Hard Times for Sippar Women: Three Late Old Babylonian Cases

Despite important work on issues of gender and representation with regard to women's history in Mesopotamia over the past generation or two, less direct attention has been devoted to the hard reality of women's socio-economic inequality in this starkly patriarchal culture. The present contribution takes up three examples of groups of women living in varying degrees of hardship and deprivation in the Late Old Babylonian period: slave, poor nadītums, and dependents. I analyze small corpora of evidence about these women to make two basic points: first, Mesopotamian women were subject to structural inequities which manifested themselves in repeatable ways (without requiring that we call them "weak" or "powerless"); second, despite consistent and persistent inequality, women's histories were yet as mutable and subject to change as those of men. It is no more effective to write the histories of only "strong women" than it is to write them of only "great men." Intersectional issues such as socio-economic difference must be taken into account to arrive at a better working picture of this or any society.