Description

The research project to be carried out during a two-month guest stay at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA) at the University of Oxford, aims at a reanalysis of the notions connected to female blood in Mesopotamian medical cuneiform texts of the 2nd and 1st millennium BCE. The researcher intends to write a study that elucidates the Babylonian healers' ideas and knowledge relating to female bleeding, in relation to cultural evaluations attached to bodily discharges in medical and other texts (e.g. myths, rituals). The study will show how views of female blood tie in with broader cultural concepts about the gendered body and human nature. The research will depart from previous studies by proposing a culture-specific conception of female bleeding in Mesopotamia differing from the notion of menstruation developed in the Hippocratic medicine - as a regular phenomenon restricted and essential to women's bodies. Integrating the textual and historical evidence with anthropological analyses of menstruation in non-Western cultures, the study will stress the ambivalent meanings attached to female bleeding in Mesopotamia, while shifting away from an overemphasis on notions of impurity and pollution, often regarded in current Assyriological research as decisive for Mesopotamian views on female blood.

Project Details

Project Type

Research Project

Subject Group

Humanities

Start

2011

End

2013

Funding

The Wellcome Trust, London

Organization

Faculty/Central Institute

History and Cultural Studies

Institute/Seminar

BABMED - Babylonian Medicine

Project Team

Director

Dr. Ulrike Steinert (Post-Doc)

Keywords

Antiquity; Art of Healing; Body; Cross-cutting Issue Gender; Cultural Anthropology; Ethnomedicine; Gender Studies; Greek Antiquity; History of Medicine; Human Medicine Interdiscilinary; Mesopotamia; Woman; Women

Researchers

• Dr. Ulrike Steinert (Post-Doc)

  Former