Ishtar – Ancient Babylonian Goddess of Sex, Love, Fertility and War
Virginity in Ancient Mesopotamia
Jerold S. Cooper
Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East: Proceedings of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Helsinki, July 2-6, 2001
Abstract
“A virgin body has the freshness of secret springs, the morning sheen of an unopened flower, the orient luster of a pearl on which the sun has never shone. Grotto, temple, sanctuary, secret garden – man, like the child, is fascinated by enclosed and shadowy places not yet animated by any consciousness, which wait to be given a soul: what he alone is to take and to penetrate seems to be in truth created by him.”
What a pity that neither Sumerian nor Akkadian has a proper word for a young woman whose flesh is capable of inspiring such marvel! At least since the foundational articles of Finkelstein and Landsberger, Assyriologists have recognized that Sumerian ki-sikil-tur and ki-sikil, Akkadian batultu and ardatu, are age-grades, covering the period between the onset of puberty and marriage. Both Finkelstein and Landsberger, influenced, no doubt, by the Sumerian, considered the batultu to be the younger of the two, ki-sikil-tur, the barely nubile to young adolescent, whereas ardatu would be an older adolescent girl. But in actual Akkadian usage, ardatu is confined to literary texts, whereas batultu, attested only after the Old Babylonian period, is the word that would be used for adolescent girls in royal enumerations of booty, and in personnel lists and legal texts. The Sumerian terms are restricted entirely to literary texts; the only case where a girl seems to progress from ki-sikil-tur to ki-sikil is in Enlil and Ninlil, where Ninlil first appears as kisikil-tur alongside Enlil as guruš- tur, but subsequently is called ki-sikil.
In western languages, too, there is no word that originally designated virgin. Parthenos, virgo, Jungfrau – all designate nubile girls before marriage, maidens, and like that word, came by extension either to denote or to connote sexually innocent girls because of the expectation that respectable girls would refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage: A Jungfrau should be sexually innocent, as well as a young woman; “in principal, a nubile young woman does not make love.”
Virginity in Ancient Mesopotamia
Jerold S. Cooper
Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East: Proceedings of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Helsinki, July 2-6, 2001
Abstract
“A virgin body has the freshness of secret springs, the morning sheen of an unopened flower, the orient luster of a pearl on which the sun has never shone. Grotto, temple, sanctuary, secret garden – man, like the child, is fascinated by enclosed and shadowy places not yet animated by any consciousness, which wait to be given a soul: what he alone is to take and to penetrate seems to be in truth created by him.”
What a pity that neither Sumerian nor Akkadian has a proper word for a young woman whose flesh is capable of inspiring such marvel! At least since the foundational articles of Finkelstein and Landsberger, Assyriologists have recognized that Sumerian ki-sikil-tur and ki-sikil, Akkadian batultu and ardatu, are age-grades, covering the period between the onset of puberty and marriage. Both Finkelstein and Landsberger, influenced, no doubt, by the Sumerian, considered the batultu to be the younger of the two, ki-sikil-tur, the barely nubile to young adolescent, whereas ardatu would be an older adolescent girl. But in actual Akkadian usage, ardatu is confined to literary texts, whereas batultu, attested only after the Old Babylonian period, is the word that would be used for adolescent girls in royal enumerations of booty, and in personnel lists and legal texts. The Sumerian terms are restricted entirely to literary texts; the only case where a girl seems to progress from ki-sikil-tur to ki-sikil is in Enlil and Ninlil, where Ninlil first appears as kisikil-tur alongside Enlil as guruš- tur, but subsequently is called ki-sikil.
In western languages, too, there is no word that originally designated virgin. Parthenos, virgo, Jungfrau – all designate nubile girls before marriage, maidens, and like that word, came by extension either to denote or to connote sexually innocent girls because of the expectation that respectable girls would refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage: A Jungfrau should be sexually innocent, as well as a young woman; “in principal, a nubile young woman does not make love.”
Click here to read this article from John Hopkins University
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