This short series aims to examine the representations of the female nude in Mesopotamia, determining any changes that might have taken place in our perception, from the ancient world through to modern society. Visual and textual sources from ancient Greece, Rome and the Italian Renaissance will also be lending a helping hand in exploring, comparing and challenging the narrative of the female nude.
Before delving into the nude form, it's important to recognise the immense struggle and hard work taken to have reached this stage. It is crucial to examine the publications which have sparked academics to explore the heavy gender biased world we live in, from past through to the present.
Feminist theory and gender studies are somewhat recent developments within the archaeological discipline, making their first appearance in the 1980s with critical works from Conkey and Spector in 1984, revolutionising the field's gender biases. The movement observed and stressed how underrepresented women were professionally in archaeology, and following this progression, identified the challenges brought about by gender biases in the past. The field has seen the archaeologist making assumptions regarding gender - most of which remain unexamined - but progression in the field led the way to household archaeology, an approach which helped in the uncovering of invisible women from the past and present.
Female associated activities - regarded as ‘domestic’ activities - such as cooking and weaving have not been subjected to social analysis; instead, they are more commonly ignored due to archaeologists not believing they held any significance in the past.
In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir published ‘The Second Sex’, a text that would become revolutionary to the way we perceived women in an inherently male world. The application of her writings to the narratives of gender in the ancient and modern world fits like a hand in a glove. “A man’s body has meaning by itself, disregarding the body of the woman, whereas the woman’s body seems devoid of meaning without reference to the male”; a prevalent statement from the Second Sex which speaks airs of truth with regards to the gender imbalance throughout our historical narrative, where the woman has been the other, while the man the absolute. Women in the archaeological record have been represented through text, statues, paintings, jewellery and domestic items which have similarly formed to narrate their lives in this way.
Control of one sex by the other is something that has been occurring for thousands of years; the historical record has seen women dominated by men both publicly and privately. Control can also be applied to the sexual allure of women, wherein in Mesopotamia this appeal was regulated as it was regarded as an intrinsic aspect of daily life. In antiquity and Renaissance periods, however, men controlled the level of public female nudity in which women were almost always fully covered - deities were depicted naked, but they were seen as sexless metaphysical entities.
The upcoming articles in the series will investigate the connection between language and form, how textual sources from Mesopotamia and the classical world reflect the nude female form through material culture, such as statues, figurines and paintings.
Text: Olivia Berry. MENAMArchaeology. Copyright 2022. Images: 1. Paul Fernandez through Flickr 2. Old Babylonian nude women. Wikicommons
3.Simone De Beauvoir, 2020. Time Magazine. Albert Harlingue—Roger Viollet Collection.
Further reading:
Briz I Godino et al., 2016. The Archaeology of Household: An Introduction. London: Oxbow Books.
Brook, B., 1999. Feminist Perspectives on the Body. (Revised edition). London: Longman.
De Beauvoir, S., 2015. The Second Sex. (Revised edition). London: Vintage Classics.
Wright, R, P. 1996. (eds.) Gender and Archaeology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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