Introduction

In times of the MeToo movement and the backlashes the movement has provoked, adding historical dimensions to the roles of women in the most ancient history takes on renewed importance. The gender theorist and philosopher Judith Butler recently published an opinion piece in The Guardian, in which she specifically addressed the backlash to gender studies in a global perspective (Butler 2021). Butler’s opinion piece mentions, among others, Denmark, whose parliament recently passed a resolution against excessive activism by scholars employed at public universities, a move seen by many as an attack by politicians on freedom of research in Denmark.1

It should be stated in the beginning that gender studies has had an immensely positive effect on research in historical subjects such as Assyriology and Egyptology. Theoretical perspectives from gender studies further our understanding of women’s roles in antiquity, whose importance for ancient societies has often been downplayed in favor of traditional histories of “big men.”

The importance of historical gender studies in general and the study of women in antiquity becomes also clear when considering how studies of women continue to shape images and behaviors of women in today’s world, as discussed by Mary Beard in two lectures that she held at the invitation of the London Review of Books (Beard 2018). The study of women and gender in the past can be used to justify or challenge the status quo of today’s world. We will only mention one example here: women acting in religious functions in the ancient Near East were often interpreted as “temple prostitutes,” a designation that can be traced back to Herodotus’s description of Babylonian women who prostituted themselves in front of the temple. Modern studies of prostitution and sex work have sometimes used the ancient Near East to destigmatize modern sex work by showing that it was not defamed in the past.2 However, a closer examination of the women that have been interpreted as temple prostitutes shows that such an interpretation is far from clear.3 The past becomes an arena that shapes the present and the future. This illustrates the need for more detailed, historical studies of women and gender with sound methodologies and theoretical frameworks. Though the contributions in this volume focus on women in antiquity, the study of gender is equally important, for example, regarding complex goddesses as Ištar and the priestly offices associated with her. However, it would go beyond the framework of this book to discuss this complex issue in detail.

As detailed in the foreword, this book is a result of a Danish-Japanese collaboration. In the 2022 Global Gender Gap Index, Denmark is ranked number 32 (score 0.764; score change −0.004 compared to 2021).4 Perhaps it is for this reason that it is not surprising that gender studies has recently come under attack by Danish politicians, such as Morten Messerschmidt from the Danish People’s party or Henrik Dahl from the party Liberal Alliance, two politicians that proclaim their worry that Danish universities will be driven by left-wing activists who disguise their activism as scholarship.5 Dahl has been most vocal in this context and described disciplines such as gender studies as “nonsense” subjects, “pseudoscience,” and disciplines that are filled with “bullshit” (Friis 2021). The terminology used here is not new and in fact already dates back at least to the 1990s, when the “Sokal affair” led to debates within academia on the nature of what is scientific and what is not. It should be noted that such debates are not just confined to the humanities and social sciences but have also taken place (and still are taking place) within the natural sciences, for example, relating to questions about the replicability of experiments (“replication crisis”), or the falsification of scientific data.6 Yet, Dahl and others only selected disciplines in their diatribes that they seem to find politically objectionable, such as gender or migration studies.

Such political attacks on selected research subjects or individual researchers represent a severe setback from achievements of postwar European democracies, in which academic freedom from political meddling became one of the cornerstones of democratic societies based in the rule of law.7 While it remains unclear what qualifies a politician to make such assessments, buzzwords such as “pseudoscience” are sure to attract the attention of the media in a destructive manner.

Yuko Matsumoto’s contribution in this volume, written before these recent attacks in Denmark, offers an important counterpoint to some of the claims that have been made about gender studies. Far from being a topic that is the domain of the “West,” whatever those using the term mean by it, it is a research discipline that not only transcends academia and is directly relevant to gender equality in the societies that we live in; it also transcends cultural and geopolitical boundaries, as Matsumoto shows by underlining the importance of gender studies for Japan.

In her contribution to this volume, Matsumoto gives an overview of history and current situation of women’s studies and gender studies in Japan including feminist influence and political backlash against everything gender.8

It is a well-known fact that Japan is far behind in gender equality and ranked 116 as of 2022 (score 0.650; score change 0.006 compared to 2021). As Matsumoto points out, the idea of “men’s public role vs. women’s private role” is still deeply rooted in the people’s mind in Japan, even though the idea is not from time immemorial. Its lingering influence can be seen from polls that show that 40% of men and 30% of women in Japan accept this idea as of 2019.9 This is reflected not only in the low proportions of women administrative/managerial workers, political representatives, and researchers but also in the despicable sexist comments, “women talk too much,” by Yoshiro Mori, the former Japanese prime minister, who was forced to resign as the president of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic organizing committee (Rich 2021).

Matsumoto also emphasizes the inclusion of historical studies of women in the field of gender studies. Therefore, we would like to emphasize in the beginning of this introduction that researching gender and gaining a better understanding of the role of women in the most ancient high civilizations in world history is not only solid research using well established methods of philology, history, social sciences, and archaeology, and other fields; the research contributions collected in this volume also add important dimensions to how we write history and therefore on how we can shape our future.

A recent volume in this series (Lion and Michel 2016) assembled an impressive array of scholars writing on the topic of women and work in the ancient Near East, a topic that has been neglected in the past. As Lion’s and Michel’s (2016: 1–7) introduction included a brief history of research on the topic, there is no need to repeat their overview here. Since then, a number of important publications have appeared, such those from the Gender and Methodology workshops (Svärd and Garcia Ventura 2018; Budin et al. 2018), as well as Michel’s book on women in the Old Assyrian texts from Kanesh (Michel 2020) and a collection of articles on the subject of powerful women in antiquity (Droß-Krüpe and Fink 2021).

The volume presented here and the contributions in it are meant to add further dimensions to this ongoing research on women by highlighting the role of women in the sphere of ancient religions. The exceedingly complex topic of ancient religions cannot be discussed adequately within the framework of this short contribution, and we will only be able to highlight some aspects. It is often assumed that the most ancient religions did not distinguish between the sacred and the profane, between piety and ethics, between the supernatural and the natural world: according to these views, everything in the ancient world was sacred and imbued with divinity or divine spirits. More often than not, such notions of religions are rooted in Eurocentric visions of “true religion” (as explained, e.g. by Assmann 2008; Assmann 2018), which created the distinction between “true” and “false” religion and whose beliefs were shaped through the written word (“holy scriptures”). In many cases, history has identified charismatic men, be they...