 Okay. Well, welcome to our internet audience, to our final presentation in our Women and Gender Performance in the Ancient Middle East Talk series. I'm thrilled to introduce our final speaker in that series. Stephanie Lynn Boudin is an ancient historian who focuses on gender, religion, sexuality, and iconography in ancient Greece and the Near East. Her PhD is in ancient history from the University of Pennsylvania. And out of a long list of her published works, I'll just focus on a few. They include Gender in the Ancient Near East, published by Rutledge this year, 2023, Free Women, Patriarchal Authority, and the Accusation of Prostitution that was published by Rutledge in 2021, Women in Antiquity, Real Women Across the Ancient World, Rutledge 2016, Artemis, Rutledge 2015, Images of Woman and Child from the Bronze Age, that's a Cambridge University book published in 2011, and the Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity, and also a Cambridge University Press book, 2008, oh, sorry, and the Origins of Aphrodite, CDL Press, 2003, in addition to numerous other articles on ancient religion, gender, and iconography. She's lectured throughout North America, Europe, the Near East, and Japan, and today's talk is entitled Women's Eroticism in the Ancient Near East. So we're thrilled to welcome Stephanie Boudin and the floor is yours, Stephanie. Hi, everyone. Thank you for coming. If you're there. So first thing we need to do here is share screen are ready to go. So Women's Eroticism in the Ancient Near East, this is not entirely safe for work. So wherever you're viewing from, please keep that in mind. All right. So let's start off with a simple or maybe not so simple question here. What is sex? According to Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan in their book, what is sex? At the most basic level, sex is genetic recombination. It is the mixing or union of genes, that is DNA molecules from more than one source. The broad biological meaning of sex simply refers to the recombination of genes from separate sources to produce a new individual. Sex is not equivalent to reproduction. On the one hand, any organism can receive new genes, can indulge in sex without reproducing itself. On the other hand, plant buds, bacteria, divide and cells with nuclei reproduce all of that any requirements for sex. We associate sex with reproduction not because they are necessarily or logically linked, but because they became linked contingently during the specific evolution of our animal ancestors. So what I'm emphasizing here is that distinction between sex and reproduction, and this is going to be relevant later on the talk. Trust me, it's going to get a bit more salacious after this. This is just the science stuff. Now, since the discovery of the oven in 1827, there's been a consistent narrative about sexual reproduction in mammals, including humans, and excluding to a certain extent the ductal platypus. The male of the species, who produces small gametes, introduces those gametes, the sperm, into the body of the female of the species, where it unites with her larger gamete the egg. If they unite properly, a zygote is born, which then embeds itself into the female's uterine lining where it gestates. Once born, the mammalian female may continue to nourish the infant outside of her body with milk produced by her mammary glands. The denizens of the ancient Aries also had a way of sexing sex, somewhat less complete than the modern narrative insofar as they didn't know about the oven, but also more complete insofar as their narrative extended out to include those gendered elements that led to the process whereby that sperm met up with that egg in the first place. So, if we were to consider how these ancients gendered sexual reproduction, the schema would go something like this. Feminine beauty and eroticism arouse the male. In sexual union, the male gives the female a baby, he fertilizes her, and in the languages of the ancient Aries, in Akkadian, in Egyptian, that is literally the verb that is used, the verb to give. The male gives the female a baby, and that is the terminology that is used for fertilization. And then finally, the female nourishes the offspring, both within her body during pregnancy and then after with her breast milk. This pattern of feminine and masculine sexuality is well illustrated in the Mesopotamian narrative, the disputation between wood and reed. Here we see a feminine adornment, we see feminine adornment leading to enhanced beauty and eroticism and visual reception of the female leading to male arousal and hence fertility. So, the great earth key made herself glorious, her body flourished with greenery. Wide earth put on silver and lapis lazuli ornaments adorned herself with diorite, chalcedoni, cornelian diamonds. Sky, on, covered the pasture with his irresistible sex appeal, presented himself in majesty. The pure young woman showed herself to the pure sky, the vast sky copulated with the wide earth. The seed of heroes would and reed he ejaculated into her womb. The earth, the good cow, received the good sea of sky into her womb. The earth, for the happy birth of plants of life, presented herself. So, in contrast to the modern way of thinking, it was the male specifically who was understood to be the fertile partner, the one who gave rise to new life. The role of the female was to nourish that new life. But that was secondary. The first role of the female in the generation of new life was to stimulate the male to potency. Basically, women instigated sex. And somewhat in line with the notion presented by Margot Wilson-Sagan, sex need not be equivalent to reproduction. Sex, eroticism, could be adjoined for its own sake, both by males and especially females, in their own ways and on their own terms. So, what we're here to discuss today is the first part of that three-part narrative, feminine beauty and eroticism. Let's begin with a standard caveat when discussing anything artistic or cultural from the ancient Near East and just about any place else. The societies of the ancient Near East were patriarchal to one extent or another. The vast majority of documents written or otherwise of sculpture, art, all of that was usually made by men and often in an elite, well-educated category of men. As such, we get a rather narrow specific view of the ancient world filtered by sex, gender and class. However, the woman's voice does in fact come through as well, both in that women were actively involved in the creation of culture, even if that was ultimately recorded by men, and women were patrons of culture, and they presumably got what they paid for. Thus, of the highly erotic, bridal songs, the song of the nuptials of the goddess Inanna with Dumouzi, Gerald Cooper has argued that we may indeed be hearing a female voice. Quote, we have no information about Sumerian women's secular songs or poetry, nor would we expect to, given the nature of our sources. But the odds are very good that if the Sumerian love songs are in a woman's voice, there could have been an actual genre of women's love and wedding songs that served as their model. That is to say, the songs hymned to Inanna and Dumouzi may derive from a woman's oral tradition of erotic poetry. Here deemed especially important because of the sex of the goddess who was being honored. Furthermore, the romantic sentiments expressed in the love songs contrast with the more aggressive and fertility-oriented themes in what might be dubbed more masculine erotic poetry. Mythological hymns from Espitania, for example, such as Anki in the World Order, Anki in Ninhursag, and Enlil in Ninlil, we'll be getting back to that one, present male deities reveling in their own phallic prowess orgasms and the resultant life, be it aquatic, vegetal, or actual offspring. Again, as Cooper notes, the love songs present the female experience of sexuality essential, fully corporeal as opposed to merely genital, and utterly devoid of the resultant fertility, pregnancy, that is so significant in the male expression of sexuality. For these reasons, it is likely that the Sumerian love songs do indeed present a feminine experience of sexuality, and this goes for other genres from other places that we'll be looking at down the line. This also goes for visual arts. Women had economic power and thus a say in how they were represented in the arts, both Sumerian and Egyptian elite women commissioned personal sculptures and seals. This particular example is actually a Hurrian example from the city of Borkesh, where the queen Okhnekem presents herself as her peer to her husband, the king of the city, and thus outranking all of his other wives. So they commissioned art, frequently including inscriptions, and this makes it clear that allowing for standard conventions of the time and place, they had agency in how they work depicted to their contemporaries and posterity, that is us. So the first thing to understand is that eroticism is definitely gendered feminine in the ancient Near East, but this is the fact, whoops, comes across in numerous text and images. A Sumerian hymn to Utu, the sun god, records what is apparently a very young Inanna telling her brother, I am one who knows not that which is womanly, men. I am one who knows not that which is womanly, copulating. I am one who knows not that which is womanly, kissing. I am one who knows not copulating. I am one who knows not kissing. Trust me, that is going to change. Similarly, and you might be more familiar with this on tablet, one of the standard version of the Gilgamesh epic. The huntsman trying to forge the wild man Enkidu sends the Harimtu Shamhat to seduce him, telling her, there he is Shamhat, bury your breasts, spread your legs, let him take in your charms, do not recoil but take in his scent, this is a man who does not bathe, he will see and approach you, spread your clothing so he may lie on you, do for the man the work of a woman. Even a curse from Anatolia reveals how eroticism, the eroticism of women, along with motherhood, is as in neatly a part of femininity as fertility and warfare are of masculinity. Thus, then from the men take away masculinity, fertility and health, take away weapons, bows, arrows and daggers and bring them to Hathi land. From the women take away motherhood, love and sexuality and bring them to Hathi land. We might also consider how female erotic attributes are displayed in secular sculpture. For example, the long robes that adorned elite Egyptian women were clingy and deofenous, such that the pubic triangle and navel, if not necessarily the breasts were displayed. Thus we might consider a wooden statuette from the eighth dynasty, Old Kingdom, now the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which shows women in nearly imperceptible clothing. It is lack of definition on the breast, a lack of a clear line between the legs or the depiction of the vulva specifically that make it clear that she's actually clothed. Nevertheless, her pubic triangle is visible and even somewhat highlighted. This is the same thing for the statuette of the wife of Nirtis, she's dating to the fifth dynasty and the exact same thing might be noted for an 18th dynasty statuette now in the Brooklyn Museum. So in all cases, we really highlight the erotic attributes and especially the pubic triangle of noble women The eroticism of feminine nudity was especially prominent in depictions of adolescent females in New Kingdom Egypt in multiple media. Thus, we might consider an elaborately clothed painted ivory statuette now in the Brooklyn Museum, which might be compared to the young female servants in a funerary wall painting from the tomb of Nebamun, now in the British Museum. And it's worth noticing if you just look at the bottom register all the way to the right-hand side there, if you contrast the female servants with the male servants, that one male servant there is wearing a kilt, his genitalia are completely covered, his head is bald, there is nothing eroticized by him. Now by contrast, the girls wear elaborate wigs and jewellery, collars, bracelets, hip belts, girdles, however you want to call them, and this is a consistent fact in the Egyptian art. While males might be shown naked in scenes of labor, they're never physically eroticized to the extent that the females are. When they are shown naked in labor scenes, the penis is always flaccid, again de-emphasizing their eroticism, although probably fairly realistic for the scene. When male deities with erections are portrayed, it is often, although not exclusively, in the presence of a nude erotic female. Thus, as Gay Robbins theorized, the effect on the heterosexual male of viewing the female body, especially the pubic region, is often sufficient to cause sexual arousal. Thus, as in many other cultures, it would seem that in ancient Egypt, a depiction of the external characteristics of the female pubic region was enough to encode a message of sexuality linked with fertility that referred not only to women, but also to the aroused male, female erotic agency. Now, there's an interesting paradox in the portrayal of female sexual agency in the ancient year east. On the one hand, the language of law codes and elsewhere make it clear that females were seen as the passive objects of their own sexuality. That is to say, the verbs that referred to sexual acts almost exclusively had male subjects, when in the active voice, and females only in the passive voice. Thus, Akkadian nouns, such as nekabu to deflower, naku to fornicate, suhu also to fornicate, have male subjects with women as the objects of the verbs. However, alternative textual data show females actively seducing males, and this comes across most clearly in scenes of bathing, where the nude female body proves irresistible to the male. Thus, in the Akkadian tale of Neregal and Ereshkigal, here in the god Neregal must descend to the underworld to apologize for fronting the queen of the dead. He is sternly advised not to do quote that which men and women do, and quote, if he sees Ereshkigal nude when bathing. God descends, and although he's careful not to eat, drinks, sit in a chair, or any of the other acts that would imprison him in the land of no return, when the goddess attends to her toilette, she went to the bath and dressed herself in a fine dress, and allowed him to catch a glimpse of her body. He gave into his heart's desire to do what men and women do. The two embraced each other and went passionately to bed, where they immersely engaged for six days and nights. At the end of the last day, Neregal snaked out of Ereshkigal's house in history's first reported walk of shame, and escaped back to the realm of the living while she was asleep. When Ereshkigal woke up and found out she cried out Tara, another name for Neregal, the lover of my delight. I did not have enough delight with him before he left. As Rivka Harris has observed, though Neregal might not have been able to resist Ereshkigal's claims, he was sexually satisfied after six days. Ereshkigal obviously was not. What may well be expressed here is the view that women have voracious appetites for sex, a not uncommon view about women. A similar dynamic appears in the Hurrian Anatolian song of Hedamu. Here, the Ishtar-like goddess Shashka seduces her brother Teshub's enemy, not her brother, his enemy. Now, when Teshub finished speaking he went away, but Shashka went to the bath house. The queen of Nineveh went there to wash herself. She washed herself. She anointed herself with fine-perfumed oil. She adorned herself, and qualities which Aral's love ran after her like puppies. Shashka said to Hedamu, come up again. Come from the strong waters. Shashka holds out her naked members towards Hedamu. Hedamu sees the beautiful goddess in his penis springs forth. The bathing motif appears as well in the Egyptian erotic literature. In the first stanza of the Cairo love songs, a female voice proclaims, my God, my lover, it is pleasant to go to the canal and to bathe in your presence. I shall let you see my perfection in a garment of royal linen, wet, and clinging. Then I'll go into the water at your bidding, and I'll come out to you with the red fish, who will be happy in my fingers. So come and look me over. The only ancient Near Eastern passage where the erotically charged bathing motif does not grant agency to the female is, and a surprise here, the biblical narrative of David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel. So here we read, one evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, she is Bathsheba, the daughter, Elliam, and the wife of Varaya, the Hittite. Then David sent messengers to her. She came to him and he slept with her. So all of these are literary texts, literary examples, but we also have more practical texts that show female agency in sexuality. Magical rituals from Mesopotamia, for example, existed to attract and bind the recalcitrant male lover. So an incantation for a woman desiring a man. I hate you on the head. I have driven you out of your mind. Set your thinking to my thinking. Set your reason to my reason. I hold you in restraint as Ishtar held Tamas. As liquor binds him who drinks her, I have bound you with my mouth for breaths, with my vulva for urination, with my mouth for spitting, with my vulva for urination. May no rival come to you. Dog is crouching, pig is crouching, you too keep crouching on my thighs. Likewise, the Mesopotamian Shazi Gatex for raising the heart. Have women actively engaged in helping their menfolk have erections? So let the wind blow. This is what the woman is speaking. Let the wind blow. Let the mountains quake. Let the clouds gather. Let the raindrops fall. Let the donkey stiffen up so that he can mount the Jenny. Let the gazelle buck repeatedly mount the she-goat of the plane. May a goat buck be tied at the head of my bed. May a ram be tied at the foot of my bed. The one at the head of my bed. Get it up. Love me. The one at the foot of my bed. Get it up. Adore me. My genitals are the genitals of a bitch. His penis is the penis of the dog. May my genitals hold his penis fast as the genitals of a bitch holds fast the penis of the dog. And the accompanying ritual. You pour powdered magnetic hematite and powdered iron into the pour oil. You recite the recitation seven times over it. If the man repeatedly rubs his penis and the woman her vulva with it, he should be able to mount her repeatedly. We even get hints of female sexual agency in the art. Syrian Glyptic, for example, has the motif of the revealing female, whereby what is almost certainly a goddess pulls back her gown to reveal her pubis to a male partner, probably in this instance at least at the storm god. Some Egyptian secular art shows women actively assisting their partners in sexual acts, either initiating courtes, helping the male enter and enter her from behind or engaging in palatia. And as noted previously, we have numerous depictions of male deities erect in the presence of nude goddesses. So the notion of female sexual passivity popularized by Sigmund Freud had no place in the ancient Near East outside of, of course, the Bible. Nor did Freudian frigidity. Ancient Near Eastern women enjoyed sex. This is seriously the case with the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar of whom we read. Assemble to me the young men of your city. Exaltation is the foundation for a city. Let us go to the shadow of the city wall. Exaltation is the foundation for a city. Seven on her chest. Seven on her hips. 60 and 60 satisfy themselves on her vulva. The young men got tired, but Ishtar did not tire. Enter you men into the excellent vulva. So the maiden spoke. Exaltation is the foundation for a city. One of these days I'd love to hear a mayor reciting this at some civic ritual, but okay, that's just me. Okay. So Ishtar isn't entirely typical. Even so, at the stations of female sexual enjoyment abound in the literature. A more personal Mesopotamian love poem declares in the female voice. The brother brought me into his house. He lay me down on the honey fragrant bed. And when my dear sweetheart had lain very close to me, one by one, making tongue one by one, my fair faced brother did 50. As if dumpstruck, I moved toward him, trembling below. I pushed quietly to him. My brother hand placed on his thigh. My dear sweetheart, so did I pass the time there. As Cooper has suggested, this may be the world's first reference to cunnilingus and female orgasm. And just quickly hear the terms brother and sister basically mean sweetheart or darling. This is not a case of incest that we're looking at. It's just their beloved terminology. The love songs from New Kingdom, Egypt also display the female enjoyment of sexuality from Papyrus Harris by 100 song cycle three, we read palm trees heavy with dates bend over my private garden. Among such towering friends grow tall towards your private dream. Dear heart, it is it is I am your chiefest love. First from the ground of your caring. And I give back that love and yours take me and my gift of a garden. The biblical song of songs reveals a healthy feminine desire for the beloved. I slept but my heart was awake. Listen, my beloved is knocking open to me, my sister, my darling, my dove, my flawless one. My head is drenched with dew, my hair with the dampness of night. My beloved thrust his hand, hand into the latch opening, and my heart began to pound for him. I arose to open for my beloved. My hands dripped with mer, my fingers with flowing mer on handles of the bolt I opened for my beloved. And hand is a common biblical euphemism for penis. So we got a lot of euphemism going on here. So there was a lot of well recognized and ultimately cherished and approved of enjoyment, feminine enjoyment of sex and sexuality. But it wasn't entirely my ties and skittles. There were definitively constraints on female sexuality. So let's look at it in two categories, the ancient constraints and then problems in modern scholarship. So constraints on female sexuality, them, and this mostly comes down to adultery. Beyond mere libido, another way that Ishtar wasn't normal is that sex per sex never led to pregnancy. In the real world, women often got pregnant from sex and the patriarchal societies of the ancient East were extremely concerned that the babies that came out of women's bodies belonged to those women's husbands. As such, the major constraint on women's sexuality was marriage and concerns about adultery. A constant in Mesopotamian law is that wives were harshly punished for adultery. A faculty stands in stark contrast to the various degrees of punishment or not faced by their male paramours. So in the laws of Ornamu dating back to about 2100 BCE, it is declared, if the spouse of a young man on her own initiative pursues a man and has sexual intercourse with him, they shall kill that woman. That male shall be given his freedom. Section 28 of the laws of Vishnuna dating to around 1800, equally called for the death of a formerly married wife. The day she is seized in the lap of a man, she shall die. She will not live. By contrast, the roughly contemporary laws of Pomerabi offer the choice of life or death to the accused woman's husband. So section 129 declares that if the wife of a man should be seized blind with another male, they will bind him, the lover, and cast him into the water, the river Ordeal. If the husband of the wife allows his wife to live, then the king will allow his slave to live. That is, the king will pardon the paramour. So it is the woman's husband who can choose to kill both of them, but if he chooses to spare his wife, he has to spare the lover as well. By the time of the middle Assyrian laws dating to around 1050 BCE, the regulation of adultery had become a lot more refined. So section 13 declares that the wife who visits a man in his own home for illicit sex will be killed along with her lover. Section 14 declares that should their trust occur in more neutral territory, such as an inn, the woman's husband is free to punish both parties as he sees fit. If, according to 15, the husband catches the wife and her lover in the flagrante delicto, he is free to kill both of them with no further consequences. However, if it is made clear that the wife specifically seduced the lover, the man will be regarded as completely innocent, and the husband may impose whatever penalty upon his wife he chooses. And frequently this comes down to cutting off her nose or parts of her body. Now, these adultery clauses were not present in the Neo-Babylonian laws. However, we have 10 marriage contracts dating between the mid-7th century and the mid-6th century, all of which contain a clause declaring that should the wife be discovered, house a voice there, with another man, she will die by the iron dagger. So what this basically means is that you had a prenup agreement where if your husband catches you cheating on him, he's allowed to murder you. So the fear of female sexual agency in adulterous context appears throughout ancient Near Eastern literature. The biblical tale Genesis 39 of Joseph and Potiphar's nameless wife comes immediately to the Western mind. This narrative may have an ancestor in the Levanto Anatolian orbit. A Hittite myth, featuring Canaanite names, so we have El Cunirsa as El and Asher Tu as Asherah, shows what happened when the Queen of the Gods made advances at the hot young buck ball. El Cunirsa looked at ball and asked him, why have you come? Ball said, when I came into your house, Asher Tu sent young women to me saying, come sleep with me. I refused. Then she spoke something to me and spoke thus, stay behind and I shall stay behind you. Else, I shall press you down with my word and stab you with my something. That is why I have come, my father. I did not come to you in the person of the messenger. I myself have come to you. Asher Tu is rejecting you, her own husband. Although she is your wife, she keeps sending to me, sleep with me. El Cunirsa replied to Ball, go threaten her, Asher Tu, my wife, and hobble her. In the same genre is the Egyptian New Kingdom tale of two brothers. Here the older brother Anubis lives with his wife and his house and his younger brother Bata lives with two of them. One day, when sent to fetch seeds for planting in the fields, Bata comes across Anubis' wife and her chambers having just finished adorning her hair. She approaches him saying, there is great manliness in you, right when observing your exertions daily, for it was her desire to know him sexually. She got up, seized him, and told him, come, let's spend for ourselves an hour in bed together. Such will be to your advantage, for I shall make fine clothes for you. Bata refused, and she accused him of attacking her, as was the case with Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar. Bata wound up castrating himself, and the unfaithful wife was killed, and eaten by dogs. One detail that's interesting to note in this particular extract is that Mrs. Anubis attempts to seduce Bata not only with her own beauty, her pretty hair there, but by offering to make him clothes. Another Egyptian narrative, King Chaops and the magician, this one dating to the Middle Kingdom, reveals a similar dynamic. Here, the wife of the chief lector priest, Weba Oner, became enamored of a man in the town. She had a servant to bring the man a chest filled with clothing, and the two of them began an enamorous affair, which ended when Weba Oner found out about it, fashioned a crocodile out of wax that became a real crocodile, and ate the townsmen when he went swimming, because the Egyptians are totally awesome. The fact that the guilty wives are completely nameless and death ensues is excellent evidence that these are wholly male-authored narratives meant as object lessons. Even so, the fact of biology, pregnancy specifically, reveals the limits of feminine agency and enjoyment when it came to sex in the ancient Near East. Unlike Ishtar, there were serious consequences to sex in a world before good birth control. A Mesopotamian blessing might offer, may Ishtar make a hot wife sit in your lap, the great blessing. There was concern that she sit only in your lap. So much for the ancient world. Constraints on female sexuality, us. The residents of the ancient Near East were at least open to, and even quite happily receptive of, female eroticism provided certain restraints were observed because of reproduction. Modern scholars have been far less accepting. In a post Freudian world, and especially in the Victorian context of biblical studies, where much any studies had their birth, the idea of openly actively sexual females has been, shall we say, problematic. Much modern scholarship avoids the idea of openly actively sexual females in the ancient Near East in a few primary ways, mainly denying the sexual agency of females and turning all female sex into fertility. So denying agency, rape. One way to deny the sexual agency of females is to claim that tales of seduction are actually narratives about rape. This is clearest in the Sumerian tale of Enlil and Ninlil, and there's still a lot of debate going on about this particular narrative. Now in this story, Ninlil's mother, Nun Boshaguno, advises her daughter to avoid bathing in the visible location of the river, since so doing would invite the Amherst gaze of Enlil. Apparently this sounded like a really good idea to Ninlil, who immediately proceeds to bathe in the river and visually arouse to the young god in the process. So at that time, the maiden was advised by her own mother, don't do it, don't go, walk along, excuse me, sorry, got to move something here. Ninlil, don't walk along the bank of the idnon birton, his eye is bright, the Lord's eye is bright. He will look at you straight away, he will want to have intercourse, he will want to kiss. And by the way, in Sumerian literature, that's the order that those verbs always go in. First you have sex, then you kiss, which probably says a lot about Sumerian notions or play, but I digress. He will be happy to pour lusty semen into the womb, and then he will leave you to it. The king said to her, as he approaches her, I want to have sex with you, but he could not make her let him. Enlil said to her, I want to kiss you, but he could not make her let him. My vagina is small, it does not know pregnancy, my lips are young, they do not know kissing. Anyway, they go on to have sex, she gets pregnant and he has to leave town. Ninlil chases after Enlil to three separate towns, each time the god attempts to hide by disguising himself. Each time Ninlil sees through the disguise and has sex with the god again, she ends up bearing four children to her eventual husband. Cooper, amongst others, has suggested that this is a story of rape, with Ninlil suffering Stockholm syndrome to explain her repeated sexual encounters with her supposed rapist. By contrast, Gwendolyn-like, Interalia, has argued that Ninlil's seduction of Enlil was deliberate, not to mention one more example of the female who seduces the male at bath time. Perhaps amusingly, those scholars who follow Cooper's hypothesis tend to be male and those who follow alike tend to be female. Next modern technique, prostitution. The far, far, far more common means of denying female agency in sex is to turn female eroticism into prostitution. An utterly absurd number of terms and women in the A&E corpora are identified as prostitutes, either secular or even more frequently sacred. Shamhat, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, who has sex with Enkidu for seven days and nights, 14 in some versions, is typically presented as a harlot. The titles of the vast majority of priestesses and cult functionaries in Mesopotamia and the Levant, such as the Kadishdu and Kadesha, about whom we heard a few talks ago, are translated as sacred prostitute, including the ones such as the Enkidu and the Nadidu, who are sworn to celibacy. I am not kidding. The ancient Egyptians also had multiple terms translated as prostitute, including a category of wet nurses. Identifying a raw female, such as Shamhat, as prostitutes, removes their agency. Identifying such women have sex at the command of a male with money, their sexuality is bought, not enjoyed personally. The problem with this, amongst many, is that there are only two examples of the exchange of goods for sex in the entire A&E corpora. They both come from Egypt and they both show adulterous wives attempting to seduce men with textiles. Remember Mrs. Anubis and Mrs. Weba Oner? Yep. As it was, the women who were often to pay for sex, that means the prostitutes were technically the males. Otherwise, there isn't one single example of the exchange of sex for goods or money from the entire Bronze Age. Words like Harim II translated as prostitute or harlot in the current dictionaries actually refer to women of specific social classes. In the case of the Harim II, a woman with neither father nor husband, and that's not part of a patriarchal household. So to be perfectly clear here, we actually have zero evidence of prostitution in the A&E. We cannot subvert notions of eroticism into prostitution. And finally, fertility. We've been hearing a lot about this one over the course of this series. The main way of denying female sexual agency, one that is so pervasive, most people don't even realize that it's happening, is to turn eroticism into fertility. Browsing through even a 21st century academic text on mythology or iconography, one will notice that most female deities are understood on some level to be mother goddesses, while any image with breasts, much less a pubic triangle, will be understood as a fertility charm. From a textual literary perspective, this fertility issue sprouts up whenever one deals with ancient Near Eastern goddesses or their servants. A seriology emerged out of biblical studies and in academic milios steeped in Protestant Christianity. It was taken as a given that pagan religions of the A&E, and especially those of the Canaanites, were sexual or geastic, and just generally morally bankrupt, you know, they ate babies and stuff like that. Institutions such as sacred prostitution and child sacrifice abounded. In the scholarship, as it definitely put by Peggy Day, disproportionately it is the goddesses and their female cult functionaries and devotees who are made to shoulder the bulk and blame for alleged moral depravities. While the proverbial bushes are beaten to see what deities lurk therein, fertility goddesses emerge from under every green leafy tree. And fertility, when applied to goddesses, their votaries and mainstream scholarly practice, has carried the connotations of illicit sexual activity. In addition, the overwhelming propensity for all goddesses to be labeled fertility goddesses reduces them to a single common denominator, thus obscuring their individuality and making them interchangeable, less threatening, and easier to trivialize. The excessive reliance on fertility also emerges in studies of the iconography. Female images are automatically assumed to be fertility amulets of some kind, and we heard about that in our last talk on the Judean polar figurines, like you see before you here. Female images and figurines from the Mediterranean and the Near East are typically categorized into two possibly overlapping categories, fertility figurine, and slightly less frequently concubines of the dead, placed in graves to provide sexual services to the deceased in the afterlife. Deceased that consist of men, women, and children in the actual archaeology. Other possibilities, of course, sacred prostitute. This is the case whether the female icon in question is naked or clothed. Thus in a 2020 science report in the New York Times, a collection of Phoenician female votive figurines discovered off the coast of Israel were presented by the researchers as they accumulated over roughly 400 years between the 7th and 3rd centuries BC in a series of votive offerings as part of a cult devoted to seafaring and fertility. These figurines, the majority of them display attributes related to fertility, to childbearing, and to pregnancy. Looking at the figurines though, one sees no signs of fertility, childbearing, or pregnancy. They are examples of the Phoenician de agravida, distinctly pregnant. They are not pregnant, nursing, or atrophic, or even eroticized. They are simply women in gowns. But woman is enough to equal fertility. Fertility equals woman is thus passed down from the academy to the general populace. Fortunately, efforts are now starting to push in the opposite direction to see even nude female images as products of their time, place, and context, and to provide more nuanced interpretations of their meanings. Thus, concerning one of the earliest versions of the nude female motif in Mesopotamia, the so-called goddess jar handles decorating funerary jars in the city of Kish, a recent publication offers, other than a charm for fertility or a symbol of maternity or prostitution, the nude female who graced the handles of funerary jars in ancient Kish and later surrounding territories was a political symbol. She was a marker of ethnic identity and unity, binding together the various classes, ages, and sexes of Kish, defined against the encroachment of foreign powers. The jar handles femininity can be understood as the result of cross-cultural tendencies to associate females with containers, liquids, and the care of the dead. Over time, the anthropomorphism and feminization of the handles may have led them to be seen as simple manifestations of the goddess Inanna, an erotic warrior goddess who recovered from death. The female body, even naked, might have a multitude of meetings. The female and her body is not merely an object of male desire, but a multivalent symbol relevant to the political ideology of city-states. Likewise, an op-ed inherits on the matter of female figurines, we read, it's not just that we have no evidence that the nude female icon is associated with fertility, we have copious data that does not. The figurines do not appear pregnant, they do not appear giving birth, they rarely appear with children, especially in the Levant. They do not appear lactating, they can be contrasted with actual scenes of erotica, pregnancy, partuition, and lactation. Never mind the fact that ancient texts attribute fertility to males, not females, to begin with. But the thinking seems to go, if one subcategory is depicted holding her breast, what else could they possibly be? What else would a woman even care about? So, in conclusion, the people of the ancient Near East recognized that females were erotic beings, and to an extent, they celebrated this fact. Goddesses such as Inanna and Shoshka reveled in and exploited their own sexuality, while Egyptian women emphasized their genitalia and the role they played in the creation of all life. There's a wonderful Egyptian anecdote that I did not go over where Rott, presented as king of the gods, is in this total grumpy funk, and the goddess Hathor goes up to him, flashes him, and he immediately bursts out laughing, and basically the universe is saved. So this is powerful stuff here. Female sexual enjoyment was the subject of religious hymns, medical magical texts, and millennia of iconography, where women shared mutually the joys of the bed with their partners, and stimulated men to fertility. Even so, millennia of Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian Muslim ideologies have hampered the study of this topic, aghast or confused at the joy of A&E females and the joy they displayed in their own eroticism. Modern scholarship has often changed the feminine libido into something different, either fertility that was for the benefit of males, or sexuality that was devoid of agency and volition, turning women and goddesses into prostitutes and victims. The scholarship is starting to change, but not until we get past our own preconceived notions of what femininity is supposed to be. Thank you very much for listening, and here is a very difficult to read bibliography that I hope you can freeze frame on and take as necessary. I am done. Thank you so much, Stephanie, for a very stimulating, so to speak, lecture, paper, some fascinating ideas. We'll give a second here for our live audience to relay some questions, but I'm trying to think, you know, maybe I can start us off a bit. Just so much to chew on. I'm always fascinated by, you know, there are sort of layers of prejudices and misconceptions. I'm thinking about some of my own readings from the Hebrew Bible where you have ancient polemic, and then you have modern scholars who pick up that polemic and treat it in fact kind of wrapped in their own, you know, originally probably Victorian senses and that sort of thing. It can make, you know, excavating, so to speak, these materials and their interpretation, you know, sort of doubly difficult in some ways. So thank you for turning back to the sources and revealing these aspects that have been, you know, muted really by, you know, modern biases and, you know, sort of prudish sensibilities. I remember from a long time ago, there was a translation of the Gilgamesh epic and the naughty bits were, you know, were translated into Latin, you know, thanks. When you look at the old Greek classics in the Loeb edition, you can tell you're looking at an old one because all of a sudden the Greek goes from being translated into English to translated into Latin. And I remember the first time I saw that it was a reference to anal sex and I burst out laughing. So, yeah. Perhaps less hidden to the, you know, to the ancient audience than to the modern. You know, since when you think about it, most of the folks reading these translations are not going to have PhDs in ancient history and, you know, with these ancient languages and that sort of stuff. You know, I just sort of, I'm trying to think, I mean, I appreciate your sort of de-emphasis of fertility. And of course, that has, you know, it's kind of a loaded term. But I'm trying to think of the, you know, because with the religious concepts with these, you know, families of deities, with these pantheons, oftentimes there was a mother who literally gave birth to the gods. So, I mean, I don't think you've thrown the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. But women do give birth. And again, it's the role to nourish the child both in the womb, very importantly there, and then after birth. It's a matter of defining fertility as origin of life. And in this case, especially in a society that knows about semen, but doesn't know about the ovum, well, you can see that the male is contributing something. But even in Aristotle, you get ambivalence of, well, does the female contribute seed or not? They didn't know. Again, they didn't know about the egg. So in many of these societies, you, once again, that those early verbs of the male gives the female a baby, and that is the term for impregnation. Plus, you get so many of the early hymns that you see both in the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian sources, where a god like Enki will ejaculate and cause the creation of the Tigris River and with it, the emergence of animals and plants and thus beer and everything else. So there's this very strong sense that male ejaculate gives rise to life. Not so much with the female erotic text, where again, what you read about is the pleasure of sex, not the annoying parts of pregnancy. There's a wonderful little Sumerian saying that the man who has seven sons is elated, the woman who has seven sons lies down in exhaustion. So they were realists. Yes. And I'm sure our audience out there will understand and appreciate that this is an age old set of issues, right? I'm wondering if you might comment a little bit more on that gesture of the grasping or the supporting of the breasts. Well, I mean, I'm interested in that gesture from the perspective of trying to understand the Judean pillar figurines better. But also, you know, it's found in the Phoenician artistic and it's also has just a huge depth of time. We find it on these Neolithic sculptures. I believe it continues down into the Roman period even. So I would love to hear you just comment on that gesture. Okay. One of the things that you have to keep in mind when looking at that is that there is a greater variation of postures than most people seem to realize. The knee jerk reaction is to assume that these figurines are holding their breasts like that plaque from gazer that I showed a couple of slides ago. I could try to bring it back if you want. But so yes, we have some examples, both plaques and in the round for Mesopotamia from the Levant, that will show a female who is actively cupping her breasts with her hands. I am resisting the urge to do that gesture here. I might wind up doing so. That is one minority variation, the most common depiction that you actually see with the nude female icon as it's spread throughout the ancient Near East is not holding the breasts, but I'm going to go back here a little bit. But with the hands underneath, so folded, here we go, kind of underneath the breasts and not holding them. And you see this gesture in both males and females. And this is the most common posture that you see, especially in old Babylonian plaques. Once again, they're not holding their breasts, the hands are folded underneath under the pectorals, we might say. And all of the comparative evidence suggests from both male, from female, divine beings, mortal beings, that this is the posture of polite attention. This is the way of saying, yes, I am listening to you. So when you see it with gods, this is a God who's listening to your prayers. When you see it with a human, for example, the figurines at Tel Azmar who are looking at the image of the deed with their hands folded, it's almost like prayer. It's almost, yes, I am in polite attention and communion within the deity. And the majority of our nude female icons actually have that posture. And I think that it could be well debated with the Judean pillar figurines. They have very large breasts. The breasts are larger than usual. But I think this is partially because they're sculpted in the round, as opposed to plaques. That are they holding their breasts or are their hands folded underneath their breasts? And before you can decide what the gesture means, you have to decide which gesture it is. Now, there are some early Mesopotamian examples that are almost certainly depictions of Ishtar or references to a goddess of that nature. Going back to the Isen Larsa period, going way back here. And they definitely hold their breasts. And that clearly meant something to that very specific population. And it seems likely that that ideology appeared again here and there throughout the ancient eras. But it was only one gesture and not the common one. You have other figurines who would very consistently hold their hand out, almost been a sign of reception or blessing. If you think of the ecliptic iconography with that benediction symbol there, sometimes you'll have one hand out, sometimes will be down by the body. But when it comes to clutching the breast, I think the important thing to remember is that, A, it's a minority position, that it seems to be a variation on that pose of light attention. And that it probably had very specific meanings in time and place and cannot be universalized to something like fertility or lactation. Great. Thank you. From our internet audience, Rich Lang has a question. He asks, Dr. Boudin, how do you reconcile the well thought out perception of female sexuality and desire and the corresponding male narrative of male desire for control? I'd say several millennia of patriarchy kind of answers the question there. It depends on how males want to control females. And I think that this is a biological constant. I've been reading the work of Franz Duval, who does a lot of work on chimpanzees and Symbians. And he just came out with a phenomenal book called Different. A primatologist looks at the matter of gender. And it's a great read, by the way, I strongly recommend it. And basically, what he says is that the male desire for control of female sexuality is endemic in our species, in Symbian species, definitely a marker of chimpanzees, definitely less so with bonobos. Bonobos are wonderful. I kind of wish we evolved more from them than the chimps, but too late now. Oh, well. So there can be almost an abstract celebration of female sexuality. If you're stuck married to a woman, so to speak, you want to be sexually compatible with her. You do not want her to be frigid. And this is something that we see in these early societies, something that I'm trying to bring out here. What happens over time, something that we definitely start seeing in the Greek literature, later Romans, and then in the religions of the book, is you start being very paranoid about female sexuality because it can lead to adultery. And that's the point where you start trying to clamp down on it. It's like, wait, if my wife likes sex, you might start liking sex with someone other than me, and that's not acceptable. And this is especially problematic when you start looking at marriage traditions like we see in ancient Greece, where you don't necessarily have the boy next door marrying the girl next door and they know and they like each other and they might even be comparable in age. You start seeing these huge divisions in age so that you have a 30 year old man marrying a 14 year old girl. And we start seeing that dynamic as early as Hesiod in the eighth century. And when no offense here, you're the old guy married to the hot young thing and you suddenly realize, wait, if you do the math, then my daughter's son-in-law is my wife's age and maybe she's more attracted to him and uh-oh. So that's when you start clamping down. So I'd say there's a biological tendency for males to attempt to control female sexuality and that this gets exacerbated by certain societal practices such as extremely age and appropriate marriages. I don't know if that answers your question, but I hope so. I think so and I think on that note, wrap things up and thank you so much for such a fascinating talk today and for wrapping up our series for this academic year. I'd also like to take a moment and thank the staff at the Bade Museum at Pacific School Religion and also the staff at the Archaeological Research Facility or ARF at UC Berkeley for all of their behind the scenes and in-the-scene work and thank all of our other speakers as well. But I'm happy to wrap things up here with such a prominent scholar giving just a wonderful overview of her topic. I also just want to take a moment and ask our audience to support this series and more lecture series sponsored by the Bade Museum. And if you can reach into your pocket go to www.psr.edu backslash centers backslash bade hyphen museum and click on the giving tab and we appreciate any kind of support as well as just the support of your attending these sessions live and also viewing them later curated on our and the ARF's YouTube channels. And I also want to put a plug in for next year's series, which in so many ways will be a continuation of many of the themes that have been discussed during this year's series. The topic where the theme is Phoenician women and gender performance both in the homeland and also in the Phoenician diasporas and we will send out more information through our various channels as that comes together. But I know we already have speakers lined up for actually October through May. So we're all very excited to continue featuring these important topics and themes through the museums and ARF's Zoom lecture series. So again, thank you Stephanie Boudin for a wonderful talk today. Thank you to all of our other speakers and we look forward to resuming our series in October of next note this year.