We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Engendering Purity and Impurity in Assyriological Studies: A Historiographical Overview.
- Authors
Couto‐Ferreira, Érica; Garcia‐Ventura, Agnès
- Abstract
In our article, we reflect upon the role scholars play in the reconstruction of historical issues, and on how much bias can be detected in those reconstructions. More specifically, and approaching the point where religion and gender intersect, we have wanted to see how the concepts of ‘purity’ and ‘impurity’ have been used in Assyriological studies to advance certain discourses on body issues in relation to women. Although both terms are recurrent in Assyriological studies, few extensive lexicographical and historical works have been devoted to the topic. Research pieces that take ancient Mesopotamia as an object of study tend to translate a number of words in terms of purity--impurity, taking them as self-evident in meaning. Cultural translation of such concepts, however, poses a serious set of problems affecting not only translation but, most importantly, understanding of ancient practices. Through the specific analysis of a Mari letter (eighteenth century BCE), and some complementary examples taken from the Ur III texts (twenty-second to twenty-first centuries BCE), we will reflect upon the question of how women have been thought to be a possible cause of impurity in ancient Mesopotamia, and through what devices this cultural construction has been formulated and argued in Assyriological studies.
- Subjects
MESOPOTAMIA; RELIGION &; gender; ASSYRIOLOGY; PURITY (Ethics); RITUAL purity; MARI (Extinct city); LETTERS; WOMEN
- Publication
Gender & History, 2013, Vol 25, Issue 3, p513
- ISSN
0953-5233
- Publication type
Case Study
- DOI
10.1111/1468-0424.12032