Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex in Ancient Mesopotamia

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

How sexually liberated were the people of Ancient Mesopotamia? In what is modern day Iraq and dates back to around 3000 BC.The answer may surprise you, with gender fluidity and sexual diversity quite commonplace. Look no further than their frisky goddess, Ishtar.Taking us back to this fascinating period is Stephanie Budin, historian and author of Gender in the Ancient Near East.This episode was produced and edited by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXTYou can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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And now you can't get mad because fair do's, we did tell you. Come back with me, betwixters, back to ancient messer. around 3,000 BC in what is modern-day Iraq. With it being so long ago, you might think that sexuality was quite a prudish, stuffy affair back then, but everything was actually surprisingly open. Gender seems to have been quite fluid. Women held a surprising amount of sexual agency and the goddesses that they worshipped. Oh my dear Lord, were they goers. But what can that tell us about the people that actually lived at this period?

How did they understand sexuality? How did they understand gender? And what is the evidence that's left for us today to attempt to understand a culture so ancient? Well, I am ready to find out if you are. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the fun. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derek. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. When we're thinking about sex throughout history,

we can quite easily get caught up in a certain westernized viewpoint, where the Catholic Church was a huge influence, basically Catholic guilt for everyone, whether or not you're practicing Catholic. But consider ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Babylon, where the ideas, although still fairly patriarchal, are certainly more fluid and flexible than anything to be found in the West. How did sex workers live at this time?

Was sex work even a thing? Just how open was sex in this society and what myths can we dispel from the period? If you'd like to explore sex reality in ancient periods some more, then why not listen to our episode? on the celebrity sex worker of ancient Greece with Melissa Funky. But back to today. Joining me today is Stephanie Boudin,

historian and author of Gender in the Ancient Near East. And she is going to be our guide today for sex in ancient Mesopotamia. So without further ado, let's get into it. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Stephanie Boudin. How are you doing? I'm doing really well. Thank you so much for inviting me.

I'm beyond excited to have you on here. I'm such a fan of your work. I really am. Thank you. You researched ancient Mesopotamia, and we'll get on to exactly explaining what that is and where that is in a minute. But the work that you do is it's so important for people like me

because you work with the very foundations of this, and you're often, it's with the translation of cuneiform tablets and hieroglyphs. And if you don't have the work, correctly, everything else can kind of fall down around it. And I think that's going to feature quite strongly in our discussions around the roles of women and what exactly words have been translated to mean. So my first question to you, before we even get on to words, is why ancient Mesopotamia, what's your historian origin story? Where did this love of this culture and this time come from? I started out originally more interested in Greece. So I am technically an ancient historian. I have two

areas of concentration. So those are ancient Greece and the ancient Near East. And I think I got into both of those because I was really interested in the mythology. I've been reading Greek mythology since I was probably eight years old and just kept going. And I loved that. And then I was looking at Norse mythology and Celtic mythology. And then I discovered Near Eastern mythology. And I really enjoyed that. And I wanted to learn more about the cultures that created these stories, this religion, these pantheons. And that's how I got more interested in ancient Near Eastern topics and just kept going from there because it's such a rich area and it has so much impact on modern times that just being interesting in its own right was one thing. And then seeing how it impacts

the modern world was another thing. And by that point, I was just hooked. And that was it. Yep. So there'll be people listening in who aren't quite sure when this particular period in history is. So if you could just tell me, where is Mesopotamia and what period in history are we talking about here? The word itself is Greek for between the rivers. And in this instance, it is the rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Yep, when Alexander the Great went out, he made everyone adopt some Greek stuff. So we have a whole lot of Greek words for things that are in places that aren't Greece. But there you have it. So Mesopotamia between the rivers, that's the Tigris and the Euphrates. And in modern times, that would be Iraq.

So the core of Mesopotamia is the modern country of Iraq between the tigers and the Euphrates rivers going down to the Persian Gulf. And as it grew, it expanded northward. So you could go northern Iraq, but it also would go over into Syria and even into southeastern Turkey. All of that was one large cultural orbit. And it would even go east a little bit into what we now think of as being Iran. So that is the greater Mesopotamia, the smaller Mesopotamia, just that. that core area between those two rivers just north of the Persian Gulf. So think of it as a rock if that helps.

For time, it is a very broad period of time. Prehistoricly, archaeologically, it goes back into the, if you will, the Neolithic and even earlier than that. But when we talk about Mesopotamian history, we're usually confining ourselves to text, so a written history, but hey, this is one of the earliest places where we find writing. So you can think of it as going from the third millennium BCE. So let's say 2,700 BCE as far forward as the first millennium, even into the conquest of Alexander the Great, whom I just mentioned.

So let's say up into about the 300s VCE. And even then you have cultural holdovers beyond that. So it is a very long-lived civilization. And it's very important for lots and lots of, lots of reasons. But one of the main ones to me seems to be, because as you alluded to just there, it's one of the first civilizations that we've got writing from. Absolutely. Mesopotamia and Egypt, Egyptian hieroglyphs are two of the oldest writing systems in the world. Can you understand Cuneiform? A bit. Oh, wow. Now, please understand that Coneiform came to represent

a number of different languages. So in Mesopotamia, you had two language groups. The earlier one is Sumerian. And that seems not to be related to any other language that we know of. It's independent, its own thing. And then the other language group is Acadian, which is a Semitic language. So it's related to Hebrew, to Arabic, and to that family of languages there. And as Mesopotamia moved out, especially in the late Bronze Age, so say from maybe 1,500 to 1,000 or so, when you had this really international community in the ancient world in the eastern Mediterranean orbit,

a whole bunch of other languages would adopt keneiform writing. So the Hittites wrote their language, an Indo-European language, in keneiform. And you had some small city states in Syria and the Levant, like the Canaanites or Ugrat. And they also would use a form of kineiform. So it was a very popular writing system. It's also extremely difficult. And when they came up with more phonetic writing, everyone said, yeah, we're going with that one, which is why you don't see it anymore. And it's written in stone as well. That must have been a bugger to have carried around.

Yeah, that's for the more monumental stuff. That's when you're a king and you're bragging about your exploits. Normally the way it would be written is on mud. So you get a slab of ceramic, if you will, is if you're going to make a pot and you smooth it out. and then you get a reed with a kind of triangular head on it, and you would press this wedge shape read, and that's what kenea for means, wedge shape, into the clay, and it would press in, and that is how they would actually write and keep the records. And one of the beauties of writing on clay is that if, say, your house burns down, well, it fires your archives to make them permanent.

So it lasts so much longer than papyrus or paper, or whatever you have on your cell phone, one EMP and all of that's gone. But that clay, it can break. But it's still there. It's still there 5,000 years later. This is such an ancient civilization. One of the oldest that we've got records from before we start going into Paleolithic, Neolithic times. So with a specialty like yours, when you're trying to understand sexuality and sexual practices,

how much source material is available to historians to be able to do this? From Mesopotamia a lot. They were a very pro-sex society. So information on sexuality now, it's all written. So what we're looking at here is language. We're looking at writing. We have iconography as well, but that can be really hard to understand in modern times.

So you will have, say, from the Neanderian, period or the middle of Syrian period, first millennium, if you will, led figurines showing couples having sex. And the lady might be bent over a cable of some sort and he's approaching her from behind. And, okay, it's a sex scene, but what does it mean? Is it pornography? Is it religious? Is it political? Is it propagandistic? One of the problems with artistry is we bring so many of our own ideas into interpretation. Now, we do that with language, too. Trust me, don't get me wrong there, but it's a little bit easier to check yourself sometimes. You know, you have to look at what do those words actually mean. As you said, we'd definitely be back to that. But when we look at the writing, there are so many

different genres ranging from, we have medical texts. We have medical texts explaining, okay, your man is experiencing erectile dysfunction. How do we help you get over that? Or this fellow seems to be suffering from love sickness. How do you diagnose and treat that? We have religious hymns, especially of the goddess Inana Ishtar, Inana in Sumerian Ishtar in Acadian. And she was a very erotic being. And so a number of her hymns, especially when talking when she's a young girl and she's just been engaged to her boyfriend, Dumuzi, talk about their sex life together. Her well-watered lettuce. Oh, very well watered lettuce and oh, plowmen, plow my vulva. We just have great, very explicit material there. We have legal cases talking about things like fertility and infertility and who may or may not be able to provide a son to a husband and how do you deal with that or cultic functionaries who are supposed to remain celibate or who at least are not supposed to reproduce and how does this affect their lives so we can get at that aspect of sexuality from the. those kind of documents. So it comes up in so many different genres from the religious to the

utterly mundane and back again. Even omen texts and they were really into omen texts. So it's a sort of thing, okay, if that black cat crosses your path, it's bad luck. Well, they had omens for absolutely everything, including sexual positions. Wow. What, like if you were doing it doggy style, that's a bad omen? It might be or potentially not, but let's see if a man looks at his woman's vagina, he will have prosperity. But if a woman looks at her man's penis, then he will suffer hardship. Literally to that level. Well, how are you supposed to not look at it? You know, they never got into the fine details. It's a little frustrating, but... That's the thing, isn't it, is you've got like these little fragments and then you're really left with this, well, there's a story there

and you haven't actually explained this. Actually, they've been. Actually, they've been. go very logically. So you'd have literally an entire list. If he looks at her vagina, if she looks at his penis, well, if she grasps his penis, if they have sex in this position, if they have sex in this other position. And what all of these things might mean. Now, please understand, they had omens for everything. So if a lamb is born without a head, it means blah. Sometimes they're not realistic. Or if mold is growing on a certain part of your door, it has a certain meaning. So literally, as I have put it, Mesopotamian. was neurosisville for the paranoid.

So everything could have some meaning. But even sexual positions and sexuality had meaning. So we even can derives some information from something that we would consider kind of strange and modern times literally omen texts. I hope that anyone listening to this, if they're not in the mood this evening, they can say, well, according to ancient Samarian texts,

it's actually unlucky. It's a bad omen for me to look at this. So we're just not going to do it tonight. I first encountered your work when you were exploring a, it's quite a sensitive topic for many reasons, but it's a really important one. What is known as sacred prostitution. Yes. And there is a very, very entrenched idea that in the ancient world at some point, women and men were selling sex to honour the goddess Anana.

And it's a story that has meant lots of different things to different people. I know that there are certain spiritualist groups today who really like that because it's like sex was sacred and fun. But we also have to look at the actual facts of this. So tell me about your research on so-called temple prostitution. Okay. Just to get the basics out in front, it never existed. It is a misunderstanding. Now, I can understand why people want it to exist.

So it started the beginning. No, it never really did exist. all of it derives from the work of one fellow Greek historian named Herodotus who wrote in the mid-fifth century BCE. And he traveled around and he did travelers' accounts and ethnography before really focusing on the history of the Persian invasions of Greece. So he's called the father of history. People who don't like him as much call him the father of lives. But generally, he was pretty accurate in an awful lot of the stuff that he wrote about that every once in a while he would take some liberties. Now, one place that he never seems to have got to was Babylon.

But he does write about Babylon, its history and its culture. And there's a section called the Babylonian logos, the study of Babylon, where he writes about all these things that he claims the Babylonians did. And every Assyriologist looks at that and says, no, no, they never did that. What was he smoking? And one of these things was sacred prostitution. And what he says in book one, passage 199, is that the foul, the most shameful custom of the Babylonians is this, that once in her lifetime, every woman of Babylon

must go to the temple of Mulita. Their name for Aphrodite is Mulita, we would say Anana Ishtar. And she has to wait there for a foreigner to come through to throw a random amount of money onto her lap and say, I claim you in the name of the goddess. And then they go outside of the sanctuary and she has to have sex with him. And then after that, she's fulfilled her. her duty, she goes home, and that's the end of that. And that is the start of this notion of sacred prostitution, these women in a sanctuary who have sex with some strange foreign man in exchange for a random amount of money, the money itself becomes sacred to mulita. And so there you have that tie between prostitution, actually exchange of sex for money or some other good, that is

wholly sacred somehow. Now, there's no evidence for this from Mesopotamia at all. You figure if you're going to have several thousand women around a sanctuary, all waiting to have sex. Yeah. And as even Herodotus says, if you're not all that attractive, you might have to sit there for several seasons. Like every single woman in the entire nation, that's what he's claiming. Or at least in the city of Babylon, but we're talking a pretty big city. So you'd think at some point, someone has to organize the porta-potties, someone has to get food to these women. And there's no evidence. And trust me, we have a lot of data from Mesopotamia. And there's nothing about any of this. So, no, that never happened. And a number of the other things he claimed were going on that went, oh, in Babylon, if you get sick, they take you out to the street and you stop all the pastors by and say, hey, have you ever seen something like this? Do you know how to treat it? No, they didn't do that either. It seems that Herodotus was making that up. I think it was a poetic inversion of Greek women's festivals, which had specific times. They were female only. they generally were not having sex during them because chastity, at least for a temporary period, was part of what they were doing.

So he flipped all of that on its head and created this other ritual for Babylon, which in a way expressed the conquered state of Babylon because at this point they'd been conquered by the Persians. And you're almost using something like a rape narrative, unwilling sexuality of your women that is bought and is approved of by the gods, is saying, yeah, The Persians conquered Babylon, and Babylon is now just stuck, and there it is, on its back, if you will. Is it about eroticizing Babylon as well, about making it like a place where naughty things happen? No, I really don't think so. You don't start getting that notion until biblical times. When you start getting this notion of the whore of Babylon, but even then, Babylon is in quotation marks because Babylon is really Rome. So what you have are biblical authors really pissed off at the Roman. empire, but they're not allowed to say, Rome sucks. So they go back to an earlier conquering civilization,

the Babylonians, the Babylonian captivity, and they talk about how, oh yeah, Babylon sucks, and the horror of Babylon and all of that. And because we get so much from biblical tradition in our own modern society, we started thinking of Babylon that way, but there's no evidence that Herodotus did. This was just one more part of his narrative. Well, people took that, and when wild with it. So you have some ancient authors who are doing spoofs of Herodotus. So for Lucian, for example, in his Syrian goddess. So he has an account of sacred prostitution because Herodotus did and he's doing a spoof of Herodotus. But instead of saying, oh, look, it's a copycat or a spoof, we say, oh, look, here's confirming evidence because we got it wrong. So basically, it's a misunderstanding of a

historiographic text, but people were so excited about it. And then especially when we started translating these languages from the kineoform, the Sumerian, and the Acadian, and they found that, wow, these societies had a lot of different female cult functionaries, priestesses and high priestesses, and cultic entertainers. And you have a group of a seriologist who have this ideology that, oh, well, men are priests. Why would you want a female? Oh, you must need her for sex some reason. and every title of some kind of female cultic officiant got translated at one point or another as sacred prostitute. Even the ones who are said are sworn to chastity.

So she's a sacred prostitute. She just can't have sex. And, oh, look, a hedgehog. Let's change the topic. Could you imagine being a woman in Babylon when Herodotus' account dropped of just being stood like, hey, we're not doing that. Oh, hi, dear, I forgot to do my marital duty. I need to go. Yeah.

Are we supposed to be doing this? The word that gets, well, you're going to tell me about this word, it is, and I'm going to pronounce this horribly wrong. Is it Kar-K-K-A-R-K-I-D? Kar-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K. Let's face that there are not many Sumerian speakers out there, so no one's going to criticize your pronunciation. Yep, it's Kar-Kid in Sumerian. It is Harimtu in Akkadian.

Okay. And this is the word that is most frequently translated as prostitute of any kind. Usually, what we'd consider a secular prostitute, as opposed to the scores and scores of words for sacred prostitutes. And recently since the late 1990s, the ideology of that word is starting to change, mainly because, again, with all the information we have from Mesopotamia about the price of sheep and houses and legal contracts and everything out there, one thing we do not have at all is any evidence for the exchange of sex for money or any other good. We have zero evidence for prostitution. Okay. So starting in 1990, a scholar named Julia Asante wrote an article saying, no, the hermitu can't be a prostitute. We don't have evidence for prostitution. Also, all the evidence we have about the hermitu, harumatum, plural, but the hermitus, none of that ever seems to suggest that she's prostituting herself. What all the evidence suggests is that she is a woman who is not under the authority of a father or a husband. So if you want, a herimtu is a woman who, is free of patriarchal authority.

And along with that is the fact that she doesn't have to save her virginity or her sexuality for a future husband or a family. So she's free to have sex. I'll be back with Stephanie after this short break. It's difficult as well because even looking at the ancient words are difficult. But when you're trying to translate, the modern words have so many layers of meaning. That word prostitute is a very stigmatized word. means very, very different things to,

so trying to transpose that back into the past, that brings with it layers of meaning. And when the Victorians were trying to understand and translate these texts, they freaked out, didn't they? They were really, really concerned about what was happening. They had no way, and it's not just the Victorians, it comes into modern times too, no way of understanding a female who is not under a man's control.

Can you tell me what you mean by that? Because that's fascinating. There are different definitions of the word prostitute. Now, the one that we tend to use in modern times, our automatic go-to one, is a person who sells sexual access to her or his body in exchange for some kind of commercial good, be it money, food, jewelry, you name it. Because sometimes you're dealing with societies that don't really have money yet, so you have to open up that definition it had. So that's what we tend to think of. But there are other definitions. of prostitute. Quick, simple one is it's an insult. Yeah. You know, calling someone a lousy

whore is obviously an insult and horror is a synonym for prostitute. It's just a bit of a harsher one. Another one that was very prominent from the Middle Ages coming forward, even into the Victorian period, is a woman who has social intercourse with men who are not her husband. So merely by interacting with different men who are not your dad, not your husband, not your brothers, but just men out in society could technically qualify you as a prostitute. And when you consider the Cortijanae of 16th century Italy, for example, yes, these are women like Victoria Franco who interacted with the court, the king of France when he came through. And by that definition, yes, she's a prostitute. Did she have sex with them for money? no, she didn't. The problem is that in modern times, when we use that term, we all think, oh, yes,

it's a person who exchanges sex for money, no matter what any other definition originally was. So there's that problem. And then you have this idea of, well, women are in this early historiographic way of thinking, if we go back to those Victorian early Assyriologists, women are appendices to men. You are someone's mother. someone's wife. You are someone's daughter. You're eventually going to be someone's wife. So women are hacked onto men and are somehow subservient to men. You're under your father's authority. You're under your husband's authority. And the idea that there is a woman out there who's not under any man's authority, apparently they just couldn't conceive of this notion. And as late as 1986, there was an article that came out on women not under patriarchal authority in Mesopotamia.

And the, a seriologist who wrote this, and remember, this is 1986 now, the age of Madonna. So you think we would have, you know, gotten a little farther in our thinking, nope, he came to the conclusion that, well, there are only two categories of women that fall under this rubric, priestesses and prostitutes. Okay. that's it. There's no such thing as, oh, I'm a single woman who works in a tavern. Nope, you have to be one or the other. And then he goes on to point out, well, your priestesses are actually sacred prostitutes. So you have this ideology that any woman who's not under a man's authority one way or another is a sex worker. And you had to get out of that notion of thinking and realizing, no, there are women out there who are simply independent, who have jobs, who run the house, who run the house, household without being sex workers. And then once you open your mind to that, and you look at all of the texts and realize, well, every woman who's called a hermitu, she never seems to have a father.

She never has a husband. She might have a brother. She might have sisters. She might have children. And very interesting here, she can have children who are recognized as legitimate by the father. So she's not his wife. She's his girlfriend on the side. But we actually have legal texts that will say. So Mr. Smith here is married to Mrs. Smith, but if Mrs. Smith doesn't produce any children for him, but his girlfriend on the side does, he can recognize those children from the hermitu as his legitimate heirs and leave all of his property to them. So he knows those are his kids. What are the odds of that happening if she's just a prostitute? Do you see what I mean? And that's just one example. Do you think that it could be that, because research the history of

sex work and it's incredibly class-based. If you are a very poor woman who is engaged in survival sex work and selling sex in the street, then we might use the word prostitute. If you are a kept mistress to an extremely wealthy man who's got you in your own set of apartments, now you're a cortisan. Or a mistress, yes. Or a mistress, right? And it's kind of, it's like the lines get so blurry with this. I mean, is there any chance that the herim to could be what we might now sort of try and look at as kept mistresses that they might have been in that sphere or do you can't you just don't hold with that at all they could have been because they are free to do so to have those kind of relationships without ties they could also be running the local bar you know they're a

tapstress they make the beer they run the business they hire the people who work for them um we have a few early sumerian texts that talk about a couple of car kids who were also cultic singers in the temple, so they provide entertainment for the deity, along with a whole bunch of other people. So it's not that you're in this job because you're a car kid or herrimtu. It's just that, oh, you don't have a father, you don't have a husband, you're an independent woman. No, because then if you're also a landlady or if you're also doing other jobs, then Carcid can't be a profession, can it? Yep. It's just a social status. And one of the things that, that, again, Asante originally realized she was looking through a lot of adoption contracts

because we have a lot of those from Esopotamia. And what you would find in a number of cases is you'd have a single woman, maybe she's a widow, maybe she never married, and she realized she needs a kid to take care of her in her old age. She adopts a daughter. And it would be written into the contract that she can provide a dowry to marry off the daughter later on, or she can make that daughter a hermitu, but she can't sell her into slavery. That would absolutely be wrong.

That is not permitted. But you have a woman without a man who is adopting a woman. So here's someone who's going into a household with no paternal figure, just a maternal figure. And the options are for this adopted girl, either to get married or to be a hermitu. So you can't have the husband and be a hermitu. And what you eventually figure out is the hermitu is simply the hermitu is simply the

one without the father, without the husband. But it's not a slave. And again, no evidence for selling sex at all. One of the reasons that the idea also came up that a herrimtu is probably a prostitute is one of the first ones we come across in Mesopotamia is Shamhat from the Epic of Gilgamesh. And she's the one that you can say, we got this wild guy out there, Enkidu. We don't know by by a first name basis, but there's this wild guy out there and he's really annoying us. And we think if you have a lot of sex with him, he'll calm down and leave us alone. So go and have a lot of sex with him. Literally the words in the text are, go do for him the work of a woman. Lay down, bury your breasts, spread your legs, try not to inhale. He's never bathed, but we're not going to worry

about that. And have lots and lots of sex. And we clearly define Shamhat as a herimtu, and everyone assumed, oh, she was paid to go and have sex with Enkidu. There's no mention of payment. And instead you have to think you have to find a woman who's not married, who's sexually available, to go and have sex with this guy and who'd be willing to do it. And apparently Shamhat was. So we started thinking, oh, maybe they paid her. So it's prostitution, but not. It's simply a woman who's sexually free and available. And in fact, the mere fact that you have these her imputes, sexually available woman, means you don't necessarily need prostitution.

Prostitution emerges in the Iron Age. we start seeing evidence for it only later in the Iron Age because, well, you've established if you will, patriarchal societies where you have so much sexual control over women that you're a 22-year-old guy, you really want to have sex and you can't have it with someone else's wife and you can't have it with someone's eventual wife and you might not be have access to slaves depending on your level of society or what your own household is going to permit. where do you get sex? That's when you start needing prostitutes. If you have sexually liberated women like the Karkid and the Harimtu, you can get a girlfriend. You don't need prostitution.

You could make that argument today. We have more sexually liberated women and we still have sex work today. Yep. But it has to start somewhere under certain conditions. We've already had prostitution. Yeah. So we're used to that idea existing. But imagine if it doesn't in your society, and there's this idea of, wait a minute, I can pay someone to have sex with me. At some point, this is a new idea. You need capitalism as well. You need money and you need those systems to be in place and for it to be an actual profession. That needs to be in place, doesn't it?

And the car kid, they seem to be very closely linked with the goddess Anana, who just sounds fantastic and amazing and incredible. Tell me a bit about who she was. Yes. There is even a hymn where she calls herself a car kid that she sits on the step of the cavern where she is a loving her into, a girlfriend to girls, a lover to men, one who knows the penis. So she's fantastic. Yes.

So you have this goddess. Her name is Inana in Sumerian. She's called Ishtar in Acadian. And there are slight differences between the two of them. But you have to understand you're looking at a very very. long span of history. You have a process of what's known as syncretism where deities merge with other deities who are similar to them and form something kind of new but like the original pairing. So you have Anana. When she comes across the more Semitic populations, they have an astral venous deity

named Ashtar, who is a warrior male deity. They get merged together and you wind up with Fishtar in Mesopotamia, who is very erotic and very. very martial, and I imagine those biblical scholars back in Victorian times who were reading for her calling out for her lover to stroke her vulva. We're like, oh my God, what are we supposed to do with this thing? Basically, she's a goddess. And in Mesopotamia, like most of the ancient world, individual city-state have the deities that own the town, if you will, and look after it. And if the town gets destroyed, they mourn it and then eventually bring it back. So Inana is a goddess who was worshipped in various parts of Mesopotamia, the city of Oric, for example, also up in the city of Akkad.

She's very powerful. And she gets her fingers into all aspects of culture and society. There's an early myth about Inana and her uncle Enki. And Enki is organizing the universe, if you will. and she gets them kind of drunk, and she steals all these great elements of society and runs away and brings them to her main city in Uruk, so that Uruk is going to be the city of this and that and the other thing. And by the time he recovers from his drunkenness, it's too late. She already has them. So it's called Inana and the Me's, M.E, these aspects of society.

And they can range from music to fallatio to almost anything in between, because. the Mesopotamians were fantastic. So we have the fictional, it's often translated as Harlot, isn't it, at Shamhat, Karqid, and we've got Anana who is a goddess and, wow, would you just love to have a drink with her? Do we have records of real life, carkids in the records,

like names that are left to us of these women? Several of them. Like I said, we have so many legal texts of different types from Mesopotamia. So I was telling you a little bit about, for example, you can have adoption contracts where a woman who has no man will adopt a daughter and that daughter can eventually become a wife or a harim to herself and we have several of those named. We also have last wills and testaments. So what happens when parents are dying and how they are

leaving the world for their children and divvying up their property? One of my favorite people in named people in Mesopotamia from this documentation is a young woman named Dada. Now, that might have been a nickname something shorter, but it's written in the text as Dada. And her father is dying, and he is writing his last will in testament. So apparently mom is already gone, so you just have this father. He's dying. He's writing his will, and he has three daughters, the oldest of whom appears to be the girl Dada. And he writes in his will that, first off, he is making Dada, mother and father of that.

household because they had this interesting kind of, if you will, certain ideas of fluid gender, if you will, that if you don't have any sons, you can turn your daughter's male. So first off, he declares that Dada is going to be mother and father of the household. And he declares in there Dada, the Haremtu, my daughter, the hermitu, is going to be mother and father of the household. and she receives this property, this property, this property, as well as both of the household slaves. Now, as for my other two daughters, I am turning them into sons.

So the two daughters are made sons. The first one already has her marriage contract negotiated. So she's going to be marrying some guy. If she fails to produce children for this guy, he's allowed to take another wife. So again, they've been turned into sons, but they're still expected to marry as women, their children is women deal with all of that. And then there's one youngest daughter. And we don't hear very much about her.

She might just be too young at this point. So yes, here we have a father who officially declares his daughter is going to be her rim to, probably because the father is going to be dying. We have no evidence that any marriage has been arranged for her, but she has been made head of the household. He have two other daughters. They're made sons, one of whom is going to be getting married. The other one may be, maybe not like.

Like I said, we don't have that information. And it is declared that provided they respect Dada as their father and mother, when Dada dies, they will inherit from her. So he has no expectation that she'll marry or have children of her own. The property goes through her to the younger daughters and their own marital states. So that is one example of a named Herim 2 and what her status is in her own family. Now that's from a Will and Testament. then we have, like I said, a number of other examples that are coming from the adoption contracts. I'll be back with Stephanie after this short break.

It's incredible. It sounds like there's quite a lot of room for gender fluidity here. And if I may throw another word at you that I've written down because I knew that I would forget it, that there seems to have been some academic, oh, I'm not sure it means that, I'm not sure it means that. So the word is sack Zichram, and it has been translated to mean man-woman. and I was reading an article of somebody arguing that that was evidence of lesbianism in ancient Mesopotamia. That it means man, woman, and that they might have been... But I'm sort of thinking now what you're saying is that this sounds like the herimto,

that you could be man and woman in those roles. Potentially, it works slightly differently. No evidence for lesbianism. There is evidence for male-male homosexuality. Not a lot, but it is definitely there. And generally speaking, they don't seem to have had a problem with it. So no problem with homosexuality, really. It's just another thing that's out there.

They probably don't write about it as much because you don't have to worry about reproduction and what to do with the children and legal rights and inheritance. So it doesn't have the messiness that heterosexual intercourse pretty much inevitably does in an age without good birth control. The term man-woman, there is a cult functionary that has that as one of its titles in the Sumerian, the Urmunus. He is also known as the Sag or Sagh in Sumerian. That's the earlier title. Then you get the later one, the Luurmunus. And then finally, in Acadian, he's known as the Asinu. And the Asinu is one of three male cult functionaries associated with our favorite goddess in Anna Ishtar. And remember those kind of Victorian parsons who started off this field of Assyriology? and were easily weirded out by things. Well, they were convinced by their biblical readings

that there's something wrong with Canaanites and those pagans to the north and to the east. There just have to be something sexually suspect about them. I mean, they engage in orgies, don't they? And then you get to Mesopotamia, and you find a whole bunch of guys who are willingly priest to a highly erotic, volatile, martial goddess,

and we already can't deal with her. And now we have guys who work for her, so there must be something wrong with them. And all of these cult titles were taken in the worst possible way. We seem to have decided, first off, that there's something wrong with them, there's something sexually wrong with them. And we have decided that they are transvestite, catamite, castrati,

homosexual eunuchs, you name it. All of those terms have been. been applied to these characters who are simply in the cult of Inana because they're male and that goddess is weird and we don't know what else to do with fun. But because we've decided that anything involving these particular males must be as sexual and badly sexual and perverted as possible, we decided that, oh, this is the man, woman and he must be a transvestite, etc., etc., instead of thinking, well, he's a servant of Anana and Anana is referred to as the woman. So it makes sense that he's the servant of the woman.

But you have three categories of cult functionaries like this. There is the Kyrgaru, there is the gala, and then there is the Asinu. And people have been saying for generations and generations that these are your eunuchs, your transvestites, your catamites, you're did it. I'm trying to think of all the terminology. One person even came up with this great definition that the Asinu is the master of ceremonies at the transvestite orgies. What?

I mean, I hope so, but that's a leap. We don't even have evidence for transvestite orgies. Much less a Mater D. Where did you come up with this? But this is the kind of thinking and the really bad scholarship that has followed these guys around. And it's a shame because one of the really neat things that we found about them is the gala.

He was apparently originally a lamentation singer. So when somebody dies, he's the one who sings the morning. if something bad happened in your town, he might lead the chorus of people and singing the lamentations. And it has been suggested that because mourning and lamentations were originally sung by women, but then it was taken over professionally by a man that maybe there's something kind of feminine about him. But that's about it. Nothing else pertaining to this guy would suggest that there is anything off, perverted, weirdly sexual about him. We have documents pointing out that he was very highly placed in society.

He worked for the palace. He worked for the king. He had children. So he's married. He has children. He could have a son who marries the princess. So very high-ranking individuals. That is high-ranking, isn't it?

Oh, very. One of the ways that people get confused about this is in Anna. There's one hymn to her written by Ed Hedewana, our first named poet, a high priestess, during the Akkadian age. So this is the late third millennium, B.C.E. And she would write some great hymns to the goddess inana Ishtar. And in one of them, she says, you turn male to female. You turn female to male.

And people looked at that and they applied it to the Asinu and these other characters and said, oh, look, she's tinkering around with their sex and with their gender. And the problem is that that's only two lines of a much longer poem. where Enjuana is saying, you make the mountains valleys, you make the valleys mountains, you make the desert sea and the sea, the desert, you make the peaceful belligerent and the belligerent peaceful, you make the male female and the female male, you take everything and turn it into its diametric opposite. That is the power of Inana. And people have focused on just that one line and saw gender fluidity and didn't necessarily see that it's part of a greater

explanation of in honest powers over the full range of reality and turning binary opposites into their opposite. And if she wants back again. Stephanie, you have been incredible to talk to. And my final question is it's a hypothetical one. But let's pretend that I've invented a time machine. And I can send you back to ancient Mesopotamia for just a few hours. So basically you get the chance to go back and find something out. Like solve, put one of these things to bed. that you can go and hang out at the temple and go, oh my God, Herodice was right. I'm so sorry about that.

Or you can go, ha-ha. Because you can imagine. Or like, so you've got the chance to go back and find one thing and solve one thing, absolutely. What would you do? Where would you go? At this precise moment, I would go back to Mesopotamia to about the year 2000, let's say.

And the thing that I'm currently doing my research on is nude female iconography. I am looking at depictions of a very, broad range of iconography shows up in Mesopotamia. It goes to Indian one direction. It goes to Spain and the other of a nude female looking directly at you, prominent breasts, prominent genitalia, holding her hands in a number of different positions depending on the time and the place. And inevitably people call these fertility figurines. It drives me crazy. Whenever you see a female who is in any way sexual insofar as, you know, under her clothes, under her clothes, she's

naked? Oh my God. We say it must be fertility. The sacred prostitution was a fertility ritual. You see a naked female figurine. It's a fertility figurine. Part of something called women's religion, whatever that's supposed to be. So I'm doing research on those and figuring out what a lot of these things are, but sometimes I will just look at one of them. And I'm trying to understand what is this? What did it mean to the population who is using it? And I would like to go back to either ancient Nipur or ancient Ashur and hold up one of these figurines and say, what is this? What do you use it for? Because I'm really kind of confused. She's neat and everything. And I think she might be Ishtar, but she might not be. And this other one that kind of looks like her, but isn't I know definitely isn't Ishtar. I think this might be a llama goddess instead. That's what I would ask. What the fuck is this? Such a simple question, but like as we started saying right at the beginning is it's those building blocks. And if you don't, as soon as you get that in place, everything else you can kind of build from there. But I believe all of your research completely.

Stephanie, whatever it is you want to say about these nude figurines, I'm going to, you can take it to the bank. I believe it entirely. Thank you. You've been amazing to talk to you. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? My latest book is Gender in the Ancient Near East. It's a 2023 publication and that has all that information about, say, the Asinu and a whole lot about female eroticism.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Stephanie. You've been marvelous. Thank you so of you. Thank you so much for inviting me. This has been great. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much to Stephanie for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to follow along and like the podcast and do all of that stuff because it actually does really help us. And if you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixtat history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from medieval chastity to 18th century illegitimacy all come in your way. And if you'd like to explore more ancient histories,

then you should definitely check out our sister podcast, The Ancients. It's not as good as this one, but it's still a very good podcast. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith, the senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.