigate each group of royal women in order to unravel the complex relationships between and within each group and to determine how each group was represented.

MI.ERIM.E.GAL (CONCUBINE)

Not including servants and support staff, the women designated MI.ERIM.E.GAL comprised the lowest rank of royal women. The term appears relatively infrequently in Neo-Assyrian records but unquestionably refers to women who were part of the king's household. As women with recognized status within a man's (in this case the king's) household who were secondary to a wife or wives, MI.ERIM.E.GAL(.MES) are most accurately termed concubines. (14) It is essential, however, to avoid the popular image of the concubine as a scantily clad, nubile young beauty whose sole purpose in life was to provide sexual pleasure and entertainment to her "master," for this vision is anachronistic and reflects a western view of the "Orient" that is as fictitious as it is romantic. (15) Concubines in Assyrian palaces represented a variety of individual circumstances and relationships, including aging women who had lived with the previous king, women related to the king but without another male protector (aunts or widowed sisters-in-law, for example), women from the household of a defeated king, women who belonged to the entourage of some foreign princess sent to Assyria for diplomatic marriage, foreign hostages and their companions, and women who were sent to live at the palace by their families in hopes of achieving advancement. (16) Certainly, provision must have been made for such a variety of women and there is no other term in the texts that could refer to them. In monumental inscriptions and archival texts, MI.ERIM.E.GAL is used in a general sense to signify any woman who lived in the palace except for the consort. (17) To outsiders MI.ERIM.E.GAL were anonymous, appearing as an indistinct but homogeneous social group (i.e., women who lived in the palace). Inside the boundaries of the women's quarters, however, a different, more complex situation pertained.

Within the women's quarters, status was primarily based on gaining and retaining the king's favor. In general, women who actually slept with the king would have had (at least temporarily) more status than those who had not, and therefore competition to attract and keep the king's attention was probably intense. In her funerary inscription, the MI.E.GAL Jaba explicitly refers to a MI.ERIM.E.GAL as a narante MAN, "favorite of the king." (18) Here, Jaba is obviously referring to a specific subset of MI.ERIM.E.GAL, rather than to all women of the palace, for the only ones who need concern her are potential rivals. In certain (private) contexts, MI.ERIM.E.GAL can have a more specific meaning than it does in public and/or administrative texts.

Age and experience may have helped gain respect and influence within the domestic wing as well. For women who were...