Chapter Four - The First Female Bureaucrats: Gender and Glyptic in Third-Millennium Northern Mesopotamia

Summary

Previous efforts to understand the relationships between gender and glyptic have focused mainly either on the uses of seals as a form of female jewelry or in regard to women being the subject of iconography. The seal, however, served several functions in economy and society, not least as an administrative tool. It has often been assumed that bureaucratic control was the exclusive domain of males, in spite of frequent physical (funerary) and iconographic associations of women and glyptic. While northern Mesopotamia does not have the quality of mortuary remains seen in southern Mesopotamian “royal cemeteries,” there is a rich glyptic repertoire with ample references to gender and social hierarchy. An explicitly gendered approach to the study of this glyptic assemblage can be used to assess how gender affected bureaucratic roles in northern Mesopotamia, which can have larger implications for the role of gender in society.