Notes on Patriarchy, Gender, and City in Sumer, 4th to 2nd Millennia B.C.E.

Abstract

This article aims to evaluate the relationship between gender, patriarchy and the city in Sumeria between the 4th and 2nd millennia B.C.E., as knowledge about the past illuminates the theoretical issues of the present. The methodology consists of reviewing the literature on these topics, fundamentally in English, since this theoretical discussion is still little addressed in our country. We adhere to the conception of patriarchy as a mechanism of social reproduction. Its emergence between 3100 B.C.E. and 600 B.C.E. is a rupture with the hitherto existing patterns of social relations and is associated with the emergence of the State at the beginning of the 4th millennium B.C.E. and of the city in Sumer during the Uruk period, between 4,000 and 3,100 B.C.E., which characterizes a phase of deep transformations, along with the strong social hierarchy and writing. It should be remembered that there were four genders in Mesopotamia: genderless, woman, man and castrated man. It is interesting to note that the cultic functions of Inanna, goddess of Uruk, demanded the participation of different genders or sexual orientations – in the early days of patriarchy there was already gender diversity. We must emphasize that the same logic that occurred with gender, through the primacy of man, occurred with the city. The city was – and has been – the norm, the standard, to the detriment of other spatial practices, such as nomadism and agriculture.