Women’s Lives in the Ancient Near East and Facets of Ancient Near Eastern Womanhood

stone statue of seated woman, broken, headless
Headless statue of a female priestess, YBC 2281, stone, Late third millennium BCE

Perhaps we, as moderns, have been writing ancient women out of history in our facile efforts to include them. We do this, in particular, by emphasizing the absence of women in history, focusing superficially on exceptional images of women, and simplifying women into types that reflect our own expectations and values, and this approach obscures the complexities of ancient Near Eastern womanhood. However, by affording the ancient record its own voice, the individuality and complexity of women’s lives and facets of womanhood emerges to replace, rather than reiterate, the conventional grand narrative on “women” and to remind us that the ancient Near East was not as much of a man’s world as we have made it out to be.

Read more in my recent essay, “Women’s Lives in the Ancient Near East and Facets of Ancient Near Eastern Womanhood,” published in the catalogue for the Women at the Dawn of History exhibition at Yale University (Peabody Museum, 2020).

women at dawn cover

Amy Gansell, “Women’s Lives in the Ancient Near East and Facets of Ancient Near Eastern Womanhood,” pp. 15-23 in Women at the Dawn of History, edited by Agnete Lassen and Klaus Wagensonner, New Haven: Peabody Museum of Natural History and Yale Babylonian Collection, Yale University, 2020.

Worlds Collide in Room F. Michael Rakowitz’s The invisible enemy should not exist (Room F, section 1, Northwest Palace of Nimrud), Jane Lombard Gallery, NYC, February 22, 2020

 

jane lombard installation
Jane Lombard Gallery( NYC), January 9th – February 22, 2020

I had been meaning to see the latest Rakowitz show in Chelsea. I was waiting for a convenient day. Maybe I’d have some reason to be in the neighborhood. I could swing by then. I figured I’d see it at some point. I’ve been following and appreciating his work for a decade. This was another iteration of his ongoing project The invisible enemy should not exist (2007-).

I’ve also been working on my book about Assyrian queens in the Northwest Palace at Nimrud. This is part of the reason why I hadn’t yet made it to Chelsea. I try to spend my working hours tucked in at the library.

Rarely do I wake up (on a Saturday nonetheless) and say “I have an idea! I have to go write! Sorry dear husband, but can I leave you with little girl for an hour or so? I have to find a quiet place and write this down.” I had an idea about Room F of the palace.

I got myself to a spot, and started to type. Then an iMessage popped up. Oh no, I thought. I probably need to go back home. But that was not it. It was a friend reminding me it was the last day of the Rakowitz show. Ok, I’ll make it happen. We’ll check it out this afternoon.

Family in tow, I walked into the Jane Lombard Gallery about an hour before closing. Perfect timing. But even more perfect, and serendipitous, or psychic, or just crazy, is that I walked right into Room F of the palace!! Maybe somewhere in my subconscious I’d absorbed the show title; maybe I actually, deep down knew the close-date. But I had no recollection of these facts. I’d been operating on the vague notion of “Rakowitz show is up in Chelsea…” I was completely surprised, totally delighted, floored, and down-right freaked out to find myself at the eleventh hour in the room I probably dreamt about the night before.

jane lombard installation
Jane Lombard Gallery, February 2020

I quickly tried to take every picture I could of every element of the show. It was for sale, as one complete installation. I will probably never see this again. I kept imagining it set up in its new home, maybe in Hollywood, overlooking an infinity pool from a room of glass walls. What would it mean there? Would it matter?

The work itself recreates the massive carved stone, once-painted panels that lined the walls of Room F on Nimrud’s Northwest Palace in the 800s to 600s BCE. Room F  is described among ancient Near Eastern specialists as the “back room” or “retiring room” of the main throneroom. It is described in the show as a banquet hall. Sure, banquets might have been held here. I like the idea of imagining the space as it was once lived in. Maybe the new owner will install this in their dining room.

Learning Sites, Inc. simulation of queen in Nimrud's Northewest Palace
https://youtu.be/rEQvg3YkkoI

The installation consists of five panels, each over seven feet tall, displaying colorful sacred trees and bird-headed, human-bodied, winged creatures (apkallu) carrying cones and buckets with which they ritually treat the blossoming palm (the emblem of the Assyrian empire).

The Arabic words on the collaged scraps of candy wrappers, tea cartons, and newspaper collide with a daintily printed cuneiform text that runs across the panels in gold script evoking the ancient inscription carved on the original stone slabs (“…great king, strong king, king of the universe…”).

IMG_8767 - 8
Rakowitz, Room F, Jane Lombard Gallery, February 22, 2020

The dark patches, cracks, and swaths breaking up the images indicate surfaces lost to the ages. The gaps between the panels remind us of the palace’s more recent losses — these gaps refer to the places where nineteenth-century archaeologists extracted the neighboring slabs, now embedded in Western collections, such as the Assyrian gallery of Met uptown.

Assyrian_Court_1520 met museum walls
Assyrian reliefs from Nimrud’s Northwest Palace, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC)

The wooden beams extending from the panels emphasize their lost architectural context, while also propping these ghosts of recent and ancient memories up in our living world after their most recent tragedy. Rakowitz’s panels reconstruct the sculptures that were still in place at the excavated palace site when Nimrud fell to the hands of ISIS in 2015.

“The act was a crime against Assyria, against Iraq, and against humanity. Destroy the past, and you control the future. – Tom Holland” read a quote at my feet.  Another quote on the floor said “Fueled by an insatiable appetite for Near Eastern antiquities, sites throughout Iraq are being worked daily by teams of looters in search of ‘merchandise.’” These are the words of Dr. Selma Al-Radi, to whose memory, and the memories of two other archaeologists, Dr. Sam Paley and Dr. Donny George, the show is dedicated.

Amy Herritt so kindly took some time to step away from the desk and give me a tour. She was telling me about Rakowitz’s interest in dates as a symbol of the Iraqi people (his Fourth Plinth lamassu was made of date syrup cans) and the aptness of the Assyrian sacred trees he chose to reconstruct being date palms. As she was talking, I was also being tugged by the crescendo of ‘Mommy, mommy, mommy…” and so many layers of so many worlds collided again.

Feb 22 2020 Jane Lombard Gallery

Third Workshop on Gender, Methodology and the Ancient Near East, April 2019

Looking forward to the Third Workshop on Gender, Methodology and the Ancient Near East, in Ghent, Belgium this April! I’ll be presenting “Images of Divinely Sanctioned Neo-Assyrian Queenship at Nimrud’s Northwest Palace.” The preliminary program is here: http://www.gemane3.ugent.be/programme/.

The mission of the Workshop is to “bring together both established and up-and-coming scholars whose work brings gender studies theory to bear on various materials and contexts in order to discuss different methodological approaches to gender studies within the framework of Ancient Near Eastern studies.” http://www.gemane3.ugent.be/call-for-papers/

I’m looking forward to seeing so many international colleagues again and continuing our conversations from the first two Workshops, held in Helsinki (October 2014) and Barcelona (February 2017). It has been an incredible experience to participate in these very rigorous yet highly constructive and professionally supportive Workshops. Since 2014, our collective knowledge and methodologies have grown substantially, and many exciting new collaborations have been established among participants.