S2E0: Bodily Matters: The Lifecycle of an Ancient Woman
In a time when society is thinking passionately about bodily rights and who gets to make decisions about women’s bodies, Season 2 turns to history. Women in the ancient world mattered, and so did their bodies—maybe learning about them can give us new questions as we face our own world.
In our season intro episode, meet an ancient high-priestess of Ur and the first known author in human history: Enheduanna. Climb Mount Sinai with the Christian pilgrim Egeria. These two women and the records they left behind offer a personal glimpse into embodied moments of religious experience. And they help us set the stage for the season ahead.
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Narrator: Yes, I took up my place in the sanctuary dwelling,
I was high priestess, I, Enheduanna.
Though I bore the offering basket, though I chanted the hymns,
A death offering was ready, was I no longer living?
I went towards the light, it felt scorching to me,
I went towards shade, it shrouded me in swirling dust.
A slobbered hand was laid across my honeyed mouth,
What was fairest in my nature was turned to dirt.
O Moon-god Suen, is this Lugalanne my destiny?
Tell heaven to set me free of it!
Just say it to heaven! Heaven will set me free!
[…] [1]Emily Chesley: Enheduanna lived in the great city of Ur, then a coastal city-state at the mouth of the Euphrates River. A daughter of king Sargon, Enheduanna also served as the high priestess of Suen or Nanna [Nah-Nah], the Sumerian moon god, sometime around 2300 BCE. [2] During her more than forty-year career, Enheduanna penned multiple hymns to Nanna and to his daughter Inanna, the goddess of love and war. This Sumerian priestess is the first named author known to human history. Her poetry gives us a glimpse into her ritual activities, but also to something more subjective: Enheduanna’s fervent devotion, her feelings of abandonment and acceptance by the gods she served, and the metaphors through which she interpreted her life.
Rebekah Haigh: Enheduanna selects descriptions with vivid bodily senses: the slobber of a hand on her mouth; scorching heat bearing down upon her body and relief of stepping into the shade; gritty dust swirling up from the ground. The lines we just heard describe the priestess’s feelings of alienation by the god she served. One scholar, Benjamin Foster, has also suggested that they allude to physical abuse she suffered at the hands of a rebel, named Lugalanne. [3] Much like today, status and position did not protect Enheduanna from assault nor its lasting, somatic memories.
Emily: It’s rare to get personal glimpses like this into the bodily senses that women in the ancient world experienced. What their limbs felt, the motions and movements they performed, how their bodies were treated by others. But these embodied moments, the arc of an ancient woman’s body through her life, are what we are searching for in this season.
[Opening Music]
Rebekah: Welcome dear listeners to the second season of Women Who Went Before, a gynocentric quest into the ancient world. I’m Rebekah Haigh…
Emily: …and I’m Emily Chesley …
Rebekah: …scholars, friends, and your hosts.
Join us in today’s intro episode, “Bodily Matters: The Lifecycle of an Ancient Woman,” as we give you a taste of our second podcast season and our theme: ancient women’s bodies through their lifecycle.
[Music interludes]
Emily: Humans are embodied creatures. We have bodies, we live in bodies, and we experience the world through our bodies. And as much head knowledge as we may gain, the experiential is an indivisible part of what it means to be human. We are more than bodies, certainly, but our bodies are part and parcel of our humanity.
Rebekah: This experiential aspect of the ancient Mediterranean world, and especially that of ancient women, is impossible to fully access. In many ways, the struggles we learned about last season in recovering women’s voices recur in this season, too. Just as elite ancient men rarely preserved women’s own words and thoughts, so too did those men rarely preserve how women wrote about or experienced their own bodies. We might not be able to access the full, subjective experience of every ancient woman, but some of them we can resonate with as modern readers, accessing through the shared human experience of living in the flesh. We might not know exactly how period pains afflicted a woman in fifth-century Babylonia or how her screaming son got on her nerves—but women today do know the cramps and dizziness and loss of appetite that get in the way of a day’s work. In the aggregate—through the texts, material evidence, and scholars—we can approach a closer understanding. We’re trying to get around the same problem from last season through the body.
Emily: Οur second season of Women Who Went Before is roughly structured around the life cycle of an ancient woman. We’ll start with some anatomy and gynecology. What bodies did Romans and Greeks think women had, and what was going on with their wandering wombs? Then we’ll look at what it was like to grow up, to menstruate, get pregnant and give birth, to survive assault, experience pleasure, pain, or sickness, and to grow old. How virginity was measured and why it mattered. How women with disabilities and bodily blemishes were treated by their communities. How race and ethnicity both shaped and didn’t shape women’s lives. How ascetics entered a living death. Through this collection of polaroid snapshots, we’re trying to create a composite physical biography of an ancient woman.
Rebekah: This season we’re talking about women’s anatomies and female bodies—women as our ancient sources understood them, of course. As we explained last season, modern notions of gender and identity do not exactly map onto ancient sources. Since we’re building on those conversations, if you’re curious to learn more, check out Season 1 Episode 0 and Season 1 Episode 7.
Emily: One of our commitments on this podcast is diversity in all its forms—both in the stories we tell and in who tells them. That commitment continues this season in the breadth of the regions and time periods we’ll cover, and in the academic subfields we engage and the scholars we interview. We’ll draw on archaeology and art history, bioarchaeology, documentary texts like letters, grave inscriptions, medical textbooks, sermons, and more to build a mosaic picture from different sources, time periods, cultures, and academic disciplines.
Since we’ll be moving around the Mediterranean, of course we’re not going to get to follow the life of just one woman, say from Pompeii, from start to finish. There are already wonderful books that give you that! We’re building a composite picture. And we’re also trying to tell a bit more of a story this season: following the rough arc of an ancient woman’s life. We’re not going to tell a story without any gaps, but we are trying to chart a course that brings in the varied experiences of ancient Mediterranean women.
Rebekah: Naturally, the sources that have survived hold some pretty different views on women’s bodies than scientists hold today, but even if we wouldn’t use their medical manuals to diagnose bloodshot eyes (stay tuned!), that doesn’t mean we can’t use them to analyze how they thought about embodiment and womanhood. We’re historians, after all. To pick up that example of the eyes… A Roman aristocrat suggested some fascinatingly dubious medical treatments sometime between 24 and 79 CE.[4] Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History,
“... The mother of a boy gives a milk a taste of which, they say, prevents dogs from going mad. The saliva too of a fasting woman is judged to be powerful medicine for bloodshot eyes and fluxes, if the inflamed corners are occasionally moistened with it, the efficacy being greater if she has fasted from food and wine the day before. I find that a woman’s breast-band tied round the head relieves headache.” (Plin. HN, 28.75–76, trans. Jones)[5]
You might be laughing at the absurdity of his scientific knowledge. Just imagine tying a bra around your head to cure a migraine! But Pliny’s quote situates us in a world where bodies were believed to be mysterious, even infused with medical potency. It also reveals that Greco-Roman men were thinking about women’s bodies as gendered, as distinct from their own, male bodies.
Emily: Women’s bodies then, as now, were remarkably resilient. They endured rough births without painkillers, labored in the fields under scorching heat, and survived years of dusty walks. They also must have experienced profound pleasures: the cool splash of bathing in a stream, the rapturous height of sexual encounters, the tenderness when cradling their newborns, the ecstasy of partnering with the divine. One pilgrim named Egeria journeyed throughout the Holy Land in the fourth century CE, eagerly visiting the sites sacred to her Christian tradition and recording her experiences for her “sisters” back home – probably other nuns in her homeland of Spain.[6] When she writes of her trek up Mount Sinai, the holy mountain where Moses was believed to have received the law from God, Egeria mentions the arduous climb yet alongside it, her pleasure at its offering.
“These mountains are ascended with infinite toil, for you cannot go up gently by a spiral track, as we say snail-shell wise, but you climb straight up the whole way, as if up a wall, and you must come straight down each mountain until you reach the very foot of the middle one, which is specially called Sinai. […] Thus the toil was great, for I had to go up on foot, the ascent being impossible in the saddle, and yet I did not feel the toil, on the side of the ascent. I say the toil, because I realized that the desire which I had was being fulfilled at God's bidding.” (Itin. Egeriae 3.1–2, trans. McClure and Feltoe)[7]
In Egeria’s travel narrative we might marvel at her body’s strength, climbing straight up a mountain in sweeping garments. We can imagine the sun’s heat pressing down on her, the scrub brush snagging her hems, her hands roughening as she grabbed at rocks. She admits her bodily struggle, but Egeria experienced divine presence in her ascent as well.
Rebekah: When we think about religious encounters, this can be a place where the shared moments of human experience come into view. Egeria probably thrilled to summit Mt Sinai as much as any male fourth-century pilgrim. In multiple medical studies patients—men and women alike—have identified spirituality or religion as playing a role in their healing journeys and providing a source of strength.[8] Some of our listeners can probably recall moments in their life of profound religious feeling, be it a poignant moment in a temple or a sense of wonder standing before the Grand Canyon.
Emily: We’re not saying that ritual spaces weren’t (or aren’t!) deeply gendered; for instance in ancient Judaism, women could not serve as priests and so certain temple spaces were prohibited to them. But personal texts like Egeria’s and Enheduanna’s can remind us that some ancient women’s experiences were not necessarily about being women, but about being human. Enheduanna’s poetry to the goddess of love and war reflects on the vastness of human life, encountered by her in ritual: “Misery, suffering, grief, happiness, bringing light are yours, Inanna. Agitation, terror, fear, awe-inspiring glow and radiance are yours, Inanna.”[9]
Rebekah: For bodily experiences are not all gendered. Certainly some ancient women’s experiences were tied to their gender—whether expectations of motherhood, or their societies’ preoccupation with veiling or virginity. But like all other humans making their way through the world, so too women move through it. And some of those life moments are just about being another human.
Emily: As we journey through our new season let’s keep this in mind, and perhaps also reconsider what we count in the category of “human.” Often historians and poets, anthropologists and social scientists study men’s experiences and texts written by men and take them as universal, emblematic of what it means to be human. So what if we accorded women’s lives and narratives the same dignity and attention? For we too are human. Let’s challenge ourselves to think about women’s experiences, maybe even those society thinks of as gendered like pregnancy and childbirth, as part of the shared human experience too. Our season on ancient women’s bodies is ultimately a season on what it means to be human.
[Podcast theme music plays]
Emily: If you enjoyed our show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our website, womenwhowentbefore.com, or find us on Twitter @womenbefore.
This podcast is written and produced and edited by us, Emily Chesley and Rebekah Haigh. Our music is composed and produced by Moses Sun.
This podcast is sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, theStanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, all atPrinceton University.
Rebekah: Thanks for listening to Women Who Went Before. And don’t forget:
Both: Women were there!
[1] Benjamin R. Foster, The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 333.
[2] Sarah Glaz, “Enheduanna: Princess, Priestess, Poet, and Mathematician,” Years Ago 42, no. 2 (2020), 32.
[3] Foster, Age of Agade, 333.
[4] Shane Bjornlie, “Pliny the Elder in Late Antiquity,” The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity, online edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), np.
[5] Pliny, Natural History 28.75–76, trans. Jones, 1963, p. 55. (Pliny. Natural History, Volume VIII: Books 28-32. Translated by W. H. S. Jones. LCL 418. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.)
[6] Víctor Parra-Guinaldo, “Itinerarium Egeriae: A Retrospective Look and Preliminary Study of a New Approach to the Issue of Authorship-provenance,” Linguistics and Literature Studies 7 no. 1 (2019): 13–21. DOI: 10.13189/lls.2019.070102.
[7] Egeria, The Pilgrimage of Etheria, ed. and trans. M.L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1919), np, with punctuation emendations. Edition in: Pierre Maraval, ed., Egérie: Journal de Voyage (Itinéraire), Sources Chrétiennes 296 (Paris: Cerf, 1982).
[8] Mariana L. Borges, Sílvia Caldeira, Edilaine A. Loyola-Caetano, Paola A.P. de Magalhães, Felipe S. Areco, and Marislei S. Panobianco. “Spiritual/Religious Coping of Women with Breast Cancer,” Religions 8, no. 11 (2017): 254; D. M. Steinhorn, J. Din, and A. Johnson, “Healing, spirituality and integrative medicine,” Annals of Palliative Medicine 6no. 3 (2017): 237–247; V. R. Starnino, “When Trauma, Spirituality, and Mental Illness Intersect: A Qualitative Case Study,” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice and Policy 8, no. 3 (2016): 375–383.
[9] Excerpt from Benjamin R. Foster, Age of Agade, 340.
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Bjornlie, Shane. “Pliny the Elder in Late Antiquity.” The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity. Online Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. N.p.
Borges, Mariana L., Sílvia Caldeira, Edilaine A. Loyola-Caetano, Paola A.P. de Magalhães, Felipe S. Areco, and Marislei S. Panobianco. “Spiritual/Religious Coping of Women with Breast Cancer." Religions 8, no. 11 (2017): 254.
Egeria. The Pilgrimage of Etheria. Edited and Translated by M.L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1919.
Foster, Benjamin R. The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.
Glaz, Sarah. “Enheduanna: Princess, Priestess, Poet, and Mathematician.” Years Ago 42, no. 2 (2020): 31–46.
Maraval, Pierre (ed.). Egérie: Journal de Voyage (Itinéraire). Sources Chrétiennes 296. Paris: Cerf, 1982.
Parra-Guinaldo, Víctor. “Itinerarium Egeriae: A Retrospective Look and Preliminary Study of a New Approach to the Issue of Authorship-provenance.” Linguistics and Literature Studies 7 no. 1 (2019): 13–21. DOI: 10.13189/lls.2019.070102.
Pliny. Natural History, Volume VIII: Books 28-32. Translated by W. H. S. Jones. LCL 418. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.
Starnino, V. R. “When Trauma, Spirituality, and Mental Illness Intersect: A Qualitative Case Study.” Psychological Trauma : Theory, Research, Practice and Policy 8, no. 3 (2016): 375–383.
Episode Cover Art
Then as now, ancient women’s bodies came in all shapes and sizes. And then as now, the female form was variously an object of fascination, objectification, and worship. Season 2 explores women’s bodies across their lifecycle. This small statue from Cycladic-period Greece both brings ancient women’s bodies tantalizingly close and yet leaves us with many more questions.
Credit: Marble female figure. Small statute from the Cycladic period. 4500–4000 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of art, bequest of Walter C. Baker, 1971, accession Number 1972.118.104, OA public domain.
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Women Who Went Before is written, produced, and edited by Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley. The music is composed and produced by Moses Sun.
Season 2 is sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity at Princeton University.
Views expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individuals, and do not represent Princeton University.