 Hello everyone, my name is Melissa Craddock and I'm curator at the Bodding Museum at Pacific School of Religion. Before I introduce today's speaker and in the Women's Admin or Performance Lecture Series, I'd like to first give the floor to Brooke Norton, who is Associate Curator at the Bodding Museum to read a statement on behalf of the museum. Thank you. We would like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Huchun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenye alone. We respect the land and the people who have stewarded it throughout many generations, and we honor their elders both past and present. We're living in a moment that warrants deep reflection on our past and present. Across many global contexts, equal access to healthcare, education, fair wages and human rights is contested on the base of sex and gender identity. In an effort to bring light to these timely issues to serve a broader public audience online and to connect to the local community that it serves, the museum is taking action to become a more inclusive, welcoming and equitable institution that practices the philosophy of radical inclusion adopted by its parent institution, Pacific School of Religion. One of these steps is the creation of public programming. Through this lecture series, we hope to highlight new and established scholars who are engaging with risky and marginalized topics concerning women, gender performance and sexuality in the past. We invite you to participate in these programs so that together we can listen, learn and work towards creating a more inclusive museum community. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Brooke. It's now my pleasure to introduce today's speaker. Dr. Jesse DeGrado is assistant professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. He studies the history and religions of the ancient Middle East with a focus on forms of socio political hegemony, such as gender and empire. More broadly, he's interested in how modern history and politics affect our reconstruction of the past, including the legacy of Orientalism and Assyriology and biblical studies. His current book project engages post-colonial theory to explore the relationship between the new Assyrian Empire and its client states, taking Judah as a case study. The paper presented today is part of another project on gender transgression and religious authority in ancient Mesopotamia. DeGrado argues that Mesopotamian temples provide a productive locus for studying complex and often contradictory expressions of gender, because they normal the transgression of certain boundaries in the context of religious ritual. This allows us to study cases where gendered aspects of a person's social status, professional obligations and identity do not necessarily align and explore how figures can be marginalized in some contexts precisely because they were empowered in others. So with that very interesting premise before us, Dr. DeGrado, the floor is yours. All right, thank you. Good morning, good afternoon and maybe even good evening to some of you guys listening live. I want to begin by offering my thanks to Melissa Craddick and Aaron Brody for organizing this important and exciting lecture series. And to the Bade Archaeological Museum at the Pacific School of Religion and the Archaeological Research Facility at UC Berkeley for hosting. Today, I'll be speaking to you about a group of women who occupied a position of significant authority as religious officiant in ancient Mesopotamia. In bilingual Mesopotamian society, the title of these women was Nugig in Sumerian and Khadishtu in Acadia. I argue that the authority and agency of these women have been obscured in scholarship by a related set of assumptions. These assumptions reduce women's lived experience to bodily functions related to pregnancy, birth and nursing. The false assumptions are furthered because they intersect with orientalist presuppositions. These figure Middle Eastern women is paradoxically cloistered and hypersexualized. As a result, recent characterizations of the Khadishtu have organized their activities around a rubric of fertility and imagine that they were primarily occupied as midwives who worked in women's only spaces. This set of assumptions is actually remarkable because we do not have a single piece of documentary evidence that links Khadishtus to midwifery. I'm going to argue instead that Khadishtus were employed in religious and political institutions primarily as ritual practitioners who specialized in rights of purification. This provides us with a more appropriate framework for understanding the frequent employment of Khadishtus as wet nurses, given the concerns around the purity of milk offered to infants. This also allows us to better understand the religious authority and social role of the Khadishtu. It finally has implications for how we think about embodied experiences like nursing and childbirth in the ancient Middle East by challenging us to think beyond ill-defined concepts like fertility. Since this is a series on gender and performance, I want to highlight some of the tools we now have for studying gender. These tools will allow us to recognize and to deconstruct orientalist underpinnings in many analyses of gender in antiquity, including in feminist ones. In this respect, I am going to offer a departure from many studies of gender in ancient Mesopotamia and the Levant. I want to be clear at the outset that my critique operates at the level of shared axiomatic assumptions. I do not impute malice to any one scholar. In fact, I will only be citing by name scholars whose work has positively contributed to dismantling orientalist and sexist approaches. I do, however, want to highlight lingering assumptions and to explore the opportunities that arise when we engage more deeply with critical theory. I'll begin with a review of gender theory and best practices in the discussion of gender in the ancient Middle East. Over the past 50 years, archaeologists, historians, and gender theorists alike have come to recognize that both sex and gender are social constructs. By this, we mean that humans attribute significance to body parts and that we make this signification seem natural by enacting specific norms. This argument was made already by Judith Butler in their books Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter Over 30 Years Ago. In practice, this means that Butler upends the second wave feminist assumption that sex is biological and gender is a social construct or feature of identity. Nonetheless, this assertion persists in a lot of work in our field. Our oversight in this area is particularly striking because Zayna Bahrani accurately and productively applied Judith Butler's framework in a book published over 20 years ago. In the section of Babylon Bahrani asserts there is no distinction to be made between socially constructed gender and biological sex since the morphology of sexual distinction is in itself already a social construct. In other words, there is no sex prior to or separate from its social construction. Since the morphological distinction we make between bodies is always culturally contingent. Neither Bahrani nor any recent gender theorist denies the existence of biological processes that underlie sexual reproduction in humans. What gender theorists do argue is that the very idea that we can trace differences in human behavior to underlying differences in sex bodies relies on a number of activities, all of which are historically and culturally contingent. These activities include the very definition of a male or female body, which in recent history has included measuring the size of an infant's external genitalia and performing so-called corrective surgeries on intersex babies. This means that allegedly self-evident sexed characteristics, say having a penis, have already been subjected to regulation and correction. Beyond that, any attempt to link specific behaviors to bodily morphology is hampered by the gendered rearing of children, which actually begins in most cases prior to birth. We can think of the popular practice of a gender reveal as a regulatory mechanism that determines what types of clothing and toys an infant will receive, how they will be held and how often, how they will be comforted, how they will be spoken to, and what will be expected of them. All of this is determined on the basis of a fetus's genitals before birth, meaning that all subsequent experiences of sex and gender are already socially conditioned. This framing allows us to get a better purchase on what gender theorists mean when they refer to gender as performance. The phrase, which originates in Butler's work, does not refer to theatricality or dissimilation. Rather, performance is borrowed from the notion of performative speech, that which affects what it means. In speaking the words, I now pronounce you man and wife, a priest effectuates a marriage, and of course the host of gendered relations that that might entail. When we think about the construction of sex and gender in these terms, we can identify the repetition of gender norms in our everyday life. Norms that encompass very mundane things, like using gender segregated bathrooms or purchasing gender segregated personal hygiene products or clothing. These norms serve to constitute our sense of a stable gendered self. In this respect, acts like gender reveals do more than condition the behaviors in a baby. These types of mundane activities so permeate our lives that we stop seeing them as constructs and begin to see social differentiation based on sex as a natural phenomenon. I want to take a moment here to discuss an issue of terminology that is of relevance to archaeologists and historians working with gender. You may see scholars of the ancient Middle East refer to people as biological males, or as biological females. This language is a red flag, and if you're writing on gender, I beg you to strike it from your personal dictionary. When you see this language in print, it indicates one of two things. Either the scholar you're reading is more than 30 years and really closer to 50 years out of date with gender theory, or they are deliberately employing an anti trans dog whistle. In either event, this is not a reliable academic course. I'm going to engage the work of archaeologist Roberta Gilchrist to explain why the seemingly neutral set of terms are, in fact, anything but. There are, of course, biological processes that underlie human reproduction, just as there are biological processes informing every single aspect of our embodied lives. But the explanatory power of biology can be quite limited. When scientists refer to biological sex, they are indexing a whole variety of biological functions that are not actually accessible to most human observers. Roberta Gilchrist stresses three of these in her overview of sex and gender and archaeology. She begins with gonadal sex, which Gilchrist presents as a single category, but which medical experts now tend to divide into two categories, internal and external genitalia, because the two do not always align. Hormonal sex can be either estrogen or testosterone dominant or a mix of the two. Chromosomal sex shows significant variation and this leads to significant variation in how bodies develop. For this, we need to look at a fourth category that can be added to Gilchrist system. This is genetic sex. Genetic sex refers to the presence or absence of genes that signal sexual differentiation of some sort. So for example, the SRY gene, which signals the undifferentiated fetal gonads to develop into testes, can actually be transposed from the Y chromosome to the X chromosome. The result of SRY deletion is that a person with XY chromosomes will develop a vulva, vagina, and even ovaries. Although the gene was identified only 30 years ago, there are already documented cases of women with Y chromosomes but no SRY gene giving birth to healthy infants, both with and without medical treatment for infertility. So the simple fact of having given birth does not actually guarantee that a woman's chromosomal status is in fact XX and not XY. Obviously then, these complex biological processes can result in a huge spectrum of physical phenotypes that include a range of intersex conditions. What this means is that a meaningful description of the biology of sex must include knowledge of all processes from chromosomes to genes to hormones. I very much doubt that a single person listening can fully account for their own biological sex, including their chromosomal and genetic profiles. I know I cannot for myself. We also cannot generally access this information for anyone else, and we certainly cannot for anyone who was living in antiquity. Furthermore, as Gilchrist points out, the markers that people in ancient societies used to determine gender were primarily gonadal morphology and secondary sex characteristics. These are actually not the same as the characteristics used by archaeologists to assign a sex estimate to a skeleton, which is generally based on bone structures and DNA analysis. The fundamental inaccuracy of sex estimates, when based on DNA and bone structure, can be seen in the recent analysis of the remains of a revolutionary war hero, Cosmer Pulaski. Pulaski was consistently portrayed and referred to as a man throughout his entire life, including in portraits depicting him with male pattern baldness and facial hair, as you can see. A recent genetic analysis has revealed, however, that Pulaski was intersex or what we would call intersex today. He had XX chromosomes. This analysis matches the initial sex estimate made in the 1990s based on Pulaski's pelvic structure, which was suggestive of higher levels of estrogen than are normally seen in perisex met. Pulaski's case has significant for ancient Middle Eastern studies, because it dispels a disturbing myth that has been propagating in scholarship. This is the idea that intersex people did not exist in antiquity because of certain comorbidities that can lead to premature death. In fact, Cosmer Pulaski likely suffered from congenital adrenal hyperplasia. One of the intersex conditions with the highest rate of infant mortality, and I use suffered from there to refer to the other conditions that come along with this. Not only did Pulaski live to tell the tale, but he saved the life of George Washington on the battlefield. To write intersex people out of history by assuming that only perisex people survived prior to modern medicine is extremely disturbing. It is ableist and it contributes to the ongoing violence suffered by the intersex community today. Let's now turn back to the ancient Middle East. I'm going to argue that the assumption of the body as a stable and self-evident locus of biological sex has a profound impact on how we reconstruct then gender and antiquity. More specifically, this set of assumptions intersects with certain orientalist impulses that figure Middle Eastern women in terms of their sexuality and their reproductive capacity. The combined effect is the assumption that women's religious experience was restricted to ill-defined concepts like procreation, nurture, and fertility. In fact, when scholars began transiting Aquidian texts in the mid-19th century, they were already looking for sacred prostitutes. A seriologist of this era pointed to Herodotus as a first-hand account of the practice. But what they actually were imagining in this period was a distinctly modern fantasy. Herodotus, who shows no actual knowledge of Mesopotamian religious practices, describes a custom in which every Babylonian woman has obliged to visit the Temple of Aphrodite once in her life and to have sex with a stranger. Nineteenth-century scholars reinterpreted this Greek passage with reference to social evolutionary theory and colonial-era ethnography. These theories posited extensive fertility rights among societies delved primitive. Namely, these were ancient civilizations and modern societies under Euro-American colonial domination. At issue here is not only the application then of Greek historiography to ancient Mesopotamia. We have a reliance on a broader set of assumptions that were inherited from the colonial context in which Sumerian and Akkadian were deciphered. The epistemic assumptions that generated the myth of sacred prostitution can be analyzed under the broader rubric of Orientalism and the related phenomenon of racialized sexuality. Then a Bahraini highlights how Middle Eastern women are imagined in Orientalist discourse as paradoxically cloistered and yet hypersexualized. This is apparent in the divergent receptions of naked women in Greek and Mesopotamian plastic arts. Naked female figures from the Greco-Roman world tend to be analyzed as high art, demonstrating the sculptor's competence in elegant representations of the human body. By contrast, Mesopotamian terracottes and other depictions of naked women are generally subsumed under the rubric of fertility. The divergent approach indicates that scholars come to the visual arts and texts of Mesopotamia with a set of assumptions about the social role of women in the ancient Middle East, implicitly conceptualizing their value only or primarily in terms of sexual reproduction. The perennial interest in women's bodies as a locus of fertility thus reveals an underlying racialized biologic inextricably linked to myths about the sexual accesses of women of color. This assumption reveals itself very clearly in the modern myth of sacred prostitution in which the ancient Middle East functions as a heterotopia for fantasies of sexual excess or deviance. But this is only one crystallization of a broader range of Orientalist readings, many of which are not framed explicitly in terms of transgressions. Today I want to consider a more deeply embedded form of Orientalism, one that characterizes much feminist writing. Mary Roberts has explored precisely this set of issues in the case of European and American women's relationship to the harem in the 19th century Ottoman Empire. In her analysis of Euro-American travel diaries, Roberts notes that foreign women portrayed the harems they visited as exotic sumptuous places of limitless enchantments and intrigues and loci of liberated feminine desire. However liberating this experience may have been for the white woman consumers, it relied on a pre-existing logic of colonial domination. Under this logic, women of color were figured as possessing unrestrained sexuality due to a closer proximity to nature. European and American white feminist scholars, for example, relied on the hypersexualization of brown and black women's bodies in their attempts to demarcate an originary locus of women's power. This manifests itself in different ways, including the mostly discredited attempts to locate a prehistoric matriarch. It can also be reinforced by second-way feminist approaches, which assert that women's experiences can best be accessed through the study of bodily functions like pregnancy, birth, and lactation. The problem is most clearly apparent in biblical studies, where the ongoing religious and cultural significance of the Bible puts pressure on interpreters to discover positive portrayals of women. This is a parent and Carol Meyers study of women's religion in Israel and Judah, which is often taken as a starting point for gender and archaeology in the Levant. The work casts women's religious experience exclusively in terms of sexual reproduction. It also supplements a biblical text and archaeological record with an uncritical reliance on colonial era ethnography. Beginning with this type of framing can constrain our results, subsuming all of women's experiences under the umbrella of reproduction. Just as the field would benefit from deeper engagement with gender theory, the time is ripe to return to these classic works and consider unrecognized Orientalist assumptions that may lurk beneath the surface. In the case of the Khadishtu, challenging the myth of sacred prostitution was only one step in dismantling our Orientalist legacy. A broader paradigm remains in place, in which Khadishtus are assumed to be, first, primarily defined by reproductive functions, and second, confined to women's only spaces. In what follows, I will diverge in my interpretation of the Khadishtu from the portrait painted in the pioneering studies of Meijer Gruber and Joan Goodnick-Westinholz. Because these scholars were pathbreaking in dispelling the myth of sacred prostitution, I want to emphasize again that my own work is deeply indebted to them. I do think, however, that there is more work to be done. In particular, these studies challenge the overtly Orientalist assumptions of sacred prostitution, but they continue to define the Khadishtu primarily in terms of bodily functions. Gruber, for example, concluded that the primary responsibilities of the Khadishtu were delivering babies, nursing babies, chanting hymns in the temple of Adad, and engaging in sorcery. The association of the Khadishtu with reproduction is made even more strongly by Westinholz, who opens her discussion of the various responsibilities of the Khadishtu as follows. One of their responsibilities was identified with a gender-specific female activity, such as a task of probe creation and nurture. Finally, Fon Belara has recently picked up this argument stating, though the sources are rather silent on this issue, it is plausible that the main activities of the Nugig Khadishtu are to be sought in the very specific setting of creating life and giving birth. These statements, which emphasize the role of Khadishtus in the process of giving birth, are remarkable for the reason alluded to already by Fon Belara. In point of fact, we have not a single documentary source that would clearly locate a human Khadishtu at the scene of a birth. Why then, does procreation and birth repeatedly emerge as a primary locus of the Khadishtu's activities? To answer this question, we need to understand Orientalism not as a monolithic discourse that stems from overt prejudice, but rather as a broad stream of approaches that share certain common assumptions. Orientalist readings of ancient texts can persist when we dispute only the most clearly negative aspects of early interpretations without questioning other underlying presuppositions. These include the reduction of women's professional roles to women's bodies and the propensity to dream up cloistered spaces of women's intimacy and power. In the case of the Khadishtu, we can counter this tendency by building an initial profile of their activities based on documentary evidence, which clusters around two activities, purification and wet nursing. The linking of these activities provides us with an alternative framework for thinking about wet nursing and antiquity. Rather than understanding nursing as restricted to a mysterious female domain governed by fertility, we can offer an understanding of the practice based on concerns about purity and prophylaxis in the care of infants. Only after discussing the documentary evidence will we return to the question of the new gig as an epithet for deities, including cases where the epithet is applied to gods who oversee childbirth. These texts raise the possibility that human new gigs may have existed in childbirth in very early Mesopotamian society, but this possibility will have to remain conjectural without further evidence. Several rituals, letters and administrative texts attest to the role of the new gig or Khadishtu as a temple efficient. Already in the mid third millennium BCE, the Sumerian term new gig appears in ration lists from Pharah. At Girsu, in the state of Lagash, new gigs receive gifts of pure milk and pure malt in the context of a festival associated with either the goddess Nanche or Baba. By the early second millennium, Khadishtus were also affiliated with the temples of the storm god Adad and the goddess Ishtar. At Sipur Anunitum, a text from the Ur-Utu archive records gifts received by Ur-Utu's mother, the Khadishtu Ilshihagali, when she performed on the occasion of her performing partzu rites. Though unfortunately we have no description of what the rites entailed. In archive from the house of Humti Adad, a Khadishtu who lived in Sipur in the late 18th century BCE also contained several scribal exercises indicating that Khadishtus may have been involved in scribal training. Although none of these texts gives us insight into the types of rituals performed by the new gigs Khadishtus, it is clear that this was a well established profession with links to temples and with a long history. It is in the middle Assyrian period in the second half of the second millennium that we finally catch a direct glimpse of the ritual responsibilities of the Khadishtu. The middle Assyrian text Kar-154 describes a ritual that begins in the temple of Adad. Several Khadishtus in the high priest, the Shanghu perform a series of actions before the deity, described first in lines four to five. The Khadishtus perform the In-Husang before Adad, they finish the In-Husang, the Shanghu purifies a censor, the Khadishtus extol the god. As the ritual progresses, the Shanghu and Khadishtus process to several other locations, including the storehouse of Minerta in the Ashur temple, the Ashur gate, and a sacred precinct known as Abit Hamri. Administrative and ritual texts from the first millennium indicate that Khadishtus continued to be involved in temple and state sponsored rituals, and that they were specifically cast with purification. For example, a Khadishtu appears in a letter to King Yisrahadin. The text is part of a series of letters between Marduk Shakhinshumi, the chief exorcist, and the Assyrian king pertaining to a prophylactic ritual the king has requested. Yisrahadin has expressed concern about the details of the ritual. Marduk Shakhinshumi reassures Yisrahadin that he will personally be present at the ceremony, and then he describes the rituals the Khadishtu will undertake. She will be responsible for applying Pashirtu, a purifying substance to the king's garments. A 7th century ritual text from the House of the Encantation Precinct Ashur also mentions the Khadishtus' participation in a ritual. Unfortunately, the text itself is too broken to discern much about the role of any of the officiants. Nonetheless, it is clear that the ritual cannot be classified as either belonging to a clustered female domain or supporting the assumption that the Khadishtu was fully marginalized from other forms of expertise in the first millennium. As preserved, the ritual extends over several days and includes a series of offerings to Bellatzeri and Shamash. Both the Khadishtu and an Encantation Precinct Ashur appear in a section of text that describes the manipulation of the purificatory elements, salt, and ritual ablutions. Thus, while the broken text does not allow for a full reconstruction of either officiant's actions in this section, it does support the association of the Khadishtu with purification. Two additional texts provide evidence for this association. The first, the Akkadian disputation poem The Date Palm and the Tamarisk is attested in manuscript copies across a wide geographic and chronological span, ranging from the old Babylonian period through the end of the second millennium. Although no full first millennium copies have been found, a catalog entry from Nineveh indicates that the poem was also known in the Neo-Issyrian period. In the relevant section of the disputation, the Tamarisk boasts the Date Palm of its powers of purification. The Khadishtu takes the water of the Tamarisk, they celebrate, and prepare a festival. If you're a fan of the Date Palm, don't worry. It, too, is an implement of purification that can be wielded by a Khadishtu. Though our evidence for this comes not from the disputation poem, but from an Encantation in the first millennium anti-sorcery series Maklu. Here, the ritual practitioner invokes the name of the Khadishtu as evidence for the purifying powers of palm products, which he uses to repel sorcery. And so he says, I wield against you, palm twine, twine of the Khadishtu's, cone, cone full of seeds. Although the ritual does not involve the participation of the Khadishtu, it clearly shows an underlying association of Khadishtus with purificatory power. The second clearly attested function of the Khadishtu is that of wet nursing. Previous treatments of the Khadishtu have tended to conceptualize wet nursing under the rubric of fertility. Based on a survey of evidence, I'm going to suggest we can better understand the frequent employment of Khadishtus as a wet nurse's as an outgrowth of their expertise in matters of purification. The earliest evidence for the association of Sumerian Newgig with wet nursing can be found in an exemplar of the laws of Ornama, originally composed around 2100 BCE. Development manuscript is held privately in the Skoyan collection, which has recently been in the news for its likely possession of looted Iraqi artifacts. The ancient text sets the wages for wet nursing and explicitly lists this as a function of Newgigship, i.e., the office of the Newgig. And so here the law goes as follows. If someone nurses a man's child, her barley will be 6 score, her wool 30 mina, and her oil 30 sila for three years. It is part of the Newgig functions. The yearly fee for a nanny will be 1 sila. From this law, we can deduce that wet nursing was among the roles of the Newgig in the late 3rd millennium. Contracts and legal documents also show that Khadishtus could be hired for multi-year nursing during the old Babylonian period. In one text from Dilbat dated to the reign of Hammurabi, a woman named Zuhuntum hired a Khadishtu to nurse her son. Zuhuntum and her husband Anukinum were ultimately unable to pay the contracted three-year fee of grain, oil, and clothing. In this particular case, the couple chose to relinquish custody of their child, and the Khadishtu Iltani, who had provided nourishment for the child over the course of years, became the adoptive parent. Finally, we can note that the Khadishtu appears to be a specific type of a wet nurse. The profession of wet nursing more generally is designated by the term Umega in Sumerian, and Mushenitum in Akhidia. A second legal text from the reign of Hammurabi, this time found at Larsa, addresses a legal status of an infant named Kulupat, who was nursed by someone who was not a Khadishtu. The baby in question was the offering offspring of a free person in Awilu, but the baby had been given over temporarily to an enslaved woman for wet nursing. And so the baby's legal status, free or enslaved, came into question. Given the evidence that Khadishtus were employed in temples already in this period, it is highly likely that a Khadishtu was some more expectantive option for a wet nurse when compared to an enslaved woman. Why then would anyone choose to hire a Khadishtu for this task? What might a Khadishtu be able to offer that a woman of lower status, or someone not dedicated to a god, could not offer? Here, I think the issue of purity is key. The purity of substances offered to infants is extremely important, and tainted food products of any sort can lead to illness and death. Consequently, hiring a woman consecrated to a deity is a good place to start in choosing the safest option for feeding. The fact that Khadishtu specialized in rights of purification can only have added to this appeal. We can find exactly these sorts of concerns around nursing, purification and apotropaism in the first millennium lamaste series. The series consists of a set of rituals and incantations intended to protect infants from this dangerous baby-murdering demon. In one incantation, lamaste is figured as a demonic Khadishtu who snatches babies from their mothers, cooing as she suckles them with her venomous milk. So she touches the bellies of women in labor, she snatches babies from nannies, she nurses, sings and kisses them. Her weapons are great, her muscles agile, the daughter of Anu is a Khadishtu of the gods, her brothers. Here, the term Khadishtu is subject to an ironic reversal in which lamaste is figured as an evil twin for the human occupation. Lamaste is precisely the sort of person you do not want to allow to nurse your baby. Another incantation in the lamaste series demonstrates the demon's penchant for murdering babies who are nursing. And so here, though not death, she has slit his throat, though not a galu demon, she has run his neck, she has strangled the baby in his wet nurse's lap. This suggests that the actual action of nursing could have provided the opportunity for lamaste to launch her attack. A wet nurse with expertise in ritual purification would be particularly appealing, ensuring that no harm can come to the baby while it is suckling. In fact, the accompanying ritual tablet for lamaste shows that nurses were indeed sometimes included in the prophylactic ritual measures against lamaste. And so you have a line, as you do this, his wet nurse should prepare the salves. Given the concerns of inst in the lamaste texts, the preference for Khadishtu's wet nurses likely reflects their status as experts in purification and not necessarily a connection with fertility or fecundity. So what evidence is there to support the association of Khadishtu's with the profession of midway furry. In fact, there is very little. The most direct evidence comes from Sumerian hands in which the term new gig is applied to deities such as Nenissima and Nintor. Each of these goddesses had a role in childbirth. Nenissima as a healing goddess and Nintor as mother of the gods and creator of humans, according to the old Babylonian myth of Atrahasis. The epithet new gig is, however, also applied to Inanna in the context of describing her fearsome powers of war and violence. This usage raises a possibility that we should understand the epithet much more generally as designating the holy or unapproachable status of the gods. Under this interpretation, the terms new gig and later Khadishtu do not refer to a restricted set of actions associated with childbirth. Rather, overseeing gestation and birth could be one way in which a god manifests holiness. Aside from applications to applications to the divine realm, there are only two texts that have been cited as evidence for the human occupation, having any connection at all to childbirth. We will begin with these two texts because they are potentially the most relevant for understanding the profession. Ultimately, I'll show that neither one of them provides concrete evidence for this function. We're going to begin with a first millennium school text that contains an excerpt of a hymn celebrating the citizens of Babylon. The full tablet remains unedited and the reference to the Khadishtu is often presented out of its context. Gruber and Weston Holtz, for example, cite only this one line of the hymn, which at face value would indeed seem to place both Khadishtus and Nadidus, another type of ritual officiant. It would seem to place them working together at the scene of a birth. This is actually very odd because no other text associates Nadidus with the role of childbirth, and we'll return to this in a minute. Let's look at the broader context first. Two things should become clear from this. First, the lines on the tablet do not correspond to poetic lines, which are demarcated by three oblique wedges. These are marked by a colon on each line of my transliteration. Second, the Khadishtu and the Nadidu are not the only profession you mentioned. This suggests that we are not dealing with a single scene of coordinated action. We are looking at a list celebrating different religious professions historically held by women in the city of Babylon. The term Khadishtu governs two relative clauses, one of which pertains to their expertise in purification and the other elaborates on their further responsibilities. Of the three professions listed, only the Khadishtu was still active in the first millennium, and the association of the Khadishtu's purification here is consistent with what we have learned of their role from other texts. The association of the Nadidu with gynecological care remains an outlier. It may indicate that the authors of this hymn were not familiar with the historical office of the Nadidu, which did not last into the first millennium. If that is the case, we should be doubly careful in attributing this information to the Khadishtu who is a well-known figure in the first millennium, at least through the Neo-Assyrian period when this text was copied. The only other texts that might associate Khadishtu's with childbirth is the old Babylonian flood story of Atrahasis. The relevant lines come from an account of Nintor's creation of humans. After presiding over the birth of humankind, Nintor announces her success. Gruber translates an excerpt from Nintor's speech as follows. Let the midway rejoice in the house of the Khadishtu woman where the pregnant woman gives birth. Wesson-Holtz adopts a similar interpretation of the syntax, including apparently the Khadishtu woman lived alone in a special hut where she presided over childbirth and wet nursing. To evaluate this conclusion, we again need to consider the broader context of the line. There are two problems with thinking Nintor's statement as a general description of the conditions of childbirth. First, it follows immediately upon the proclamation of her own successes in creating humans for the first time. Second, for Gruber's interpretation to be syntactically plausible, we would expect the location relative pronoun Ashar to introduce the clause the pregnant woman gives birth. Instead, the indefinite location relative Ali is applied. A translation wherever is thus more appropriate. This moves the generalized action of giving birth into a subordinate position with the subsequent lines. In other words, we cannot conclude from these lines that women generally give birth in the house of the Khadishtu. What does seem likely is that the author of Old Dublin and Atrahasis envisioned the creation of humanity in an area overseen by a Khadishtu. There are a few ways in which one might interpret this statement. The authors may have imagined the domain of Khadishtus to be a particularly auspicious spot for the creation of humanity since it was ritually pure. Or they may actually be using Khadishtu as an epithet for a deity, such as Nintor herself. Alternatively, it is possible that the Khadishtu, or in this case really Sumerian forerunner Nugig, did participate in some way in the birthing process in very early periods, and that a memory of this function survives in the old Babylonian version of Atrahasis. If so, the role was likely completely obsolete by the late third millennium as we have no documentary evidence for it. And even the memory would have been lost apparently by the Neo-Assyrian period since the only first millennium manuscript preserving these lines omits mention of the Khadishtu entirely. I've saved the most interesting case for last, and this is the attribution of Nugigship to the healing goddess Ninnisana in Ashirgita. The hammock stoles the virtues of the Ninnisana as goddess of medicine and includes a short section on her role in birth. The passage describes Ninnisana's stewardship of offspring from conception through ministrations after birth. Unfortunately, the line that attributes Nugigship to the deity also contains several unknown lexics. The verb luch at the end of line 79 does mean to wash, and so it is possible that the reference to Nugigship refers to her role in purifying an infant after birth and not to the whole process of pale birth. If Nugigship does specifically designate Ninnisana's role as midwife, then it may add credence to the historical reconstruction briefly entertained based on Atrahasis. Perhaps this text too contained an echo of an earlier role of the Nugig, which included childbirth as well as wet nursing and culture purification or ritual purification. This type of variation would not be surprising over the long span of Mesopotamian history, but it also remains entirely hypothetical. We simply do not have the type of documentary and ritual evidence we would need to confirm it. Today, we've had the opportunity to consider ancient texts in conversation with contemporary gender theory. Engaging critical theory allows us to identify assumptions about the role of women in ancient societies. In particular, scholars tend to assume that professional women were primarily responsible for what are considered women's issues. There is also a tendency in scholarship to subsume functions like birth and nursing under a broader rubric of fertility. This concept is extremely ill-defined. Without more careful analysis of what exactly fertility means to a given people and in a given context, we risk regurgitating orientalist stereotypes and racialized paradigms. These tend to hypersexualize women of color and to collapse historical distinction. My reanalysis of the Khadishtu opens the doors to thinking about bodily signification in new ways. Legal texts make clear that Khadishtus were often employed as wet nurses, but fertility is probably not the right way to conceptualize their role in Mesopotamian society. Instead, I have argued that concerns about purity and apotropaism drove the demand for this aspect of the Khadishtu's professional repertoire. Of course, the domains of fertility and purification do not necessarily need to be considered fully distinct. However, the fact that wet nursing increased infant survival does not necessarily mean that their role was actually conceptualized primarily in terms of fertility. Similarly, today's doctors and even baby formula manufacturers have some impact on what we might call fertility because access to medical care and quality food increase the chances that a person or baby will survive and ultimately reproduce. That does not mean, though, that we conceptualize all medical professionals or executives at the Gerber Corporation as fertility practitioners. Even within the domain of reproduction and infant care, some symbols may be more salient than others. Ultimately, it would be facetious to claim that no Khadishtus ever participated or oversaw childbirth. Since the institution is attested over a period of more than 1500 years, such absolutes are silly. Indeed, we have barely had time to dive into questions today of diachronic changes in the profession. What I do want to say in conclusion is this. Our definitions of ancient professions should be based first and foremost on documentary evidence. When we reduce all of women's professional lives to vague notions of fertility, we are essentializing the bodies of ancient women. And this has direct implications for how we think about gender today and especially the gender of marginalized groups. By understanding the broader symbolic connections and particular concerns associated with nursing, we can gain a richer understanding of the diverse and complex lives of women in ancient Mesopotamia. Thank you. Thank you so much for this very enlightening and rich talk that I know everyone on this call has found very valuable and hopefully people watching live on YouTube also have responses. So we invite our audience to submit any questions or comments and as we move into the Q&A part of today's talk. I'll start with some of my own responses and a question or two to start us off. So I first want to just express my appreciation for how clearly your presentation articulated. What is a troubling but still entrenched relationship in the scholarship of the ancient years between Orientalism, racism, sexism and colonialism and especially the essentializing of women's bodies. I really appreciated your discussion of the racialized logic with the hyper-sexualized focus on bodies of women of color and the equation of women's lives to reproductive tasks including how white feminist scholars may even perpetuate these ideas. So I'm going to start us off with some questions of semantics as we wait for some YouTube questions to come in. So as just speaking from my own research perspective as someone who studies human burials in the broad context of ancient Middle East. I'm wondering how we might get around the serene issue that you raised of moving away from outdated terminologies like biological male and female where such usages might still be standard in fields like bioanthropology and studies of human biological remains as you mentioned. And as you also mentioned this field has methods for sexing skeletons meaning identifying probable biological sex and certain data sets like chromosomes and hormones and genes are not always accessible to these ancient skeletal remains and within the study of bone structure which tends to rely on certain morphological features and measurements in the body many of these skeletal remains do fall into uncertain categories. So what might you recommend is the best practice in terms of analyzing skeletal remains as osteological data sets without imposing too much interpretation about sex and rather than using these terms of biological male and female or man woman what terminology might be more accurate and inclusive. Yeah, so I think for this both emphasizing that you're producing a sex estimate and saying what that estimate is based on is really important. So to say that Kazemar Paleski's remains were initially assigned a sex estimate of female based on the pelvic structure is a way to acknowledge the inherent uncertainty in that right. And it sort of is a constant reminder that we actually do not have access to the embodied reality. And also that when we are talking about biological processes and sex we're really talking about a spectrum that has a huge amount of variation and where somebody and both have estrogen in their system causing a wider pelvis but also have high levels of testosterone causing facial hair and male pattern baldness, and that in society, the secondary sex characteristics there are absolutely dominate right. We have even have the baptismal record of Kazemar Paleski and we do not have a single, just no hint that anyone ever thought there was anything wrong with him. The closest that the researchers could come who were working on this was a note that he was sickly, and they said maybe this means his genitals were deformed. But because the condition he has is often accompanied by poor sodium regulation and diarrhea, it probably literally means that he was ill often as an infant right. So just owning the uncertainty and using very specific words for what we're basing estimates on. So that's really helpful and you know a lot of the bioarchaeological literature, it is based on estimates and that and the methods are pretty clear. I think it's perhaps the next step of people who aren't specialists who are then taking this information, and then presenting it sort of as just so determinations rather than continuing to engage with the nuance. So yes, raising this awareness is really important. Okay, so I have some other questions. And, okay, I guess, how do I frame this this is partly based on my own research also. I guess I'm wondering at what point in the life course in the ancient Middle East might gender have been assigned to the young such as babies and children and for some context this question comes out of some of my own work into the construction of personhood in the ancient Middle East as an acquired social status that could start to apply to persons at different stages of the life course it could change over time to continue after death and you did touch in your discussion on differences on say legal texts between different statuses like a willow, which can you cut you and enslaved person so how might this acquired personhood framework applied to assignment of gender to babies children adolescents in this context what clues might the textual sources provide. They are being assigned a sex at birth, based on genital morphology. And, but there is within Mesopotamian society not the same assumption that this is an immutable characteristic. And so you have the goddess ish tar like in him, one of Nana, I think it's not a seat. She is given credit for the ability to turn men into women and women into men. There actually are intersex conditions that will manifest with an infant being assigned female at birth and then all of a sudden producing testosterone at puberty. And it literally looks like they've run a penis. So from the perspective of Mesopotamians, that would probably be a case of ish tar intervening and changing someone sex for them right. So the fact that something's attributed at birth again doesn't mean that they're not sort of an acquired or developmental component where something can change. And Nana also had specific cultic functionaries religious functionaries called a sinew whose job was literally to transgress gender, including wearing women's clothing on one half of their bodies and men's on the other, switching what types of symbolic accoutrements they have. And so there are ways in which transgression is sort of deliberately institutionalized. Thank you that's really helpful as well. So that's sort of related to that last question. And also now on the topic of childbirth. There are also some indications and legal text in the agent release that I've looked at in translation that assigned basically different values of compensation that apply to mothers who are carrying fetuses that were harmed in utero right so by by some other values and those values, at least in two examples, increase incrementally as the gestation time increased so for example and an old Hittite legal code. If a woman was harmed and had a miscarriage at 10 months that find to be tentacles those five months five shots right so. And the law code of Hammurabi. They're similar stipulations that also adds an element based on the status of the woman herself and whether she is the daughter of a free man and a wheel or a mischievous or not. Sorry, so all these sort of nested layers of social status being baked into the legal system. But what I'm now thinking about in light of your talk is that these compensation values aren't linked to the assumed sex or gender of the fetus in this context. So it could be an interesting example of sex and gender neutral approaches to legal status and social status. So that's just one thought to consider. And a question related to that discussion is what the textual sources might indicate about the legal value or status of people who were gendered in various ways. I'm thinking of like documentary legal texts as soon as the law codes are sort of they're not applied right there, literary constructions are you are you thinking of different valuations in the sort of conceptual framework of law codes or in applied texts or. I'm thinking sort of broadly. So we have a kind of fun text in which it could use to is elevated to the status of son, meaning that she is given specific legal rights are often in here, or are applied to men as opposed to women so things like the ability to inherit as a primary air. There are cases where there's both an institutionalized difference in how men and women are treated under the law but also options for elevating someone status. And this seems to be in general pretty common with could use just because these are women who work outside, like their professionals right, and that brings with it concern about their ability to control their own income. I need to actually go back and sort of see if there's any way to get statistics on this but I'm guessing that it is much, much more common for it could use due to take the status of sonship then for someone who is not associated with sort of a prestige profession like this. Thank you. I think we have time for one final question. This is coming from the YouTube audience. The question is, what do you do about the problem of not retrojecting contemporary scientific diagnosis or categories on to pre modern context and I assume this is a question in light of our knowledge now about hormones chromosomes and genetics. Yeah. So I think this is super super important to think about so for somebody like cashier Mayor Pulaski he simply was a man. He's not intersects in that framework. So the same thing that we can say, it seems to us, like the stars ability to turn men into women and women into men may have been a response to what we conceive of as intersex or had some explanatory power. But if we sort of set that aside it's actually really interesting because it means that all of Mesopotamian society is shaped by the assumption that gender is not fixed, right, that sex and gender are both permeable and they move back and forth. I think we can sort of use the modern terminology and we are trying to translate for ourselves what types of issues are arising, because this is the way that we have to explain different bodies different embodied experiences, but we then need to step back and say actually be like them to let go of these categories and to really live in a world to imagine living in a world where, if the God wants, she can turn you into a man she can turn you into a woman she can do whatever she wants right. Thank you. Okay, so I think it's just about time to wrap up here so after the grotto I want to thank you again for presenting your talk today in the women and gender performance lecture series I'd also like to thank the audience for joining us today and to invite everyone tuning in live or after the fact to attend our next lecture in this series, which is coming up in March, Dr. Ann Austin will be presenting the talk titled tattooed women, best and the March, connecting tattooed bodies and figurines in dear El Medina Egypt that will be held on March night at 930 Pacific on this very same YouTube channel. So we hope that you will join us again. Thank you.