Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati 2016

“Women’s Power and Work in Ancient Urkesh,”
in S.L. Budin and J.M. Turfa (eds.), Women in Antiquity: Real Women across the Ancient World, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 48-63.

One of the peculiar features in Urkesh glyptics, is the focus given to the women: the queen and her female servants are portrayed and also carried names and titles (such as ‘nurse’ or ‘cook’).
     In the introduction, the author describes the discovery of the sealings in the Royal Palace of Urkesh, underlining how “no other Mesopotamian corpus of seal designs, from any time period, have such a personal specificity as well as a detailed expression of the culture” (p. 48).

The role and function of the Royal Palace itself is investigated, by comparisons with other palaces such as Mari’s one.

The following paragraph recalls how a depiction of two nude women portrayed on a ceramic statuette (A12.30) and a vessel (A12.108) found in pit A12f194 and in the ābi, respectively [for this last structure, see also Urkesh website].

A seal (A15.270: see here for pictures: A15 items) depicting a sacrifice also include the figure of a woman sitting on a stool. Furthermore, women are also portrayed during working activities. Anyhow, the most important woman portrayed on Urkesh’s glyptics is indeed the queen Uqnitum, wife of king Tupkish. Her 8 seals, reconstructed on the base of a large amount of sealings (around 72: see Buccellati and Kelly-Buccellati 1998 for information), allow to reconstruct the main role of the queen at Urkesh, as queen and mother of the future successor to the throne (mostly in the so-called ‘family-scenes’), but also as a person directly involved in administration and storage activities.

Furthermore, the author analyses the seals belonging to the royal nurse Zamena, those of the queen’s kitchen ‘chef’ Tuli and the only one quoting the name of the daughter of Naram-Sin, Tar’am-Agade.

Concluding, the author underlines the peculiarity of women depictions at Urkesh: “From the immediacy of the Urkesh seal iconography, combined with the seal inscriptions, we can obtain a glimpse of the life of the women at that court. This is only the case of the Urkesh women—not the Urkesh men. The seal impressions we have for Tupkish himself […] are realistic/b>, but the male members of the court […] all have heraldic scenes which do not reflect their ‘work.’ Even though these seal impressions all came from the same contexts as those of Uqnitum and her attendants, these male retainers have chosen to represent themselves only with more conventional designs” (p. 60).