Reinas y concubinas de palacio en el Próximo Oriente: su visibilidad en la cultura material del III y II milenio a.n.e.

Abstract

This work focuses on the study of the role and functions played by queens, princesses and other women involved in palaces in the Ancient Near East during III and II millennia BC. The main aim of this study is the understanding of the visibility and agency of those women both in the palace and in that society. For this purpose, I have analysed the contemporary material culture from an interdisciplinary perspective, studying sources both from the textual and visual record to avoid possible incorrect interpretations and to propound hypotheses supported by both kinds of sources. Due to this approach, I have been able to ascertain that some of the queens and princesses of the III millennium BC played a very relevant role, maybe even higher than her husbands or fathers. Those women took part in important social and religious events, which sometimes were exclusively female celebrations; they participated in the palace administration and had both women and men working for them; they were the authors of literary compositions and art and architecture patrons; they were also mothers who used family portraits to show their political power. At the end of the III millennium BC, the concubines of the kings began to gain importance and to perform the duties of the queens, despite what the relationship between them was sometimes even emotional. However, from the Old Babylonian Period onwards, royal women and concubines, unlike women of lower status, started to lack in the sources, and when they are named or represented is to show how they were used as political instruments by the kings. Possibly, this was the result of a transformation of the conception that the kings had of their wives and daughters rather than a real change in the role played by those women.