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November 2023
Vol. 11, No. 11
Gender in the Ancient Near East and Egypt
By Stephanie Budin
Sex and gender have become central topics of discussion and scholarship in a wide variety of fields, ever since second-wave feminism emphasized the distinction between these two aspects of biology and culture. Scholars of antiquity are now trying to understand how the denizens of the ancient world, such as in Mesopotamia and Egypt, understood these concepts in their own cultures without retrojecting modern interpretations onto the past. Here we consider how people in the ancient world thought about sex and gender in terms of their language and artifacts.
"Sex" refers to which one of two roles an organism plays in those forms of reproduction that combine the genes of two organisms in the creation of the next generation. Those organisms that produce the smaller, penetrating gametes are known as males; those organisms that produce the larger, nourishing gametes are known as females. This goes for humans, most vertebrates, and several species of plants.
"Gender" is comprised of the beliefs held about individuals based on their sex. All world cultures have some notions of aspects of personality or intellect that are supposedly sex-based: Males are more violent; females are more nurturing. Males are better at math, females have better verbal skills, et cetera. These beliefs are profoundly significant, for they — consciously or not — influence how individuals in a society learn to act and self-identify, and how other members of that society expect each other to behave. The result is a constantly self-reinforcing process whereby males learn to act in a "masculine" fashion and females "feminine," strengthening the belief that males are innately masculine and females feminine, for whatever counts as "masculine" or "feminine" in that particular community. These aspects of behavior are taken as innate and justify relations between the sexes and their roles and positions within the overarching community.
Sex
The societies of the ancient Near East had a binary sex paradigm—female and male— and had notions of how these two sexes were supposed to be and behave, to wit: gender. The binary nature of biological sex is most easily manifest in the ideograms they used when discussing human beings: Basically, they used pictures of their genitalia. In early Mesopotamia, for example, the idea of a generic human being was expressed by the Sumerian sign SAG:
To render a human male the UŠ sign was used (also transcribed NITA), an ejaculating penis:
To make a human female the SAL sign was used (also transcribed MUNUS), a vulva:.
So "woman" equals "human with vulva" and "man" equals "human with penis". There isn't much by way of ambiguity.
Likewise in Egypt. More commonly, males and females were distinguished using the signs A1 and B1, which show the entire body: 
for a male and 
for a female. But, not to be outdone by their northeastern neighbors, the Egyptians could also render sex with graphic genitalia: 
and 
(you can guess which is which on your own).
Gender
In addition to this notion of binary sex were notions of gender, i.e. the quality of being feminine (the way a female is supposed to be) or masculine (the way a male is supposed to be). Again, this comes across in the vocabulary. In Mesopotamia, both Sumerian and Akkadian have words for the "state of being a woman" or "state of being a man." In Sumerian these are NAM.MUNUS and NAM.NITAH; in Akkadian they are sinnišūtu(m) and zikrūtu(m). Sumerian NAM refers to a state of being or fate; the Akkadian suffix –ūtu refers to a state of being or –ness quality. Thus, femaleness or the state of being male.
Gendering also manifests in art. For example, in ancient Egypt, there were stylistic conventions used to distinguish between male and female that did not necessarily have anything to do with reality. Males are consistently bigger (up to 60% bigger!) than the women they are shown with, have darker skin, are shown in more active poses, and are less eroticized than females (that is: female genitalia are often visible through clothing, male genitalia most assuredly are not). For example:
-- Sent from my Linux system.
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