Join us for the first seminar of our Spring series, featuring Dr. Jana Matuszak speaking on ‘Defining the Ideal Woman, 2000BCE: A Perspective from Sumerian Didactic Literature’!
Wednesday, 12 January 2022 at 4pm GMT
Register on Zoom here.
‘Defining the Ideal Woman, 2000BCE: A Perspective from Sumerian Didactic Literature’
Ancient Iraq, often referred to as the cradle of civilization, is home to many firsts – among them, the first literary discourse on gender. The talk will introduce a small corpus of mostly still unpublished Sumerian literary texts written around 4000 years ago, which indirectly define the ideal woman. They are the only Mesopotamian literary compositions featuring ‘ordinary’ housewives as protagonists and hence reveal unique glimpses into their daily lives. However, since they were most likely composed by schoolteachers for their pupils, they present an exclusively male perspective on what constitutes ideal femininity. Comparison with similar didactic texts defining the ideal man reveals that notions of perfection in regard to character traits, behaviour, ancestry, health and good looks applied to men and women alike. Conversely, the texts propagate a clear gender division with respect to work: while the ideal man was conceived of as a competent scribe, the only suitable female profession was that of a housewife. Although material culture as well as non-literary sources prove that this is a highly restrictive view of a much more multi-faceted reality, this bias reflects the texts’ origin in scribal milieux. At the same time, it furnishes early evidence for a recognition of the performative nature of gender: according to the texts, it is (domestic) work that makes a woman.
About the Speaker
Dr Jana Matuszak is an Assistant Professor in Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, who specializes in Sumerian literature from ancient Iraq. She serves as co-editor of the academic journal Altorientalische Forschungen. Prior to returning to her alma mater, she held Lecturer positions at the University of Jena, Germany, and SOAS University of London. Her PhD dissertation entitled ‘“And you, you are a woman?!” Studies in Sumerian literary debates between women with an editio princeps of Two Women B’ was awarded the Dissertation Prize of the International Association for Assyriology (2018) and the Johannes Zilkens Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation in Humanities and Social Sciences of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (2019). A revised version of her dissertation was published as a monograph by De Gruyter in 2021. Current research projects address aspects of law, literature and gender in early 2nd millennium BCE Iraq.
