"Women's Property and Social Networks in Mesopotamia"

wEdge 1 The Mummy Under the Bed Essays on Gender and Methodology in the Ancient Near East Edited by Katrien De Graef, Agnès Garcia-Ventura, Anne Goddeeris and Beth Alpert Nakhai Zaphon The Mummy Under the Bed Essays on Gender and Methodology in the Ancient Near East Edited by Katrien De Graef, Agnès Garcia-Ventura, Anne Goddeeris and Beth Alpert Nakhai wEdge Cutting-Edge Researches in Cuneiform Studies Volume 1 Editor-in-Chief: Lorenzo Verderame Editorial board: Eva von Dassow Agnès Garcia-Ventura Jean-Jacques Glassner Ann Guinan Emanuel Pfoh Jordi Vidal The Mummy Under the Bed Essays on Gender and Methodology in the Ancient Near East Edited by Katrien De Graef, Agnès Garcia-Ventura, Anne Goddeeris and Beth Alpert Nakhai Zaphon Münster 2022 Illustration on the cover: Dama oferente de Ibiza. Museo Arqueológico Nacional. Inv. 1923/60/510. Foto: Fundación ITMA, autor: Santiago Relanzón. The Mummy Under the Bed. Essays on Gender and Methodology in the Ancient Near East Edited by Katrien De Graef, Agnès Garcia-Ventura, Anne Goddeeris and Beth Alpert Nakhai wEdge 1 © 2022 Zaphon, Münster (www.zaphon.de) Printed in Germany. Printed on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-3-96327-088-8 (book) ISBN 978-3-96327-089-5 (e-book) ISSN 2698-7007 Table of Contents Preface and Acknowledgements Some Words with a Mummy ................................................................................ 7 Women Talking about Women: Excavating the Memory of Women in Ancient Near Eastern Studies Agnès Garcia-Ventura ........................................................................................ 13 1. Reading Against the Grain The Late Bronze Age in Syria: Was It a Dark Age for Women? Frances Pinnock ................................................................................................. 41 The Female Gaze: The Subjected Body in Tablet 103 of Šumma ālu Omens 1–7 Ann K. Guinan .................................................................................................... 57 In nomine matris et filii . . . : The Use of Matronymics in the Legal and Economic Documents from Sukkalmaḫ Susa Katrien De Graef ................................................................................................ 89 2. Cult and Cults Women in Cult in First Millennium BCE Mesopotamia Natalie Naomi May ........................................................................................... 125 Engendered Cosmic Regions in Ancient Mesopotamian Mythologies Lorenzo Verderame........................................................................................... 157 Of Cities, Mothers, and Homes: A Cognitive-Stylistic Approach to Gendered Space in the Hebrew Bible Karolien Vermeulen .......................................................................................... 173 Vanishing Point: New Perspectivity on Women in the Book of Exodus Elizabeth B. Tracy............................................................................................. 195 3. Ancient Beauties The Aroma of Majesty: Gender and the Hebrew Bible’s Olfactory Cultic Theology Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme ..................................................................... 217 6 Table of Contents Performing Beauty in Phoenician-Punic Cultures: A Gender Perspective Meritxell Ferrer and Mireia López-Bertran ..................................................... 233 Embodying the Past: The Case of the Goddess on Lion at Hasanlu Letteria Grazia Fassari and Raffaella Frascarelli ........................................... 253 Entangled at Death: Beads, Gender, and Life Cycles during the Central Anatolian Early Neolithic; Aşıklı Höyük as a Case Study Sera Yelözer and Mihriban Özbaşaran............................................................. 289 4. Networks and Powers Zinu, Wife and Manager in Old Babylonian Larsa Baptiste Fiette ................................................................................................... 327 Grandmother’s Tablets: Some Reflections on Female Landowners in Nuzi Brigitte Lion ...................................................................................................... 353 Women and Their Weight: Incorporating Weighted Edges in a Network Analysis of the Central Redistributive Household of Nippur (Eighteenth Century BCE) Anne Goddeeris ................................................................................................ 369 Women’s Property and Social Networks in Mesopotamia Allison Thomason ............................................................................................. 407 Was It Law? Gender Relations and Legal Practice in the Ancient Near East Ilan Peled .......................................................................................................... 433 Index ................................................................................................................. 447 Women’s Property and Social Networks in Mesopotamia Allison Thomason1 1. Introduction The activities of women involved in the Old Assyrian (ca. 1950–1700 BCE) trading networks between Anatolia and Ashur have received a great deal of interest by scholars of the period and beyond. Certainly, the extensive trading and social networks of the male traders—the patriarchal “heads of households— have garnered the majority of ink. But the occasions when women got together with other genders or with just other women to network have received relatively less attention in scholarly literature.2 This contribution aims, therefore, to study the activities of the Old Assyrian and Anatolian women mentioned in the texts from the period in relation to social networking. Ultimately, this quest is one derived from social history, which seeks to understand how groups of people interacted with each other in a society, and how individuals made their way in these groups and forged their own agency and identities. From the wealth of documentary evidence in the Old Assyrian corpus, including in the written records of the women under discussion, I have identified several ways in which women exercised their authority and resourcefulness through interactions with other people. In order to ensure their own survival as well as that of their close family and associates, women who sent, received, or were mentioned in letters invested their energies in behaviors and actions such as the development of social networks, investment in social capital, using information to enhance their situations, and exchanging movable property with others to ensure survival. My aim here is to utilize both quantitative analysis through visualization of network connections and qualitative data through quotations from Old Assyrian texts, in order to understand social networks, their outcomes, and their activities. 2. Background In earlier studies inspired by the GeMANE workshops and published in previous proceedings volumes,3 I have brought forth the idea of the resourcefulness and prominence of the women in the Old Assyrian trading networks to bear on the evidence of the letters, excavated for decades now from Kültepe (ancient Kanesh) in Turkey. The principal raison d’être for the Old Assyrian letters’ Department of History, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, [email protected]. There are a few exceptions, especially for the classical world. For examples, see Nosch 2014 for a brief study of Greek women’s networks in the Bronze and Iron Ages. 3 See Thomason 2013, 2018. 1 2 408 Allison Thomason existence was the movement of textiles—typically commodities, not personal property—produced by women overseeing households at Ashur and sent to be sold in Anatolia in exchange for silver, among other things. In many of the letters, written both to and from men and women involved in the trading networks, actors frequently discuss the urgent need for their correspondent to perform their requisite duties, using strident pleas to persuade their contact of the emergent nature of the request. Often, scholars have referred to the use of such language as “emotional” or “desperate,” and associated it especially with women, when in fact a quick perusal of the letters shows that men utilized similar rhetorical language in equivalent frequency. Thus, I have long asserted that the use of the terms “emotional” or “desperate” to refer to the status of the women, a common refrain in much of the literature, has more to do with gender stereotypes held by modern scholars than it has to do with ancient people, and we should refer to these phrases rather as clever rhetorical strategies that the people deployed to acquire silver owed to them. After their initial discovery about a century ago, Assyriologists working on the Old Assyrian tablets have made it their goal to understand the experiences and roles of robust male actors in the trading networks, and therefore focused on the initial publication of their archives. In the past two decades, enough letters have been published that scholars have begun to conduct secondary analyses in order to explore metanarratives about the logistics of trade, economics, and the relationship between commerce and politics. In addition, although references are too numerous to cite, many investigators have explored the social aspects of Mesopotamian and Anatolian life discussed in the letters (and other documents), which contain evidence relating to gender roles, marriage practices, inheritance legalities, ethnic relations, and kinship ties.4 The most recent work on the Old Assyrian sources suggests that there are enough tablets published now to begin The publications of Garelli (1979), and Michel (2001 as exemplary) began the discussion of social aspects and women in the Kanesh texts. Veenhof (1972), Larsen (1976), Dercksen (2004), Veenhof and Eidem (2008), and Barjamovic (2011) are just a few examples, along with many others, who have explored the geographic, political, legal, and commercial aspects of the letters. These systematic and synthetic treatments are in addition to the dozens of volumes of the original publication or re-collation of various tablet collections and archives. The most recent attention to the “strong and independent businesswomen” in the Old Assyrian trading networks takes the form of a documentary, co-produced and co-written by C. Michel and V. Tubiana-Brun, entitled Thus Speaks Tarām-Kūbi: Assyrian Correspondence, which has received some attention in the popular press as well (see, for example, an article published online by the British Broadcasting Corporation: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210111-the-secret-letters-ofhistorys-first-businesswomen [accessed 11 February 2021]). Recently, Michel published an English-language edition of the women’s correspondence from Ashur in Kanesh (2020). Since it was published after most of this article was written and edited, I was not able to include references to the texts within it. 4 Women’s Property 409 large-scale statistical analyses studying aspects of commodity trading and social networks of the traders in the Old Assyrian documentary evidence. These studies have deployed useful methodologies from other fields, including accounting formulas and algorithms, found in software for “big” data analysis, upon the innumerable individuals and commodities mentioned and listed in the tablets.5 Coupled with the recent emphasis in academics on digital humanities, modern methodologies derived from statistics and computer science have finally penetrated the deep ancient world of the Kanesh traders and their networks. 3. Quantitative analysis: women’s social networks in Mesopotamia One such form of data analysis that explores interactions between human actors, a preeminent goal of work on the Old Assyrian evidence—especially the letters—is social network analysis. This relatively new methodology has attracted much attention in the worlds of political science, economics, and sociology to explain especially how different groups in societies can benefit from or gain access to valuable networks of other people. This access in turn results in positive outcomes for either an individual or a society at large. For example, survey data from corporations has been analyzed to show how men and women use their networks within those businesses differently to enhance their job positions. Social network analysis can utilize qualitative or quantitative forms of data, where the survey responses of individuals are quoted, or the number, diversity, and strength of their connections to others in their organization are quantified in a database, and then graphed visually through software programs such as Gephi or NetDraw, in order to create images containing numerous circles connected by lines (Fig. 1). See, for example, Anderson 2017b and Stratford 2017. Attempts to digitize the thousands of Old Assyrian texts have been initiated by the University of Copenhagen (by the Old Assyrian Text Project), but they are difficult to sustain due to limited staffing resources and server space (https://oatp.ku.dk/ [accessed 17 October 2019]). Many older publications of Old Assyrian texts have been digitized as PDFs (but not easily coded in a database like CDLI) by Karl Hecker and are available through OATP (Old Assyrian Text Project). Other collations are available in CDLI (Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative). Edward Stratford has begun a project at Brigham Young University to encode the entire known Old Assyrian corpus into easily readable and searchable HTML (2019). 5 410 Allison Thomason Figure 1. Gephi graph of the Šalim Aššur networks. Courtesy of Adam Anderson (2017b: Figure 2.4.1). The circles represent “nodes” or individual people mentioned in letters (including senders and receivers, who are often listed in greetings), and the lines are “edges,” or some kind of established connection that is carefully defined and coded by the researcher. For example, an edge might refer to when a person writes a letter to another, or when two individuals’ names occur in the same text—thus creating specified connections. This graphing usually requires the expertise of a scholar of Old Assyrian texts who can translate the tablets and identify through prosopography individuals mentioned in them, enabling them to Women’s Property 411 create a database of nodes and edges. The scholar can also encode other aspects of these nodes, including attributes of gender, kinship, ethnicity, or commercial role.6 With the help of a trained statistician or computer scientist, who can submit the data to various mathematical formulas and algorithms, social network analysis arrives at the number and strength of those actors and their connections.7 This methodology is useful for understanding individual or group experiences, where a researcher can pull out (disaggregate) the data according to different coded attributes that have been identified in the texts, such as gender, status, profession, or ethnicity. Reserachers can even disaggregate the data by associated places or objects—an activity that is very hard to do when texts are published as family archives, which is the typical situation of Kanesh tablets, whether they were indeed found in situ together as an archive from one site or named locale, or not (Fig. 2).8 Figure 2. Spreadsheet / Gephi Nodes of Old Assyrian “f” women. Data from Anderson 2017b. It is in this part of the exercise that some find fault, as the prosopography and identification of attributes is fraught with ambiguity due to nonstandardization of encoding methodology for individuals mentioned in the tablets (see Goddeeris, this volume). 7 In my case, that person is Ben Oestermeier, a staff member at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s Interdisciplinary Research and Informatics Scholarship/Digital Humanities Center, who has been instrumental in helping with Gephi. 8 In fact, approximately 4,000 to 5,000 of the nearly 23,000 known Kanesh tablets were extracted from Kültepe in the early twentieth century and sold on the antiquities market, thus losing any type of contextual information. In the latter part of the twentieth century until today, the tablets have been scientifically excavated, with findspots recorded, making it easier to reconstruct physical archives. 6 412 Allison Thomason Social network analysis as a tool for research about people and their behavior was developed by academics in the 1970s, such as social psychologist Stanley Millgram and many economists, but it has also garnered some recent attention for the ancient world in the past few years. In this realm, rather than relying on survey data, historians have studied data about connections between individuals cemented in ancient texts—whether paper and parchment documents from the Medici in Florence, 9 papyri from the Greco-Roman worlds, 10 or tablets from Mesopotamia.11 Anderson’s recent doctoral dissertation from Harvard University tests whether using social network analysis and visualization models can confirm any old insights or lead to any new ones regarding Old Assyrian traders, thus shedding light on the experiences and events of these ancient individuals.12 Regardless of the dataset or time period being analyzed, social network analysis stems philosophically from the Bourdieusian assumption that individuals strive to develop social capital, and that they will use their connections with other people—their social networks—to translate that social capital into material profits, or at least subsistence and comfort.13 Bourdieu concludes that “social capital is a transformed, disguised form of economic capital.”14 Networks are only useful, therefore, if they translate into material benefits, and the normative behaviors of individuals exhibited as reciprocity and trustworthiness present in social networks (or constructed by them) help to augment social capital. In turn, “these levels of trustworthiness and reciprocity are the capital from which further assets are produced.”15 Or as the economist Lin writes, “Social capital is expected to yield better information, better control, or more influences so as to gain relative advantages” in a market, such as the job market. These advantages can be economic, but also include less explicit returns to enhance mental and physical health, including trust, support, social solidarity, and reciprocity. 16 Scholars do not attempt to visualize and analyze social networks for their own sake, but to see how they could translate into some sort of material or psychic advantage or benefit. In the case of gender and its relationship to social capital, Borgatti et al. suggest that women’s ways of acquiring social capital should be divorced from understanding their actions within the public/private (or domestic/public) divide: “Transcending the public/private divide is a ‘vital precondiPadgett and Ansell 1993. For the Hellenistic world, and a nice summary, see Cline 2012. For the Roman world, see Alexander and Danowski 1990. 11 Waerzeggers 2014. 12 Anderson 2017a. 13 In fact, women’s social capital is often deployed close to home in neighborhoods to enable them to simply “get by,” or survive (Borgatti et. al. 2013: 11). 14 Bourdieu 1986: 253. See also Borgatti et. al. 2013: 6. 15 Borgatti et. al. 2013: 1. 16 Lin 2011: 7. 9 10 Women’s Property 413 tion’ for social capital analysis.”17 The idea to jettison the dichotomy of public and private, in light of the fact that it does not apply to contexts outside of the modern Euro-American model, has led many scholars to identify new contexts of agency for women in the ancient world, including “institutional,” “commercial,” and “domestic” spheres of interaction.18 The Old Assyrian trading ventures involved all of these three spheres, and in many occasions, actors in the networks—both male and female—asserted their agency concurrently in these three spheres identified for Mesopotamians. In other terms, identifying separate and discrete spheres of interaction might not be possible for ancient Mesopotamia, as actions often took place in the context of more than one sphere. Ultimately the goal of social network analysis for the Old Assyrian period is to understand how these connections translated into real or perceived advantages and benefits in society. Due to my previous research and interest, I began by analyzing social networks among women that were evident in the Old Assyrian archives. The word “archives” has been used in the past to refer to collections of tablets that can be grouped together from Kanesh, including those from the early twentieth century that were not excavated scientifically and sold on the antiquities market, which was legal throughout the early twentieth century.19 Recently, however, scholars have begun to identify historiographically different types of archives from Kanesh and other sites. They differentiate between “archives” proper (those tablets actually excavated together in situ at Kültepe from Level Ib) and “reconstructed archives,” also called “dossiers” or “files”—or those tablets that were not excavated together, but clearly come from Kanesh and reasonably can be considered together as a related corpus due to the individuals named within them who have some sort of kinship or trading network connections. Fortunately, the publication of thousands of the tablets from Kültepe, whether from reconstructed or excavated archives, has allowed a second phase of studies of the Old Assyrian textual corpus, which builds on earlier initial publications and groupings according to these patronymic kinship relationships. I was fortunate to have access to the open-source data for a limited number of Old Assyrian actors and networks, compiled and analyzed by Anderson in his doctoral dissertation.20 I Borgatti et al. 2013: 4. For Mesopotamia, see Garfinkle 2007, Joannes 2013, and Svärd 2012. For the classical world, Trümper identified “domestic, civic, and sacred spaces” (2012: 291). 19 For a discussion of the excavation history of Kültepe/Kanesh, and the different types of archives, see Veenhof and Eidem 2008: 41–69; Veenhof 2013; and, most recently, Barjomovic 2019: 87–89. 20 Fortunately, the data (spreadsheets and Gephi visualizations) were made available by Anderson in the open-source platform GitHub (https://github.com/admndrsn [accessed 17 October 2019]). This is a prime example of the recent push in the humanities, which has received a great deal of funding, to digitize data and make it available without charge 17 18 414 Allison Thomason soon found, however, great practical challenges to this venture, as does any researcher dealing with the Old Assyrian material. The central principle for organizing publications of the unexcavated tablets from the Old Assyrian period is to group and publish together tablets into “reconstructed archives” of the families of prominent Assyrian traders such as Pūšu-kēn (brother of Tarīšmātum, husband of Lamassī) or Imdīlum (brother of Tarām-Kūbi). Though absolutely necessary due to the nature of family naming in Mesopotamia, this method relies on and is driven by patronymics (for example, if someone is identified as “wife of PN” or “daughter of PN”), and papponymics (“granddaughter of PN”), which both fundamentally devolve from patriarchal views of relationships and power and of spheres of interaction, modern and ancient. In its very basis, the ancient (and modern) patronymic organizational principle that has allowed ready publication of tablets and important prosopographic work nevertheless can create challenges to an approach that seeks to find relationships that formed outside of patrimony—the concerns of social historians. Early in the historiography of the texts from Kanesh, the focus of modern researchers was to reconstruct the archives from a single male individual’s patronymy and to seek to identify trading networks that could clarify questions related to supply and demand, rates of exchange, and, generally, the economy. However, the scholarly approach to finding meaning in the texts has changed recently. If we are trying to understand humans and events that the tablets reference from the perspective of social history, we must “move beyond the confines of a single archive,” as Anderson contends, but also beyond the confines of a patronymic organizational scheme. Rather than trying to reconstruct whole archives, Anderson suggests looking microhistorically at personal narratives of individuals.21 Or as Waerzeggers, who has applied social network analysis to Neo-Babylonian archives, writes, “The worlds documented in the NeoBabylonian archives are not self-contained units; they touch, intersect and overlap.”22 It is this approach to the Kanesh texts that I embrace here. However, the current situation of the dataset is limiting for a non-Old Assyrian expert such as myself. Despite his acknowledgement that tablets were not necessarily housed together as family archives of prominent traders, Anderson has organized his data according to patronymic principles—testing the “excavated” archive of a trader against the “old,” unscientifically excavated texts of another male merchant. Fortunately, some data is available to study a limited number of women’s interactions in these two Old Assyrian trading networks. Anderson was mainly interested in determining who were the “highest ranked” to a wide audience. 21 Anderson 2017a: 42, 65. 22 Waerzeggers 2014: 209, emphasis in original. Waerzegger’s contribution discusses in detail how databases for social network analysis are created using cuneiform tablets and individuals named in them. Women’s Property 415 or “most robust actors” in the networks that he identified, based on the attributes and algorithms to which he chose to subject the data. My study of networks of women is limited, but I was able to extract individuals identified as female and their edges, or “connections,” in Anderson’s GitHub database. These individuals were attested only in the so-far digitized letters regarding Old Assyrian trade, which had been catalogued in the Old Assyrian Text Project database.23 Out of 23,000 estimated total Old Assyrian tablets, 6,000 of these are digitized, and 2,000 of them are letters. Within these 2,000 letters, Anderson identified through prosopography 4,000 nodes (or distinct individuals mentioned in the letters), 126 of whom he identified positively as female with the letter “f” in the gender attribute column of his database.24 There might have been more, due to the fact that Anatolians did not necessarily differentiate gender in their naming traditions. Obviously, there were relatively few women mentioned in letters when compared with men, which we already knew was the case.25 But this relatively small number does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the actions of women were insignificant for themselves or their own circles of interaction. My goal then is to look at the letters in a qualitative manner, from the perspective of the women, not the male traders. This allows me to resituate our imagining of this complex society and the activities of individuals to place women at the center, and we can understand lived experiences from the women’s point of view outward. In my gender-dependent process, I disaggregated these women (nodes) and their connections (edges) and visualized with the software program Gephi the networks among these women, outside of any reference to their male colleagues. I did not expect to find any connections, but to my great surprise, I did. Based on such a small sample, I make the following observations about the women in general. This database is no longer available as open source on the internet. It is probably housed on a server somewhere, but it was inaccessible to me as of this writing. Fortunately, some of the Old Assyrian tablets have been digitized and transliterated through the CDLI project, or the original publications of them have been digitized, even if they are not quite searchable in a database. In addition, Edward Stratford of Brigham Young University is currently working on technology to create an easily readable and searchable database of Old Assyrian texts (ASOR 2019, San Diego). 24 Anderson 2017a: 123. 25 Michel (2016) suggests that this is due more to the text-writing practices and a landbased patriarchy in Mesopotamia, rather than a lack of existence or participation of women in the whole enterprise between Ashur and Anatolia. Women are more frequently attested in the Old Assyrian letters due to the fact that the property of the groups involved was largely not landed. Lion, however, argues that women were frequently represented textually because of the unique situation in which absent husbands forced women to be more active in commerce (2018: 233). 23 416 Allison Thomason Figure 3. Gephi graph of Old Assyrian “f” women’s social networks. Data from 2017b. Women’s Property 417 1. The women positively identified in the letters were from various ethnic backgrounds.26 2. Many of the women show no connections to other women (the stand-alone nodes), although of course they probably had males in their networks. 3. Some of the women do have connections among themselves, independent of any male, as shown in this Gephi graph marking these connections (Fig. 3). 4. The female with the most connections in the network—i.e., the largest social network—is simply named amtum (secondary wife)—and although the amtum is coded as one single individual in the graphs, Anderson ascribes named and unnamed individuals to this commonly attested type in other aspects of his research.27 However, given Anderson’s encoding methodology, the graph appears to show unique individuals with distinct edges. If this is the case, Figure 4 shows that this node, amtum, has quite a large network with other females, of several different ethnicities.28 Figure 4. Network of amtum. Data from Anderson 2017b. Indeed, the identification of a person’s “ethnicity,” itself a problematic term for linguistics and prosopography, is not easy to determine by name alone. It is a modern term that can mean several things—one’s nationality, language, family origins, etc. However, scholars of the Old Assyrian texts have traditionally assigned what I would consider “ethnicity” to individuals based on linguistic markers in their names, and as an “outsider” I am trusting these assignations based on others’ scholarly expertise. For a discussion of the problems inherent in the modern term “ethnicity,” see Jones 1997. 27 I thank Anna Goddeeris for helping me to understand the data complications here. The disambiguation of the data required for complete prosopographic certainty is still in its early stages for the Old Assyrian corpus. However, Anderson’s social network analysis encoding and Gephi visualization methods indicate that each node is a single individual, with uniquely identified edges attached; thus, at least for now, one could possibly infer that the amtum labeled in the graph(s) is a single person, although with some hesitation until more data analysis and encoding can occur. 28 For a discussion of this terminology and translations, see Anderson 2017a: 160ff. He confirms, “Marriage, whether aššatum or amtum, meant forging closer ties and moving into more central positions within both the Assyrian and Anatolian networks, in order to increase in wealth and social standing” (2017a: 160). 26 418 Allison Thomason Figure 5. Ego-network of Šišahšušar. Courtesy of Adam Anderson (2017b: Fig. 2.16). Anderson’s data does not definitively ascribe a single individual identity to the amtum identified in my Gephi analysis; therefore, we could be viewing the network of several different wives/amtū active in the letters. Thus, this brief quantitative analysis and visualization via Gephi graph is inconclusive at the moment, dependent on whether the term amtum in Anderson’s database can be definitively identified as a single individual.29 The inconclusiveness and small sample of According to Anderson (personal communication, November 2019) the word amtum stood for him as a “type” and not an individual during his initial encoding of the data. 29 Women’s Property 419 this quantitative analysis, therefore, was helpful in highlighting the questions we could ask of the data, even if the questions cannot be answered definitively after such a brief study. We can in essence “ground-truth” such networks on a casestudy basis by examining published letters regarding other amtū of the Assyrian traders. Anderson has discussed in detail the social network he discerned of one amtum, Šišahšušar, wife of the “prominent trader” Aššur-nādā, who was ethnically Anatolian. 30 He notes that Šišahšušar was not a concubine, slave, or “maid,” as some translate, but a “secondary business partner who enters a contract to manage the affairs of the principal contract holder,” and that their relationship was “entirely professional.” But she did have three children with Aššurnādā: two sons who stayed with her in Kanesh and a daughter, Ištar-lamassī, who became the amtum of another Assyrian trader, Puzur-Ištar.31 Šišahšušar’s own network, called an ego-network, was almost as large (72 percent) as that of her husband (Fig. 5). 4. Qualitative analysis: social networks and social capital Anderson suggests that Šišahšušar’s social network was centered on her experience as a native living in Kanesh and conducting Aššur-nādā’s affairs there when her husband was almost always away in Ashur or trading elsewhere in Anatolia. Anderson reports eleven letters written between Aššur-nādā and Šišahšušar.32 Two of these letters were written to Aššur-nādā from Šišahšušar. In one letter alone, Šišahšušar reports that she exchanged silver, textiles, barley, and wheat with no less than nine other people, all male. She also collected animal skins from one of his agents and drew on credit from other merchants. She received jars of lard, sides of beef, and other rare foodstuffs (narûtum, mūṣum, and ewasum; untranslated).33 She apparently requested that her husband seek out and send her a specific “good quality” garment for a female in her network, Ahar, thus serving as a middlewoman in that exchange network.34 It was Šišahšušar’s job to reassure Ahar that Aššur-nādā would bring it when he returned, so This brings to the forefront the idea that any database and its visualization of networks is dependent on how data is first encoded by a single Assyriologist or project. Currently, only grammatical principles and prosopographic methodologies allow for gender encoding in the Old Assyrian letters, not in fact context. Furthermore, encoding attributes are not necessarily standardized across Assyriological data encoders or encoding projects, although such efforts to standardize are under way. 30 Michel discusses the problems and challenges in identifying women as amtum or aššatum in the OA corpus (2008: 214). 31 Anderson 2017a: 70. Michel also discusses the letters of this woman (2001: 476–480 = AKT 1, 1 and OAA 1, 50–58). 32 Five were published by Michel (2001: 478–80). Several are available in CDLI. 33 This causes Michel to note that letters sent to woman frequently mention obscure foodstuffs for “la vie quotidienne” (2001: 478). 34 Michel 2001: 480 = OAA 1, 50. 420 Allison Thomason that “she wouldn’t get angry.” In relation to anger, there is a reference to Šišahšušar getting “angry” in a letter to Aššur-nādā, but only one—she is not “constantly complaining” to her husband, from what I can tell. As an operator, I can imagine that a lot of Šišahšušar’s time was spent smoothing over affairs and lubricating the wheels of commerce in Kanesh for herself and her family. Anderson contends that an Anatolian wife’s network was probably dominated by native or Anatolian connections, including an especially strong or close connection with another Anatolian wife of an Assyrian trader. According to Anderson, this was a great boon to the entrepreneurial enterprises of Aššur-nādā. “We can begin to see the great advantage an Assyrian merchant would have by taking a second wife in Anatolia,” 35 he writes—or what the anthropologists would call participating in “exogamous marriage.” This falls back on the old assumption that public and private are separate, and that men used social networks developed by women within families (i.e., not “in public”) to enhance their “public” standing.36 But I argue that we may turn these circles, figuratively. For example, could Šišahšušar have been using her connections to increase her own social capital (in houses or out) in Kanesh or within the larger Aššur-nādā network, which extended to Ashur? Perhaps she was trying to position her half-Anatolian children to be more successful in the network than those children within the Assyrian family of Aššur-nādā. In fact, Anderson’s Gephi analysis shows that due to her own social capital, Šišahšušar had power or rank over a young Assyrian son of Aššur-nādā’s merchant colleague, whom she admonished in one letter for not performing an important task. Šišahšušar was no doubt a “robust actor” in the family trade, although according to patronymics and Assyrian law, on “paper” as a non-Assyrian amtum, she should not have had such relevance to the economic health of the firm. Most importantly, her network and rank within Aššurnādā’s firm secured her survival, if not comfort, as well as access to commodities such as food or silver in Kanesh (although she tries to extract more goods in one letter, claiming that “all is lost”). When looking at published letters in general, an Anatolian or Assyrian woman’s social capital certainly translated into some sort of material benefit for her and others, including, but not limited to: 1. 2. 3. 4. Increase in silver (economic capital). Increase in distribution of textiles. Receipt of movable property. Increase/maintenance of status or reputation as good worker/weaver, honest broker, good wife, member of an accomplished family. Anderson 2017a: 75. The published letters also indicate that Anatolian women had connections with many other Assyrians living in Anatolia or traveling through Kanesh (Michel 2008). 35 36 Women’s Property 421 5. Checking up on husband and other relatives, male or female, to ensure they followed through with tasks. 6. Looking after or transacting with caretakers, male and female, for their children or those of other traders.37 In some cases, but not all, the social capital was transformed into economic capital. To use Bourdieu’s terminology, women competently used “investment strategies” such as acquiring and exchanging commodities in Kanesh, resisting demands by their husbands for reasons of self-interest,38 taking other males and females to court to receive a judge-induced financial judgment,39 or pulling rank on a subordinate. All of these social capital strategies were “directly usable in the short or long term.”40 This fact is ironic, as the female wives and relatives of traders discuss in the letters their current discomfort in regards to survival. I assert that such “plaintive wails” are not limited to women in the Old Assyrian letters, and, moreover, we see now that they are but another tool to further their own situations, and some women were in fact quite wealthy with social capital.41 The women in the Old Assyrian letters consistently refer to their physical well-being and that of their children—their general situations of survival and comfort. Two situations emerge from the letters with complaints. First, some of the letters of wives to their husbands begin with the stock phrase “We are well, your youngsters and your people are well,” but then go on to claim the most desperate of situations. Second, the word for “misery,” manāhtum in Old Assyrian, can also be translated as “expenses,” thus equating emotional and economic health.42 In the letters, the women often indicate that they had sold everything just to pay for food, using the verb laqātum (scraping together), which implies selling items as a last Such is the case of Kapsiya, Assyrian wife in Ashur of Ali-abum, who reports in letters to him from Kanesh that she transacted with men and women in Ashur to look after her children in exchange for silver (Veenhof 2010: 140–141 = KT V, 40). This settlement tablet contains several clauses regarding the fact that the daughter whom Kapsiya entrusted to the care of other families had died, and she expected some financial renumeration. Among other things, Kapsiya “has a claim” on the figurines of the gods made of gold owned by the caretaker family’s mother, Hudida. 38 For example, a subordinate Asānum complains to Kulīya that his wife, Abāya, would not go with him and “refused to talk to me in the karum [and] … she has caused me a lot of trouble until you met her personally” (Veenhof 2010: 111 = KT V, 18). There is even suggestion in this letter that Asānum “put his hands on her head” in a possible instance of physical violence. 39 For example, see the tablet recording the verdict of a debt dispute between two women, Kapsiya and Būṣi, taken to judges (Veenhof 2010: 184 = KT V, 70). 40 Bourdieu 1986: 5. 41 Veenhof 2010: 100 = KT V, 11. 42 Ibid. 37 422 Allison Thomason resort for survival. This is desperate rhetoric indeed, but the women are resourceful: they ultimately ask often for the silver to pay debts, and they indicate that they have opportunities to borrow silver from other family members or other trading networks, either to procure food or settle debts—they use their social connections, then, in their own and their family’s self-interest.43 As a useful comparison, Joannes makes the argument that the social networks of women within Neo-Babylonian families were used to advance the interests (e.g., social capital) of the family as a collective, rather than any individual woman within it.44 Is this not, however, still defining the experience of these women according to their membership in the patriarchy—that is, suggesting that they only contribute and gain in a collective headed by males? In contrast, for Greek women, Lee points out that increasing the social capital of the family might also enhance the individual social capital of a single woman, whose connections (whether bridging between families or bonding within her family) give her clout and status; in other words, her connections increase her social capital within the family itself.45 Despite their being outnumbered in the textual record and the “real” marketplace, women such as Šišahšušar indeed participated individually and independently, as well as within their communities, and their social capital was vital to enhancing material benefits for themselves and their networks or families. 5. Social networks and exchange of information There is no doubt from the letters that all persons of any gender involved in the Old Assyrian circumstances gossiped, which I define here as exchanging information with members of a network about either insiders or outsiders, for both supportive and detrimental purposes, often when the subject of conversation is not present. Gossip induces anxiety for men and women in any society, but especially those of the ancient world, where marriage was arranged as a political and economic transaction. The possibility of “detrimental gossip” could negatively affect the status of the family, whose positive reputation was necessary for influence in politics, property relations, religion, and commerce. It is especially concerning to men in a patriarchal society when women gossip with each other outside of their discourses with men, and these conversations and gatherings are considered suspect and secretive, even witchy, since they are inaccessible to men. We see that gossip is also a concern of the Old Assyrian traders. In one letter, the Assyrian trader Ennum-Aššur writes to Nuhšātum, his wife in Kanesh: For example, Abāya is the co-sender, along with several other (male) traders, of a letter to Kulīya in Kanesh. They report that many transactions, some sealed by Abāya, related to this trader’s debts are taken care of in Ashur by the group (Veenhof 2010: 102 = KT V, 13). Other examples abound in Michel 2001: 419–511. 44 Joannes 2013. 45 Lee 2017. 43 Women’s Property 423 “Why do you listen to gossip unceasingly and you report that people say ‘they mistreat the young boy and girl’ and they say ‘what about them?’ Stop listening to gossip! Don’t listen and don’t get angry! Since I have arrived in Ashur, everything has been wrapped up financially.”46 In this case, both husband and wife are concerned about their reputations among their social cohort—including her sister and his niece who are talking to each other—fearing that people are accusing them of poor financial prowess and mistreating (their?) children: “Your sister is friends with my niece and you keep listening to their gossip and false claims. If the young boy and girl were really being mistreated, then why doesn’t she do something about it herself?” 47 In another example, Ababaya writes to her husband to spur him to action, “Your sister talks a lot with your father and she tries to make him forget you!”48 Women also wrote letters to other women, either singly or among larger social groups. As just one example, the relationship between two women is well documented in a series of letters written by Lamāša, who is part of the network of Pušu-kēn, to Musā, who was in Kanesh. The relationship centered around the exchange of items of movable property that Lamāša was keen to track, probably because she owned them outright. For example, Lamāša requests Musā to send “3 textiles, 2 grinding stones, 200 jars of beer, 20 sacks of wheat, 7 ‘objects’, along with sealed tablets found in a jar” from the house in Kanesh to Ashur. In another letter, Lamāša writes that “3 bronze pinchers, 3 spoons, 3 forks and many other metal utensils” had been with her for eight years and she wanted them sent to her by Musā. At one point, Lamāša reminds Musā, “You are my sister, you are my mistress, and you and me should love each other.”49 The kinship relationship between Musā and Lamāša is hard to trace, thus it is possible that use of the term “sister” was a fictive imagining of a kinship tie, meant to remind Musā of her connections (and trustworthiness or reciprocity) to Lamāša.50 6. Social networks and movable property Old Assyrian letters such as those exchanged between Lamāša and Musā can also shed light on the access that women had to “movable property,” and the importance of such property to both the woman and the trade. Influenced by Meyers’s important work on female associations attested in the Hebrew Bible and Israel,51 I have argued elsewhere that there must have existed a “parallel” Michel 2001: 509 = AKT 3:79–80. The Old Assyrian letters use the phrase lā áš-ta-name-e for “let me not hear.” 47 Michel 2001: 510 = AKT 3, 79; emphasis mine. 48 Veenhof 2010, KT V: 11. 49 Michel 2001: 486 = BIN 4, 90. 50 The fictive, and therefore symbolic, use of family terms was common in the Old Assyrian letters. 51 Meyers 1999. See also Taylor 2011. 46 424 Allison Thomason network of women trading movable property with other women in Anatolia and Ashur. The movable objects have some other personal value, as gifts or part of dowries; they are individual and unique items, usually requiring rare material and specialized labor to produce, and they were important to the household or individuals. Of course, frequent mention in the letters attest that women traded all sorts of regularly available commodities with anyone necessary, buying and selling their textiles and consumables such as jars of beer, sacks of grain, bundles of reeds, wood logs, silver, copper, and gold enumerated in weight as mina, shekels, or ingots.52 I am here defining “movable property”53 as different from these fully exchangeable commodities, although they can certainly be sold for them.54 Michel notes that marriage and divorce contracts from the Kanesh corpus contain references to marriage gifts, bride-prices, and dowries, where husband and wife have similar rights to the marriage properties, but they rarely itemize the properties, whether movable or landed.55 The published letters reveal that when women did receive or send movable property apart from consumables or commodities, these included a wide variety of items: wood boxes; grinding stones; belt buckles and garment pins; textiles, plain and fancy, for all uses; copper utensils and vessels or votive objects; finished jewelry of any sort of metal/substance; and furniture.56 And although the bulk commodities garner much clay space, these singular items also receive some discussion. For example, Tarām-kūbi writes to Innāya: You told me to save the bracelets and jewelry that are there, you can use them to pay for food … but where are they? You have ransacked the house and left it empty. I have no wheat or barley left. I had to bring a little “emblem” [votive offering] to the temple. I got rid of everything I had Of course, some women in Old Assyrian letters (mainly concerned with trade) also owned landed property, especially urban houses, as well as slaves, all of which they bought and sold, rented and leased. 53 Dalley translates the term numātum as “movable property” (1980: 67–68), although it refers to property that has reverted to a wife after her husband’s death. Roth (1989–1990) translates the general term udê bīti as “miscellaneous household goods,” which can be equated with “movable property.” Archaeologically, these items would be subsumed under the category of “material culture,” and art historically, “portable objects” (see Thomason 2014). 54 Such was the case with Ištar-lamassī’s son, Iliya, who attempted to protect movable property of “value,” including textiles, boxes, and a mirror (KT 91: k348). Unfortunately, to pay off debt, the portable goods of the deceased mother’s household eventually were sold off for silver (Michel 2016). 55 Michel 2008: 213. 56 It also included some valuable and rare “rings of meteoric iron” that Ababaya requests of her husband, Kuliya (Veenhof 2010: 100 = AKT 5, 11). Michel (2015) also discusses the movable property of the Kanesh households. 52 Women’s Property 425 on hand … why then do you accuse me of extravagance? It all goes to food! Today, I live in an empty house—send me silver.57 She also mentions that she has deposited a special garment into the temple of god Amurrum.58 She reports to Innāya that she has “assembled the bronze for an offering to the ‘young maiden’, and our silver pins and lapis lazuli we have given to the city (as tax).” Many references in the letters also attest that women owned their own seals (sometimes used by others), and indeed a few of their sealings have been found in the glyptic record.59 Recent analyses of dowry inventories and laws concerning them in southern Mesopotamia demonstrate that dowries (šeriktum [Old Babylonian] or nudunnû [Neo-Babylonian]) were used to transfer wealth within and between families, or in the case of consecrated women,60 to transfer wealth to the next generation of their families or within the nadītu communities (which in some cases overlapped).61 In other words, dowries were the material form of exogamy / bridging social networking connections. Here we have economic capital transformed into social capital. The movable property items listed in the dowries’ inventories included, as Westbrook writes, personal clothing, jewelry, and toilet articles of the bride, together with quantities of oil, then a large number of household utensils, in particular, kitchen utensils such as millstones and cooking-pots [metal or other], and often a substantial amount of furniture, such as tables, chairs, and (more than one) bed. … Noteworthy in these lists is the precision with which the items are noted—this is particularly so with the consumable element—the quantities of oil contained in the jars that the bride brought with her.62 The dowry inventories from southern Mesopotamia also included textile tools such as wool combs, loom beams, and spindles, although it is the finished texMichel 2001: 466 = CCT 3, 24. Michel 2001: 466–467. 59 For example, Waqqurtum mentions sending textiles in a bag under her own seal to an associate, Buzāzu (Michel 2001: 443 = BIN 4, 96). For a discussion of women in business and female seal owners in general, see McCarthy 2016. 60 Most recently, De Graef has examined the economic status and agency of nadītu women of Old Babylonian Sippar (2018). 61 I thank an anonymous reviewer of this chapter for this clarification. 62 Westbrook, 1988: 90–91. Dalley finds many other items listed in the dowries: leather bags, various decorations and trimmings for garments, wooden utensils and vessels, livestock, reed baskets, vessels full of various oils, headdresses, vessels of perfume, animal hair rugs, hair combs, boxes, and chests. For Neo-Babylonian dowries, Roth also notes the listing of “butter churns, lamps, grates, censors and stands.” She writes, “While these goods were of importance to the bride herself, it is hard to escape the conclusion they were of less importance to the contracting parties than the more economically significant silver, real estate, or slaves” (1990: 18–19). 57 58 426 Allison Thomason tiles, not the tools, that are listed most frequently in the southern dowries and discussed in the Old Assyrian letters.63 Archaeological excavations throughout Mesopotamia and Anatolia, including at Kanesh, have unearthed such tools, often in the contexts of houses or “industrial” areas. The southern dowries also list self-care items that obviously had some economic, personal, or cultural value, called either “toilet items,” “hairdresser baskets,” or “barber’s tools” in translations, but these are not discussed in the Old Assyrian letters, perhaps because they had little exchange value. We know that the dowry ensured the wife’s security and status in the marriage and after, but also that husbands often had access to the dowry as capital to support the family. However, in the case of divorce, both laws and contracts indicate that the husband had to pay back every shekel of the dowry he “borrowed” during the marriage before the wife left his house.64 Daughters (and of course sons) could inherit their mother’s dowry, demonstrating intergenerational woman-to-woman exchange of movable property.65 I can imagine copper vessels and garments or rugs handed down and moved around for decades as daughters entered marriages and moved into their own or in-laws’ houses, as Roth notes that the items in Neo-Babylonian dowry inventories were also fairly consistent: “Each bride brought into the family different garments and jewelry for herself and different furniture and utensils for the household. The specifics of a bride’s dowry, particularly of household and personal goods, would depend upon her circumstances: whether she came from a wealthy or modest family, whether she moved into a new household independent of her mother-in-law, or joined an existing well equipped one. Although all dowry lists included selections from the same categories of property and similar items, no two lists or inventories are identical” (1989–1990: 1). 64 Such is the case for Kannūtum, the wife of the trader Ilī-bāni. In one letter, Ilī-bāni must go through all sorts of machinations to ensure that some silver, which was Kannūtum’s own capital and which one of his representatives had “borrowed” to pay his own debt, be compensated in full by himself or others (see also Veenhof 2010: 142, 159 = KT V, 41, 51). Veenhof writes, “The whole affair raises questions about the financial relationship between Ilī-bāni and his wife [not named by Veenhof], who apparently had her own capital; the just mentioned measures to be taken in order to indemnify her must have been a real nuisance for her husband, since they interfered with his commercial activities” (2010: 129). 65 In Greece, the garments and self-care items formed a “sex-linked” component of the dowry, the woman’s “trousseau,” and they had a separate word for this group of personal items (Lee 2015). But this is not the case in Mesopotamia, where Roth concludes at least for Neo-Babylonian dowries that while “the husband appears to have little or no interest in [the gender-linked items of a dowry], they should not be minimized; they can help the wife set up her new household independent of her family and contribute significantly, apart from her husband’s means and resources, to her personal comfort and adornment (clothing, jewelry, perhaps a slave as personal attendant). The fact remains that such items are included in our documents, and hence there was a need to record and often to itemize them” (1989–1990: 36). 63 Women’s Property 427 still occurs today. The only testament or will we have for an Old Assyrian woman was for Ištarlamassī, a widow living in Kanesh, who left all of her substantial assets to her daughter from her first marriage living in Ashur, despite the fact that she probably had an Anatolian husband.66 Related letters indicate that after Ištar-lamassī’s funeral expenses were paid, all of the movable and other property of the mother’s estate went to the daughter (although this could be because her two sons had died around the same time as their mother). Regardless of the inheritance of the sons, laws and wills from southern Mesopotamia indicate that in some cases, a Mesopotamian woman could divide her estate equally among her heirs, including daughters; they were “free to dispose of property as they wished.”67 The daughter does not become sole heir only by accident of her father’s or brother’s death. Still, it is difficult to find anywhere in the Old Assyrian (or cuneiform) record direct references to a mother passing down a valued family heirloom, such as a single piece of jewelry, from her dowry to her daughter’s. Archaeologically, we can see this in heirlooms found in tombs, such as those of the Nimrud queens of Assyria, and we should not discount the fact that these objects had more than economic value—they could possess apotropaic or other magical properties.68 Whether they owned them outright or not, women also were the guardians of the movable property of the houses in Kanesh and Ashur—including the tablets in archives—and were responsible for transporting or ensuring the safety of these symbolically precious objects.69 The activities of several women named in the letters relate to their roles as keepers of the family property. Examples include the following: − Ab-šalim must arrange for a garment to be delivered to a female servant and her child in Kanesh.70 − Ab-šalim must deliver a silver pin to a young servant in her husband’s house in Kanesh. She also must guard tablets in family archive.71 − Ab-šalim is asked by her brother to send silver buckles to him. She also has to receive shipment of furniture that has been sent to the house.72 − Tarīš-mātum, sister of Pušu-kēn, must ensure that a statuette of a god is Veenhof 2008. De Graef 2018: 141–144. 68 See Gansell 2018 for a discussion of the properties of objects in the Nimrud queens’ tombs. 69 See, for example, a group of objects that Buzāzu, Pušu-kēn’s son, entrusts to Lamāsa (Michel 2001: 484 = CCT 4, 36b and 37a). 70 Michel 2001: 462 = BIN 4, 68. 71 Michel 2001: 463 = HUCA 40, 59–60. 72 Michel 2001: 458 = BIN 6, 20. 66 67 428 Allison Thomason offered in the house shrine, so that evil will be banished from their business.73 − Tarīš-mātum also donates votive offerings, on recommendations of a divination priest, to help sick relatives (young children).74 − A letter from the male trader Šu-Labān to the women Šupiahšušar and Hattītum (daughter of Tarīš-mātum, who lives in Kanesh) includes a discussion of garment pins and also discusses how another trader will bring them a sack with vessels, garments, and jewelry—which he requests for them to send him while he travels.75 − Maganika, daughter of Hattītum and Aššur-rabi, is scolded by her father that she left the house unattended, allowing possible access for robbers. He then asks her to send some silver belt buckles to him as he travels. The women curating personal and family property, who in some cases were at least temporarily placebound due to their status as overseers, relied upon their social networks to enhance and protect what was entrusted to them. 7. Conclusion This exercise has shown that social network analysis is useful for answering some historical questions, as in the case of Anderson’s research. Equally as important, the quantitative method also leads us to develop questions about the lived experiences of women in Anatolia and Mesopotamia—something qualitative analysis of the words and their textual contexts can help to answer. The problems that arise in careful prosopographic identification of individuals in the corpus, which social network analysis relies upon, makes it difficult to identify some individuals in the tablets, much less their social relationships in aggregate form. Thus, when the questions of social history are asked of the texts, it is equally important to apply a “microhistorical” or “case study” qualitative approach to the textual sources. As for other methodological concerns, I am well aware that I have relied in this study so far on the existence of separate “males” and “females” in Mesopotamian society, and I am well aware of the troubles with this dichotomy for the ancient past. Certainly, the Old Assyrian and related texts record such aspects of human existence, and I have focused today especially on only half of that dichotomy, women.76 But we do not have to accept the other baggage loaded onto these old “donkeys.” The typical assumption, which Michel 2001: 450 = KTS 1, 24. Michel 2001: 451 = KTS 1, 25a. 75 Michel 2001: 456 = CCT 3, 31. 76 I have not here addressed the idea of gender as fluid and performative of the third wave of feminism, but suggest that the actions of the women in the Old Assyrian networks can be used of evidence of the incongruence of trying to fit gender dichotomies with the ancient evidence (see Garcia-Ventura 2018 and this volume). 73 74 Women’s Property 429 seems to persist to some extent among scholars today, is that women in the Old Assyrian trading networks were not the prime drivers of action or profit—and this attitude derives from the fact that the overwhelming majority of letters were written to and from males. If we forge ahead despite this fact, and choose to place the women mentioned in the letters at the center of analysis and see the world from their standpoint, our understanding of the experiences of past people can only be enriched. When we consider social capital as a way to determine the “agency” or “power” of a person or group of people, we can see that women in the Old Assyrian letters threw their energy into their social networks, with other men or women or whomever, in order to receive social capital in return. This capital took the form of commodities, information and knowledge, or movable property—as attested in innumerable legal and economic documents not only from Kanesh, but throughout southern Mesopotamia. In their quest to survive and thrive, individuals such as Šišauštar, Ab-šalim, and Ištar-lamassī frequently relegated gender to the back of the caravan. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the editors of the volume, Beth Alpert Nakhai, Katrien De Graef, Agnès Garcia-Ventura, and Anna Goddeeris, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their careful stewardship, constructive comments, and astute editing of this manuscript. 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