by Jonathon Tilley
We know little of girlhood in ancient Mesopotamia, but this is hardly surprising when you consider how we came to know what we do know. When it was rediscovered, the entire civilisation had been lost and forgotten for two thousand years, buried beneath the dusty plains of Iraq. It is largely thanks to the discovery of thousands of clay tablets, and the efforts of scholars in working out how to read them, that we have been able to draw out scraps of information, piece them together, and achieve our current level of understanding. Gaps are inevitable, and one of the most gaping is the subject of women and girls – a half of the population of which we are largely ignorant.
So what can we say of girlhood in ancient Iraq? Some children went to school, but very few, and especially not girls. Some women could read and write. We have the letters and accounts of many women of the temple or palace elite actively involved in business. And there is Enheduanna, daughter of King Sargon, the first known poet in human history. But these examples of the royal daughters and sequestered elite women who formed the female literati are exceptional. For most, girlhood did not mean education.
It probably meant work – most children began light labour in weaving centres when they were five or six years old. The lives of girls were directed to marriage and children, and they were trained from childhood in the traditional roles of wife, mother, and housekeeper. They would have learnt how to grind grain, cooking and beer making, spinning and weaving cloth for clothing – all the skills they would need. They also played. Their toys – dolls and miniature furniture – reflected their future roles, but some toys were shared with the boys, like spinning tops and skipping ropes.
Girlhood was short. Secondary sexual characteristics marked the transition into adulthood, and girls were married off between the ages of fourteen and twenty. These marriages were usually planned when the couple were children, or even before they were born. The family of the husband-to-be chose a girl, and paid her family a compensatory amount. When the girl became nubile, she was introduced into her husband’s household and became a member of his family. She would probably stay there until her death, entirely under her husband’s authority. Indeed, in Akkadian, the language of ancient Mesopotamia, the verb ‘to marry’ – ahâzu – also means ‘to seize’ or ‘to take possession of’.
This wasn’t unique to Mesopotamia. An Akkadian word used for the husband was bêlu – ‘lord and master’. The word ba’al is used in Hebrew, ba’l in Arabic – both close relations of bêlu. And there is more in writings from other parts of the Near East; in the Bible: ‘…yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you’ (Genesis 3.16), and in the Qur’an: ‘Men are superior to women, Allah having preferred them.’ (Surah 4.34). Even today, these views remain influential among some people.
Literature gives us a new viewpoint. The mythological character Ishtar was the goddess of love and war, but inspired many poems about youthful love, in which she is depicted as a young girl. In one, she waits impatiently in her parents’ house for her lover Dumuzi to arrive. In another she sneaks out of the house to meet him, and as they embrace under the stars she realises how late it is getting. ‘Let me go!’ she says. ‘I must go home! What am I going to tell my mother?’ Dumuzi suggests that she says her girl companions persuaded her to go with them to listen to music and dance. It all seems very familiar to a modern reader. But we must take care – this is literature from a civilization in which few could read. It may not have reflected views from far outside the elite levels of society that produced it.
We have been able to extract little more from the remains of Mesopotamian civilisation. What it meant to be a girl in this ancient land is largely lost to us. We search through the ruins and find what scraps of information we can, but the picture we have is incomplete and fragmentary like the texts from which it is drawn. There are so many things which we do not understand. So many things of which we have only the briefest glimpses or we have lost forever in the dust and can only guess at. But perhaps the dearth of information itself tells us a great deal.
