I received wonderful news that my article “The Masculinities of the Neo-Assyrian “Queens of the Arabs” has been published in the Hebrew Studies journal.
You can see the contents of the special edition here at NAPH’s website.
This article means a lot to me, as it was the reason for my interest in masculinities studies. During the course of my PhD research, the one aspect of the “Queens of the Arabs” that kept nagging at me was how masculine they were. In many ways, they were unremarkable and indistinguishable from other non-Assyrian rulers in the ancient texts – except for being noted as women.
When I started my first postdoc at Helsinki one of my goals was to deal with this niggling question, so when I was invited to contribute to a special edition of Hebrew Studies dealing with questions of ancient gender, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to put the question to rest.
Due to copyright, I’ll make sure a copy of the article is available here and on my academia.edu page next year. In the meantime, you’re welcome to read the abstract below:
The “Queens of the Arabs” are a unique group of women whose actions are only recorded in the sources of the Neo-Assyrian empire. They ruled in many of the same ways as other foreign male kings did: they led military campaigns, and were in control of their people’s assets. In a very real sense these women acted in a masculine manner. In this contribution, I will explain how hegemonic masculinities theory can provide nuance to a gendered reading of these women. I will then demonstrate how the “Queens of the Arabs” conformed to Assyrian ideals for foreign masculinities. Finally, I will discuss how the scribes and artists tasked with recording the actions of these women used motifs in their repertoires for both men and women to depict these masculine women in reliefs and texts.
Bennett 2022, abstract
I’m always happy to chat about my work, so if you have any questions, please send me an email at eleanor.bennett@helsinki.fi .
Ellie Bennett 