The economic status of women in Ancient Mesopotamia – REFEMA

In a traditional society, as the Mesopotamian was, in which the producing functions and the management of property are very clearly distributed, women played a fundamental role in the daily life production. In some cases, their role exceeded the primary needs of the family and they carried out an essential part of the production of great institutions. They may have become essential too in the production of luxury goods in the scope of the international trade.
Women were also a central element for the preservation and the transmission of property. The cuneiform sources (administrative, legal, economic texts) from Mesopotamia provide us with numerous data about the economic role of women during a very long period, from the end of the Third until the end of the First Millennium B.C.
While the women relationship to the labor world changed in a spectacular way in contemporary France and Japan, it seems also interesting to examine how, in a very ancient past, and in a very conservative civilization, we can reconstruct and analyze various aspects and the evolution of the economic role played by women
The planned project is based on three themes:
1) The economic role of women in the family sphere (activities, productions, diversification, internal hierarchy);
2) Special systems of production: female work in palatial and religious organizations on the one hand, economic situation of the Assyrian traders' wives and their relationship with their husbands on the other;
3) Women and inheritance: connection between the social situation and the financial autonomy of Babylonian notables' wives and daughters; role of women in the transmission of the private property.
Each of these themes will be examined by the Japanese and French participants in this research group, for a span of time over than two millennia of time, according to the available documentation. We plan a scientific workshop every year in each country in spring and automn, also one in Japan, and one in France, and a final colloquium in Paris, giving a synthesis of the workshops. Miss Yoko Wataï, as an experienced researcher, who speak perfectly both Japanese and French, will be more specifically in charge of the gathering, the follow-up and the distribution of the results in France and in Japan, during the duration of the project.