Congratulations! Winner of the second IAA Dissertation Prize
At the 64th Rencontre in Innsbruck, the Board announced the name of the second IAA Dissertation Prize, given to the best PhD dissertation written in the fields of Assyriology or Mesopotamian Archaeology. In 2018, the prize was given to Jana Matuszak, for her dissertation entitled: “‘Und du, du bist eine Frau?! ’ – Untersuchungen zu sumerischen literarischen Frauenstreitgesprächen nebst einer editio princeps von Zwei Frauen B”.
Jana has kindly accepted to write the following text for Mar Shiprim, to describe her work. Thank you, Jana, and congratulations!
“And you, you are a woman?!”
In my dissertation I provide the first critical edition of the Sumerian literary disputation between two women known by its modern titles Two Women B or Dialogue 5. Despite the less than evocative titles chosen by modern Sumerologists, the text itself ranks among the most fascinating literary compositions from ancient Mesopotamia: two imaginary female antagonists accuse each other of not being a (good) woman. Apart from the fragmentarily preserved disputation(s) entitled “Two Women A”, Two Women B is the only Mesopotamian literary composition that features ‘ordinary’ women as its main protagonists, and their heated dispute allows us a unique glimpse into the role of women in society as well as into the authors’ conception of ideal femininity.
For perhaps obvious reasons, the text seems to have been quite popular already in antiquity: over 60 manuscripts from the early 2nd millennium BCE have been discovered so far. The majority come from the city of Nippur, as is usual for Sumerian literary compositions. But even in places such as Kisurra, Ĝirsu or Mari in modern-day Syria, where Sumerian literature is much more rare, manuscripts of Two Women B have been unearthed. Moreover, it is the only text from the corpus of Sumerian literary disputations that is also preserved on a handful of bilingual (Sumerian-Akkadian) manuscripts.
“Two Women B” manuscripts from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA). © J. Matuszak
The topic was first suggested to me by my Doktorvater Konrad Volk when I had just completed my second year at university. I found the task quite daunting back then, but once I actually started working on my dissertation in 2014, I soon realised the enormous potential of the text and enjoyed the diversity of the individual steps I had to take in order to bring the ancient text back to life. I started by collecting all known manuscripts of the text. Much of the work had already been done by Miguel Civil, who had passed on his list of manuscripts to Konrad Volk. However, when I set out to study the originals in collections all over Europe and America, I also discovered a few new ones – one in Ithaca (a bilingual one!), one in Jena, and one in Istanbul. Now it was possible for the first time to reconstruct the text in its entirety.
Editing the text was beset with all the difficulties a Sumerian work of literature usually presents (there still is no complete Sumerian dictionary!), but the lack of any narrative and the exclusive use of direct speech, often colloquial and full of idiomatic phrases, proved especially challenging. It took me months to arrive at a translation of the text, but that didn’t mean I understood it yet. In order to understand it better, I decided to approach the text from a variety of different angles. One such approach consisted in trying to understand the internal development of the debate, and for this I profited from reading not only Catherine Mittermayer’s study of the rhetoric of Sumerian precedence debates (due to appear in Untersuchungen zur Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie), but also about verbal contests in other cultures and dialogue studies more generally.
UET 6, 158 showing new joins made by J. Matuszak. © British Museum (London, UK)
The quarrel seems to start quite playfully, with one of the protagonists drawing the other into the debate. They start exchanging insults and accusations, which soon become more serious. The debate stops abruptly when one woman calls the other a “whore.” This seems to have had serious consequences, as word seems to have gone round and resulted in the slandered woman’s husband divorcing her on the basis of adultery accusations. The slandered woman then turned to the assembly in order to convince the judge of her innocence and clear her reputation. My detailed rhetorical analysis could explain how the initially playful quarrel got out of hand, and what parts the individual contestants played in it. However, I also paired my rhetorical analysis with a stylistic analysis – which had never been applied to this sort of text before. I could thus show that one of the women – the one that had initiated the debate and finally defended herself at court against the unjust allegations – was a far superior speaker both on argumentative and stylistic grounds, and thus likely to emerge as the winner.
In the next chapter, I analysed the proceedings at court, linking them whenever possible to contemporary Old Babylonian legal theory and praxis. I argue that Two Women B stands at the crossroads between legal theory and praxis. While presenting a fictional, literary adaptation of an ideal type of lawsuit, it taught the students who studied this text the practicalities of proceedings at court: how to give a prosecution speech and how a speech for the defence, how to arrive at a verdict applying which laws, and how to accommodate appeals.
Since the didactic potential of the text was apparent also in other aspects, I devoted one chapter on its ‘Sitz im Leben.’ The text’s immediate social context was undoubtedly the school, where Sumerian was taught as a dead language to students whose mother tongue was most likely Akkadian. Two Women B was not only deeply embedded in the corpus of Sumerian literary debates and diatribes as well as texts reflecting on school life, but also shared intertextual links with ‘wisdom literature’ and proverbs. Particularly interesting, however, is the fact that Two Women B was suited for a theatrical (school) performance.
Finally, I wanted to write one comprehensive chapter on the model of femininity as set out in the corpus of Sumerian didactic literature. For this purpose, I collected all Sumerian literary compositions that indirectly define an ideal woman. Next to Two Women B, these are the fragmentary disputations collected under the umbrella term “Two Women A” and the diatribes Ka ḫulu-a (‘The Evil Mouth’) and Munus nam-ḫulu (‘Woman [perfecting] evil’) – all of which had never been edited. When studying these compositions jointly, a remarkably holistic image of an ideal woman emerged. She was expected to be humble, obedient, diligent and skilled in the management of the household as well as in the provision of food and clothes; she had to be from a good family, pretty, healthy, and good in bed. Considering the probability of male authorship and male audience – girls did not normally get a scribal education – as well as the fact that an ideal woman was exclusively defined ex negativo, I finally addressed the question of misogyny. I compared the above-mentioned texts about women to similar texts about men; mainly school disputations defining an ideal scribe and diatribes against men. I showed that they were very similar in structure, approach and phrasing: some lines are even identical in texts about women and texts about men. The authors of these texts – most likely schoolteachers – apparently thought it best didactic practice to invent truly shocking and incredibly incompetent and immoral characters, who were designed to deter and prevent students from repeating their mistakes. Their failure was a didactic necessity for the motivation of schoolboys – and their prospective wives – to excel.
One tablet from the Frau Professor Hilprecht Collection of Babylonian Antiquities, before (left) and after (right) the new joins by J. Matuszak. Fragments were glued together by the restaurator Carmen Gütschow. © C. Gütschow.
Indeed, throughout the disputations there is an implicit but omnipresent threat: if you don’t excel, you’ll be expelled from your peer group. Any incompetent scribe will not be counted among the intellectual elite anymore, and any woman who does not conform to the ideal of femininity will loose her status as woman, as is evident from rhetorical questions à la “And you, you are a woman?!”, which are often found in both Two Women A and B. The implied answer clearly is “No!”, because the speaker tries her best to prove that her rival failed at every aspect of womanhood. At the same time, the rhetorical questions show that these texts were not inherently misogynistic: the protagonists were compared to a fundamentally positive model of femininity – an ideal to which at least the inferior contestant failed to conform.
The Sumerian literary disputations and diatribes, and Two Women B among them, can safely be situated within the intellectual and elitist milieu of the school. The authors set a high ethical and professional code for members of their peer group and barely hid their contempt for those who either could not keep up with it or came from lower strata of society and were thus excluded from the beginning. That housewives should feature as protagonists in this corpus of texts might at first sight be surprising. However, it seems that according to the worldview of the authors, an ideal scribe should be accompanied by an ideal wife, and Two Women B set out the parameters for her.
The text thus proved to be a treasure trove not only for historical gender studies and gender linguistics (women in Sumerian literature speak a special genderlect), but also for the history of literature and law. It is my hope that my research contributes to bringing a hitherto poorly understood Sumerian literary genre to the attention of colleagues in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and beyond, and therefore I’m very grateful for the opportunity to write about it here. My dissertation is planned to appear in the series Untersuchungen zur Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie.
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