The Construction of Women’s Identities through Commemorative Objects in Bronze Age Mesopotamia

Abstract This article focuses on female devotees and divine beneficiaries in Early Mesopotamia, analyzing the nearly 600 known objects dating to the third and second millennia BCE and dedicated by non-royals to the gods, in order to memorialize themselves and others. It seeks to track patterns of gendering objects, namely through the lens of female identities. Such patterns include the relationship between female devotees, goddesses, and particular object types, such as female genitalia. In addition, by taking an intersectional approach to women’s identities, we demonstrate that factors such as status complicate the overarching patterns in object choice. Certain elite women, for example, dedicated mace-heads – normally a male-coded object – to the gods. Commemorative objects dedicated by private individuals thus comprise a crucial data set for not only examining religious belief and practice across Mesopotamia, but also the particular ways in which dedicatory practice represented female identities and commemorated individual women.