Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

17 8 DEBT
In the very earliest Sumerian texts, particularly those from roughly
3000 to 2500 Be, women are everywhere. Early histories not only record
the names of numerous female rulers, but make clear that women
were well represented among the ranks of doctors, merchants, scribes,
and public officials, and generally free to take part in all aspects of
public life. One cannot speak of full gender equality: men still outnumbered
women in all these areas. Still, one gets the sense of a society
not so different than that which prevails in much of the developed
world today. Over the course of the next thousand years or so, all this
changes. The place of women in civic life erodes; gradually, the more
familiar patriarchal pattern takes shape, with its emphasis on chastity
and premarital virginity, a weakening and eventually wholesale disappearance
of women's role in government and the liberal professions,
and the loss of women's independent legal status, which renders them
wards of their husbands. By the end of the Bronze Age, around noo BC,
we begin to see large numbers of women sequestered away in harems
and (in some places, at least), subjected to obligatory veiling.
In fact, this appears to reflect a much broader worldwide pattern.
It has always been something of a scandal for those who like to see
the advance of science and technology, the accumulation of learning,
economic growth-"human progress," as we like to call it-as necessarily
leading to greater human freedom, that for women, the exact
opposite often seems to be the case. Or at least, has been the case until
very recent times. A similar gradual restriction on women's freedoms
can be observed in India and China. The question is, obviously, Why
The standard explanation in the Sumerian case has been the gradual
infiltration of pastoralists from the surrounding deserts who, presumably,
always had more patriarchal mores. There was, after all, only a
narrow strip of land along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that could
support intensive irrigation works, and hence, urban life. Civilization
was thus from early times surrounded by a fringe of desert people, who
lived much like those described in Genesis and spoke the same Semitic
languages. It is undeniably true that, over the course of time, the Sumerian
language was gradually replaced-first by Akkadian, then by
Amorite, then by Aramaic languages, and finally, most recently of all,
by Arabic, which was also brought to Mesopotamia and the Levant by
desert pastoralists. While all this did, clearly, bring with it profound
cultural changes as well, it's not a particularly satisfying explanation.33
Former nomads appear to have been willing to adapt to urban life in
any number of other ways. Why not that one And it's very much a
local explanation and does nothing, really, to explain the broader pattern.
Feminist scholarship has instead tended to emphasize the growing