The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— Women and gender in Babylonia —
not your slaves. . . . If you are my son-in-law and I am your mother, I should be in
your thoughts. Do not make me unhappy.” 18 Widows appear to have been differentiated
by class: the often powerful almattu was head of her own household; older widows
might have continued living with their adult children; young widows might have
been remarried by their paternal agents or been given harimtu status; and destitute
women might devote themselves to a temple, despite harsh living conditions, or enter
a bīt mār banî. The latter institution is described only obliquely but appears to have
been a Neo-Babylonian recourse for “women in transition” more generally to seek
physical or social protection within the household of a free citizen such as a temple
official (Roth 1987).
There were several classes of priestesses in the Old Babylonian period, some (but
not all) of whom were to remain celibate and/or unmarried, and some of whom lived
in a common, cloister-like community (Harris 1989: 150ff.) The best-known of these
priestesses were the nadītu, whose records have been found in great quantities at the
gagû (cloister) in Sippar (Harris 1975), and – in fewer numbers – in private
neighborhoods of Nippur as well (Stone 1982). Several laws of Hammurabi pertain
to these women, who could marry so long as they remained childless; if they did
marry, they could either adopt children or provide their husbands with slave concubines
who could bear children (LH §146). Nadītu-priestesses often owned substantial
property, including their own individual houses within the cloister and taverns (Roth
1999) and engaged in the business of money-lending. Many of them came from elite
households, and the ownership of their property returned to their father’s heirs
(typically their brothers) after their deaths. For this reason, it has been argued that
elite families welcomed the opportunity to devote a daughter to the cloister in order
to limit the dispersal of the family estate, and nadītu-women appear have been able
to broker deals outside the family circle more easily than could the men of their
paternal household (see discussion in Harris 1989); but it is clear as well that to
become a nadītu was an honor and an opportunity for the exercise of piety. See Assante
(1998) for a re-assessment of some of the other classes of religious women who were
thought to have engaged in cultic prostitution; instead, they seem to have had a
variety of roles, from wet-nurse (qadisˇtu) to (theoretically) celibate high-priestess (entu).
SLAVE WOMEN IN DOMESTIC HOUSEHOLDS
A Middle Babylonian contract from Nippur (BE 14 40) nicely outlines the three
options available to young free women from poor households (cf. Assante 1997: 16):
a girl’s biological father gives her up for adoption under the conditions that she may
marry or enter into harimūtu, but she may not be sold into slavery. By the Neo-
Babylonian period, “within the class of free citizens there was enormous variation in
economic circumstances, from the land-owning entrepreneurial families . . . to the
tenant farmers and hired labourers” (Baker 2001: 20); and the poorest women seemed
to be quite aware of the possibility of enslavement, either as a punishment for
transgressions or as a means of income for their families. It evidently was not uncommon
for even persons of moderate means to own three to five slaves in the NB period
(Dandamaev 1984: 216), whereas the wealthy Egibi family owned over 100 slaves,
most of whom presumably were born in the household (Baker 2001). Thus slaves
comprised a significant sector of Neo-Babylonian society, though it was not nearly
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