Property of Sekhmet

Behold:



These figures appear on the back pillar of a magical healing statue, Turin 3031, which portrayed a man holding a Horus cippus. Only the lower part has survived.

If that's an accurate rendering of "Sekhmet the Great, beloved of Ptah", then her phallus seems to have slid down to her knees. Kákosy compares her to other lioness-headed, ithyphallic figures, from Karnak and Hibis, and also "the statue in Naples inv. 1065 back pillar right side ref V.1.", which alas I seem to have neglected to photocopy.

There are enough examples of this figure - the ithyphallic lioness-headed goddess - to say that it was definitely A Thing, a rare example of androgyny in Egyptian religion. But what did it mean to the ancients? If it's a syncretism between Mut or Sekhmet and a specific male god or gods, then why not name them? Perhaps it was comparable to pantheistic figures - showing that the deity in question had the powers of all the gods, male and female?

ETA: Figures labelled as Sekhmet appear elsewhere on the same statue - which makes sense for a goddess associated with sickiness and healing. The goddess takes various forms: holding two snakes; holding a long double-headed snake ("Sekhmet who subdues the Rebel"); as a lion-headed uraeus, presented with the wedjat by a baboon (presumably a reference to the tale of the Distant Goddess); and as a lion lying on a shrine, wearing the atef crown ("Sekhmet the Great who dwells in the City" (perhaps Thebes)).

Nefertum also makes multiple appearances, firstly to the left of Horus on the cippus, in the form of a lotus with tall plume hung with two pairs of menits. The texts on the cippus which refer to this symbol name "Horus the Saviour", who Kákosy speculates was identified with Nefertem in this case. Kákosy writes that this symbol was "a potent emblem" and says that Nefertem and his lotus often appear in magic; Horus on the papyrus, which appears on the right side of the cippus opposite Neferterm's symbol as its "counterpart", "may have been the symbol of rejuvenation and freshness of health" as well as the union of male and female (many goddesses hold a papyriform sceptre).

There are several other interesting figures, such as Sobek pulling a snake out of his mouth and two cats flanking a sistrum. "Khonsu the Great who came forth from the Nun" appears in the form of a crocodile on a pedestal with a falcon-head and sun-disc emerging from its back.

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Kákosy, László. Egyptian Healing Statues in Three Museums in Italy: Turin, Florence, Naples. Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali, Soprintendenza al Museo delle antichità egizie, 1999.

Egyptian hieroglyphs at Mnamon: Ancient writing systems in the Mediterranean: A critical guide to electronic resources

Ancient Egypt for kids - Egyptian Crowns and Headdresses of Gods

A Very Remote Period Indeed: A blog reviewing recent archaeological publications having to do with Paleolithic archaeology, paleoanthropology, lithic technology, hunter-gatherers and archaeological theory.

Untangling an Accounting Tool and an Ancient Incan Mystery (NYT, 2 January 2016)

Diodorus Siculus describes the Assyrian king Sardanapallus (perhaps Ashurbanipal) as a transvestite / transgender bisexual and blames him for the destruction of the Assyrian Empire - although the Greek historian's account mostly sounds like a pretty ordinary war.

Ancient Egyptian herbal wines (Patrick E. McGovern, PNAS 106(18), 5 May 2009) | Archaeological team prepares 4,000-year-old Hittite meals (Slate, 8 September 2016)

Ancient 'Mad Libs' Papyri Contain Evil Spells of Sex and Subjugation (LiveScience, 20 May 2016)

Scientist debunks nomadic Aboriginal 'myth' (GA, 9 October 2007) | Waking our sleeping Indigenous languages: 'we're in the midst of a resurgence' (GA, 31 August 2016) | Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth, DNA study confirms (GA, 21 September 2016) | World-first genome study reveals rich history of Aboriginal Australians (ABC, 22 September 2016) | Indigenous Australians know we're the oldest living culture – it's in our Dreamtime (GA, 22 September 2016)

A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity (NYT, 30 November 2009). Review of the exhibition The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.

How human sacrifice helped to enforce social inequality (Aeon, 8 June 2016)

The Exotic Animal Traffickers of Ancient Rome (The Atlantic, 30 March 2016)

Female King Ruled in Canaan, Carving Suggests (National Geographic, 10 April 2009)

Scientists use 'virtual unwrapping' to read ancient biblical scroll reduced to 'lump of charcoal' (GA, 21 September 2016)

Unearthing the origins of East Africa's lost civilization (CNN, 19 October 2015)

A chapter on Hittite birth rituals, discussing "binding" in sorcery and mythology:

"Here [Text F in Beckman's catalogue] the goddess IŠTAR speaks to the goddess Malliya, who speaks to the goddess Pirwa, she she in turn to Kamrusepa, who 'yoked her horses and drove to the Great River, whom she conjured by incantation'. Then all that had been bound was loosed, through the ritual agency of Kamrusepa.

This goddess is found frequently in the circle of IŠTAR (ie the Hurrian Shausuga), Malliya (a river goddess), Pirwa and Askasepa, the 'genius' of the Gateway. Pirwa, both god and goddess, honoured by songs in Nesite and Luwian, is described as the god upon a Silver Horse and depicted in the iconography of Kültepe/Kanesh with chariot and team of horses... The logographic writing IŠTAR represented a deity, at once male and female, of War and Love." (All emphases mine.)

What caught my eye here, of course, was the hints of gender ambiguity; but also - look at all those goddesses! The article goes on to describe Kamrusepa's healing a newborn child and calming the anger of "the Hattic god Telepinus".

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Beckman, Gary M. Hittite birth rituals. Wiesbaden, O. Harrassowitz, 1983.
Pringle, Jackie. "Hittite Birth Rituals". in Averil Cameron and Amélie Kuhrt. Images of Women in Antiquity. Croom Helm, London and Sydney, 1983.

The idea that the Sumerian term kar.kid (and its Akkadian equivalent ḫarimtu) consistently means "sex worker" has been put under the microscope. A proper analysis of this may have to wait until I can copy Julia Assante's article on the subject without cutting off half the pages this time. In the meantime, a short excerpt from a recent paper:

"In the list the word nidnu, although seemingly without a context, can be thought to denote (although not necessarily) 'wages' of a prostitute. After all, the prostitute is termed in Sumerian as MUNUSKAR-KID. As Sallaberger brings to my attention, the early writing of KAR-KID as KAR-KÌD/KÈ(AK) points to the etymology of the term as 'a worker at the quay/market place', although a less literal meaning can be thought of, such as 'a (woman), engaged in trade', or what in modern parlance would be called (offensively) as 'a
working girl'."

(Let us put aside the fact that "prostitute" is also an offensive term.) Were there no women who worked in the marketplace or at the quays other than sex workers? The author, Yoram Cohen, has considered Assante's argument that kar.kid/ḫarimtu has been misinterpeted, but considers it to have been "safely dismissed". Yet again and again there are texts he quotes in which "woman worker" would make just as much sense as "sex worker" where the word kar.kid or ḫarimtu appears. For example, Cohen writes:

"Under the ideal conditions of the land during Assurbanipal's reign, these workers will receive for their commodities by far more than the going rate — they will be paid by camels and slaves. The brewer sells as his commodity his beer, the gardener his vegetables and the tavern-woman — she sells what? Presumably sex for which she receives her nidnu."

Were there no women who worked in the tavern other than sex workers - no women innkeepers? No barmaids? Even the text under examination, which states that if a stranger asks for a bed for the night, you should give him the wages of a ḫarimtu, makes just as much sense if the woman in question is an innkeeper.

I retain a strong suspicion that the same assumptions and circular logic that invented "sacred prostitution" may be at work here. I have a mountain of material to get through, but something which would help convince me that kar.kid/ḫarimtu specifically indicates "sex worker" would be if there are terms for women workers that are consistently distinguished from it.

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Assante, Julia. The kar.kid / harimtu, Prostitute or Single Woman? A Reconsideration of the Evidence. Ugarit-Forschungen 30 2003 pp 5-96.
Cohen, Yoram. The Wages of a Prostitute: Two Instructions from the Wisdom Composition 'Hear the Advice' and an Excursus on Ezekiel 16,331. Semitica 57 2015, pp 43-55.

(Long ago (June 2011) I started a series of postings about the assinnu which I made a hash of, so this is a do-over!)

Richard Henshaw (1994) groups the assinnu with the kurgarrû, the kulu'u, the saĝ-ur-saĝ, the pilipili (pilpilû), and similar cultic functionaries who are "a kind of actor in the cultic drama". He remarks that, unlike most professional titles, many of these can't be translated; possibly they're foreign loanwords, or pre-Sumerian words.

Like many Akkadian words, assinnu was actually written down using Sumerian signs; someone reading a tablet out loud would have said "assinnu" when they saw LÚ.UR.SAL or UR.MUNUS. The LÚ indicates it's the name of a profession; SAL and MUNUS both mean 'woman'. Martti Nissenen (1998) says that: "UR.SAL, or 'man-woman', should actually be read "'dog-woman', 'dog' representing masculinity in a despicable sense" (147n45). I've often encountered this assumption in the literature - that 'dog' in terms like the Sumerian saĝ-ur-saĝ or the Akkadian keleb must be derogatory. However, UR also appears in terms like ur.mah "lion" and ur.saĝ "hero, champion"; more than one scholar has wondered if the saĝ-ur-saĝ is a type of ur-saĝ. (Henshaw says that it's not "bitch", which was written SAL.UR.) Drawing on the online Sumerian Lexicon, Saana Teppo points out that "'dog' can also mean a young man, a servant, a warrior, or an enemy".

In various cultic texts, we get glimpses of the assinnu's religious jobs, including chanting, singing, and dancing. In one ritual, the assinnu and the kurgarrû wear the belû / tillu (possibly a scabbard?) of the goddess Narudu. (Any relation to the saltier of Atargatis, I wonder?) In another, "... the assinnu is found setting a brick down in the House of Lament... He lights a fire over it and roasts on it various meats, fish, and other items. He pours a libation of beer and places seven loaves on the fire. The ritual ends with him singing the Love Lyric 'When I saw you in the Equlû.'" (One of several tasks for the assinnu and the kurgarrû during the month of Simanu, as described by A.R. George, who remarks that they were probably busy the year round.)

Martti Nissinen (2003) describes letters from Mari which mention prophecies delivered by assinnus attached to the temple of Annunitum ("a manifestation of the warrior aspect of Ishtar" - Wilson). (Prophets are often grouped with assinnu in "lexical and administrative lists".) Åke W. Sjöberg quotes passages describing saĝ-ur-saĝs carrying "the corvée basket" and yokes, which "show that the saĝ-ur-saĝ (when corresponding to the assinnu) had duties other than only cultic assignments".

Richard Henshaw cautiously outlines the evidence for the assinnu's sexuality. The Epic of Erra contains a line referring to the assinnu and the kurgarrû in Anum and Ishtar's temple, the Eanna:

ša ana šupluh nišī Ištar zikrusunu uterru ana ain [nišūti]

"The translation of this is ambiguous," cautions Henshaw: "'those who in order to bring about awe/religious awe in people, Ishtar turned their maleness into femaleness'... Nothing more appears in this text to indicate the nature of this change".

In a text describing "sexual advances, sexual dreams, etc", there's a line "something like: 'if a man suffers physically in prison, and like an assinnu the desire to copulate is taken away from him..." (This impotence could mean sterility rather than erectile dysfunction.) And another line: "... if a man approaches (for sexual purposes) an assinnu..." (Henshaw cautions that many lines of the text describe the "fantastic actions" in dreams rather than "actual cases".)

Of the Descent of Ishtar and Asushanamir, Henshaw says, "Why the assinnu could pass through the gate and confront the queen... is not explained in the text, but I propose that being of in-between sex made him impervious to the sexual rites and power that Ereshkigal, following the example of her sister, could impose upon him." (She herself is a pretty sexy goddess.)

One text pairs the assinnu with the sinnišānu: "The form of this word can be explained as the word for woman, sinništu, with the feminine ending" replaced by the masculine ending -ānu, perhaps to be understood "man-woman". Elsewhere, a curse promises to "(turn) his maleness like (that of) a sinnišānu".

One text, says Henshaw, includes a possible reference to a female assinnu - that is, "the feminine form of the noun assinnu" - and another mentions a female kurgarru.

Concluding his appendix on the assinnu and co, Henshaw remarks: "Many of the texts discussed in this section are cryptic; indeed, I think they were meant to be." Scholars sometimes seem to have drawn great, and sometimes questionable, conclusions about these cultic personnel from very small scraps of information.

ETA: More on the assinnu's unclear sexuality from Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel. Robert R. Wilson cites the lines from the Epic of Erra above and notes that "This has been variously been interpreted to mean that the assinnu was a eunuch, transvestite, male cult-prostitute, or pederast. However, none of these interpretations can unambigously be supported by reference to other texts [therefore] some scholars hold that the assinnu was simply an actor who took a female role in cultic dramas." Assinnus appear in three of the Mari letters mention the assinnu, and in one of them, the assinnu Šelebum goes into a trance in Annunitum's temple before giving a prophet warning meant for the king. Wilson suggests that, during the trance, Šelebum was possessed by the goddess, and therefore would have spoken and acted in a feminine way; and that this might have been a regular part of the assinnu's job.

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George, Andrew "Four temple rituals from Babylon." in George, A R and Finkel, I L, (eds). Wisdom, Gods and Literature: Studies in Assyriology in Honour of W. G. Lambert. Winona Lake, Indiana, Eisenbrauns, 2000, pp. 259-299.
Henshaw, Richard A. "Appendix Three: The assinnu, kurgarrû and Similar Functionaries". in Female and male - the cultic personnel: the Bible and the rest of the ancient Near East. Allison Park, Pa, Pickwick Publications, 1994.
Kessler Guinan, A. Auguries of Hegemony: The Sex Omens of Mesopotamia. Gender & History, 9: 462–479, 1997.
Nissinen, Martti. "Introduction". in Prophets and prophecy in the ancient Near East, Martti Nissinen with contributions by C.L. Seow and Robert K. Ritner ; edited by Peter Machinist. Atlanta, Ga, Society for Biblical Literature, 2003.
Nissenen, Martti. Homoeroticism in the Biblical World. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998.
Sjöberg, Åke W. A Hymn to Inanna and her Self-Praise. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 40(2) autumn 1988.
Wilson, Robert R. Prophecy and society in ancient Israel. Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1980.

In this chapter from Sacred Marriages, Saana Teppo (now Saana Svärd) describes the assinnu, the kurgarrū, and the kulu'u (or gala), and their role in the worship of Ishtar. "in their ecstatic performances," she writes, "they were joined with Ishtar in a union comparabable to sacred marriage... they fulfilled the same function as the king in the sacred marriage ritual: they ensured the blessing of the goddess for the country."

"It seems that all three groups of cultic functionaries were born as men (or hermaphrodites [that is, intersex people]), but... their appearance was either totally feminine, or they had both male and female characteristics. [All three are] recorded in the literature of the Sumerian period [and] continued to appear in Akkadian texts up to the Seleucid and Persian eras." They were rained for their ritual duties: "ecstatic dance, music, ritual plays, and performances", in which they wore female dress and makeup and carried masks, spindles, and weapons. Teppo admits that the "evidence for this from Mesopotamia is not overwhelming", but it is possible that, like the galli and the hijra (?), the cultic performers mutilated themselves to achieve "an altered state of consciousness in which they could achieve union with the divine - a sacred marriage". (Perhaps the weapons were for mock or ritual battles? One of the love lyrics W.G. Lambert translates, perhaps describing a ritual, includes the lines 'Battle is my game, warfare is my game,' he/she will utter and the Assinnu-priest will go down to battle, he will ... a jig [...]".)

In the Sumerian version of the Descent of Inanna, Enki creates the kurgarrū and "the kalaturru (GALA.TUR, which can be translated as 'young kulu'u')" from dirt under his fingernails and dispatches them to rescue Inanna. In the Assyrian version, Ea creates the assinnu Asushanamir for the same purpose.

Teppo discusses the possibility that the assinnu, kurgarrū, and kulu'u performed sex work connected with Ishtar worship; I'm going to put that aside for now, because I still haven't fully got to grips with the recent overturning of the long-standing assumption that every priestess (and almost every woman!) in Mesopotamia was a sex worker. I will note, though, that the "kulu'u is called Ištar's 'sweet bedfellow' (ṣālitu ṭābu) and 'lover' (ḫabbubu)."

(ETA: Henshaw (p 300) discusses this last, translating the lines from a "namburbi text addressed to Ishtar": "come enter our house / with you may enter the beautiful one / who sleeps with you / your lover and your kulu'u." Henshaw notes: "it couldn't be three separate people invited in!" Oddly, that was exactly how I read it - although I think Henshaw's interpretation is probably right.)

Teppo suggests that the assinnu's role in healing is explained by Asushanamir's helping to bring Ishtar back to life. Assinnus could also be prophets (and there are three Neo-Assyrian prophets who, though are not called assinnus, are described as being both men and women). The kurgarrus performed a "war dance" "with knives, swords, and clubs", and played "ritual games with skipping ropes and bawdy speech". The assinnu and the kurgarrū are often found in each other's company, such as at liminal moments - the New Year's Festival, and eclipses.

The kulu'u or gala was originally a lamentation chanter, listed alongside "female mourners and wailers" and using the female literary dialect, Emesal. (Possibly they replaced female singers, retaining "the female forms of the profession".) An Old Babylonian poem describes Enki creating the gala to soothe Inanna's heart. Galas peformed in temples, at funerals, and possibly at court. The chief gala (GALA.MAḪ) was a high-ranking official; there may have been gala guilds, gala families, and female galas. (There's possible evidence of a female assinnu and a female kurgarrū.) But some galas were slaves, and the galas could be forced to do corvée work for the temple.

Ishtar could change someone's sex or gender, as noted in Inana C (aka The Stout-Hearted Lady, Lady of Largest Heart), the hymn Išme-Dagan K, and The Epic of Erra, which says of Ishtar and the kurgarru and assinnu: "Who changed their masculinity into femininity to make the people of Ištar revere her. The dagger-bearer, bearers of razors, pruning-knives, and flint blades, who frequently do abominable [ie "taboo acts, forbidden to regular persons] to please the heart of Ištar." Which said, nobody knows for sure whether some or all of the assinnus, kurgarrūs, and kulu'us were castrated (and if so, to what extent). (Eunuchs, ša-rēši, were a separate category of persons.)

So these cultic personnel had an established, institutional role, but how well were they treated as individuals? Some of Teppo's evidence that they were marginalised doesn't quite convince me. Enki created them from the dirt under his fingernails, but then, he created the human race out of lowly clay (maybe there was a bit left over :). The curse placed on Asushanamir is pretty unequivocal, though, damning the assinnu to a homeless city life, and someone is insulted with the remark "He is a kulu'u and not a man" - a reminder that "in practical terms Mesopotamian society was strongly patriarchal and had fairly inflexible gender categories," as Teppo remarks. She goes on to say: "There was very little toleration for individuals who did not conform to the expected male and female roles." (I wish she'd given some evidence for Mesopotamian gender non-conformity!) Perhaps these "third gender" roles "existed specifically because the roles of men and women were so clearly defined" - they represented "an outlet, a means for society to deal with people who could not, for whatever reason, function in society as men and women."

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Lambert, W.G. "The Problem of the Love Lyrics". in Hans Goedicke and J. J. M. Roberts (eds). Unity and diversity: essays in the history, literature, and religion of the ancient Near East. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. (p 105)
Teppo, Saana. "Sacred Marriage and the Devotees of Ishtar". in Martti Nissinen and Risto Uro (eds). Sacred marriages: the divine-human sexual metaphor from Sumer to early Christianity. Winona Lake, Indiana, Eisenbrauns, 2008. pp 75-92.

It's been a long time since I made one of my postings about gender in the ancient world. Until now, I've mostly posted about "third genders" which undermine the assumption that "man" and "woman" are universal constants in all times and places. This time I want to share my notes on a practice which calls into question the "natural" nature of gender. In at least three ancient Near Eastern cities, a woman could become a man, or simultaneously a man and a woman - at least for the purposes of inheritance.

Counting descent solely through the male line requires any society to tie itself into knots*, especially when sons are necessary not just to inherit the property of the paterfamilias, but to perform ancestor worship. In the ancient Near East, a daughter could inherit, but then her father's property would go to her husband's household. In the absence of a son, an ancient Near Eastern man would usually appoint his son-in-law, brother, or brother's son as his male heir; or he might adopt a son. However, as Zafrira Ben-Barak points out, a man from another household could be a dangerous place to stash your patrimony. We have the documents from a case in which, through a series of dodgy steps, the son-in-law's brother ended up inheriting everything - taking the original testator's property entirely out of his household, and extinguishing his line to boot.

One solution? If you had a daughter, you could make her into a son. In a will from the Hittite city of Emar, a man's will states: "I have established my daughter Al-ḫati as female and male [MUNUS ù NITAḪ]." and charges her with the worship of the household gods and ancestors. (His brothers were called as witnesses to the will; I wonder what they thought of not being appointed his legal heirs.) He also appoints his wife "father and mother [a-bu ù AMA] of my estate".

In another will, also from Emar, the testator's wife is appointed "mother and father of the house", and his daughter is declared to be "male and female" and again given a son's responsibility of maintaining worship of the family's gods and ancestors.

From the city of Nuzi, in the Hurrian-speaking kingdom of Mitanni, comes a will in which Unap-tae declares: "My daughter Šilwa-turi as a son I made." "Using the accepted term for son-adoption, marutu ["sonship"], the father adopts his daughter as a son," writes Ben-Barak. Another will gives three daughters all the status of sons and leaves the testator's property and gods to them. And finally, in a will from the Syrian city at el-Qitar, the testator adopts the wife of his adopted son as his own son.

Katarzyna Grosz suggests that this custom - which, from the documents, was clearly a well-established practice - paved the way for "full legal independence" for women. What I'd like to find out is whether a woman's legal status as "head of the household" gave her any other rights which were normally exclusively male - or was her new status only relevant when it came to the family?

Ben-Barak's analysis of the term "male and female" is that it doesn't literally mean Šilwa-turi is a legal hermaphrodite; rather, she is "a female with the status of a male". The entire business is a reminder that "man" and "woman" are social categories which can be changed by a bit of clay with marks on it**.

(In one of the wills from Nuzi, the testator says that should his nephews try to make a claim on his estate, "may this tablet break their teeth". I just had to get that in somewhere.)

ETA: Left out a bit. There's a parallel from India, the putrika-putra, a "daughter appointed as a son". Because she was considered a son, her son would not be the heir of her husband, but the son of her father: "As the merits of a son and grandson are equal (eg in offerings made to ancestors)," writes Grosz, "the latter ranked as a son." (A quick Google showed that this is only a glimpse at the complexities of traditional Hindu inheritance law.)


* We're watching the TV series Wolf Hall at the moment. When you're the King of England, the lack of a male heir has world-changing consequences, not to mention getting a lot of people killed. (Do matrilineal societies have the same kind of crazy problems?)

** Come to think of it, I wonder if there's any chance those curses - "may Ishtar impress female parts on your male parts" - have some basis in some real-life events? I have no doubt that the goddess can change anybody's physical sex, but perhaps the ancient civilisations of the Near East were familiar with a change of gender, and might wish the inferior social status of "woman" on their male enemies?

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Ben-Barak, Zafrira. "The legal status of the daughter as heir in Nuzi and Emar." in Society and economy in the Eastern Mediterranean (c.1500-1000 B.C.): proceedings of the International Symposium held at the University of Haifa from the 25th of April to the 2nd of May 1985 / edited by M. Heltzer and E. Lipinski (eds). Leuven, Uitgeverij Peeters, 1988.

Grosz, Katarzyna. "Daughters adopted as sons at Nuzi and Emar". in Jean-Marie Durand (ed). La Femme dans le Proche-Orient Antique: compte rendu de la XXXIIIe Rencontre assyriologique internationale (Paris, 7-10 juillet 1986) (Rencontre assyriologique internationale 33). Paris, Recherche sur les civilisations, 1987.

Wanted to note here Winnie Brant's theory that Akhenaten was transgender - hence his "epicene" portrayal. Brant is not an Egyptologist, so caution is indicated (the vandalism of Amun-Min's phallus in temple portrayals dates to much later, doesn't it?) but some of her ideas are interesting - for example, she suggests that Akhenaten might have turned against Amun after the god failed to change his male body into a female one.

Brant points out that if Akhenaten wanted to appear in public (or in inscriptions) as a woman, he faced a problem: "If Akhenaten dressed in women's clothes, he would not be pharaoh! If he felt the urge to appear cross-dressed in public, there was only one woman he could pretend to be and still maintain his royal authority: his chief queen, Nefertiti." She suggests that this could explain their resemblance in portraits, as well a kingly portrayal of Nefertiti smiting foreign female prisoners in a male skirt, as well as her sanctuaries at Karnak which had "no counterpart for the king". It's an interesting suggestion, that this symbolic merging of king and queen could have been a way for the pharaoh to express or inhabit his female self.

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Brant, Winnie. "The Gender Heresy of Akhenaten". in in Bullough, Bonnie, Vern L. Bullough, and James Elias (eds). Gender Blending. Prometheus Books, New York, 1997.

Spiritual Power? 18th-Century Artifacts Unearthed in Caribbean

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Remains of Long-Lost Temple Discovered in Iraq: "'One of the best results of my fieldwork is the uncovered column bases of the long-lost temple of the city of Musasir, which was dedicated to the god Haldi,' Marf Zamuatold Live Science in an email. Haldi was the supreme god of the kingdom of Urartu. His temple was so important that after the Assyrians looted it in 714 B.C., the Urartu king Rusa I was said to have ripped his crown off his head before killing himself."

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Was Cleopatra a drag queen? (2005) (Three known artifacts show Cleopatra VII dressed as / represented as a man.)

Brooklyn Museum to publish a handbook for the recently deceased (Book of the Dead of Sobekmose)

One-of-a-kind Egyptian spider rock art dates back to 4,000 B.C.

Alan D. Eames, 59, Scholar of Beers Around the World, Dies

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Barnsley lass Joann really digs Egypt (not what I was looking for, but pretty entertaining nonetheless :)

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Die Auferstehung der Göttin Sachmet (The Resurrection of the Goddess Sekhmet) and Egyptian goddess statue unveiled in İzmir’s Red Basilica - an 8.5 metre tall statue in Pergamon

More Sekhmet statues unearthed at Amenhotep III's temple in Luxor

4,000-year-old [Old Babylonian] erotica depicts a strikingly racy ancient sexuality

 

We're moving house, so all sorts of things are popping out of the woodwork.

"Female chastity, and especially virginity, removes the assumption that a woman is operatively female and therefore de-sexualises her. Furthermore, it assigns her to a 'liminal', or intermediate, state between masculine and feminine, with a pronounced bias towards the masculine. Thus de-sexualised, a virgin can in certain societies adopt the attire and manners of men... whatever simultaneously partakes of two contradictory categories - the third, 'betwixt-and-between' category - is abnormal because non-natural and rationally unintelligible, and in many societies is identified with the 'holy'... [Saint Thecla's] membership of a third, anomalous category brought her very near to the holy angelic state - a sexless and bodiless condition which however remained closely aligned to the male sex, as may be inferred from the names and military interests of angels."

(I was reading something else entirely recently - can't remember what - anyway, it occurred to me that before troublesome Eve is introduced into the world of Genesis, that world is both male and neuter: male is the natural, sexless category.)

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Petropoulos, John C. B. "Transvestite virgin with a cause: The Acta Pauli et Thecla and late antique proto-"feminism"." In B. Berggreen and N. Marinatos (eds). Greece and Gender, Bergen, Norway: Norwegian Institute at Athens, 1995.