Bibliographic Essay

Little thought per se has been given to women as agents of violence in antiquity, let alone to the role of the royal harem as the site of revenge-fuelled violence and murder. Fiona McHardy's ‘Women's Influence on Revenge in Ancient Greece', in F.

McHardy and E. Marshall (eds.), Women's Influence on Classical Civilization (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 92-114 is an appropriate starting place for Greek conceptions of women and revenge. Robert Rollinger, ‘Herodotus, Human Violence and the Ancient Near East', in V. Karageorghis and I. Taifacos (eds.), The World of Herodotus (Nicosia: University of Cyprus Press, 2004), pp. 121-50 systematically explores the concept of violence in the Histories and focuses, therefore, on some female acts, but not exclusively so. Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg strongly advocated the notion that images of female violence among Persian women were concoctions of a Greek Orientalist imagination; see particularly her ‘Exit Atossa: Images of Women in Greek Historiography on Persia', in A. Cameron and A. Kuhrt (eds.), Images of Women in Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1983), pp. 20-33, and ‘Decadence in the Empire of Decadence in the Sources? From Source to Synthesis: Ctesias', in H. Sancisi-Weerdenburg (ed.), Achaemenid History I. Sources, Structures and Synthesis (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1987), pp. 33-45. By and large Maria Brosius follows the same tack in her Women in Ancient Persia (559-331 BC) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). For a different approach, however, which looks for a reality behind the stories, see Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones and James Robson, Ctesias' History of Persia: Tales of the Orient (London: Routledge, 2010) and Lloyd Llewellyn- Jones, King and Court in Ancient Persia 559-331 BCE (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 96-122.

An investigation into ancient queenship and the role of royal women in the courts of the ancient Near East quickly reveals the opportunities taken by palace women to secure power and position.

See, for instance, Hennie J. Marsman, Women in Ugarit and Israel (Leiden: Brill, 2003) and Elna Solvang, A Woman's Place is in the House. Royal Women of Judah and their Involvement in the House of David (London: Bloomsbury, 2003). Sarah Melville's The Role of Naqia/Zakutu in Sargonid Politics (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1999) investigates the role of the king's mother in Assyrian society. On royal women and succession issues see especially the following: Ronald de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (London: Darton Longman & Todd, 1961); Aiden Dodson and Dyan Hilton, The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt (London; Thames & Hudson, 2005); J. R. Novotny, ‘Daughters and Sisters of Neo-Hittite and Aramaean Rulers in the Assyrian Harem', Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies 36 (2010), 174-84; J. R. Novotny and J. Singletary, ‘Family Ties: Assurbanipal's Family Revisited', in M. Luukko, S. Svard and R. Mattila (eds.), Of God(s), Trees, Kings, and Scholars: Neo-Assyrian and Related Studies in Honour of Simo Parpola (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2009), pp. 167-77.

For a fuller understanding of how royal women employ agency and power within court circles see Mary Anderson, Hidden Power: The Palace Eunuchs of Imperial China (Buffalo, OH: Prometheus Books, 1990), May Holdsworth and Caroline Courtauld, The Forbidden City: The Great Within (Beijing: Forbidden City Publishing House, 1995), and Evelyn S. Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Of particular importance in cross-cultural studies is Leslie Pierce's The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), while Jeroen Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 87-155 provides some fruitful explorations of several harem societies in a series of eastern and western courts.

For violence in the ancient Near East see especially Sandra Jacobs, The Body as Property: Physical Disfigurement in Biblical Law (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) as well as Zainab Bahrani, Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia (New York: Zone Books, 2008). C. L. Crouch's War and Ethics in the Ancient Near East. Military Violence in Light of Cosmology and History (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009) explores the biblical background of violence in a wider Near Eastern setting. An excellent discussion by Hans van Wees explores physical violence to war victims, including women: ‘Genocide in the Ancient World', in D. Bloxham and A. D. Moses (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 239-58. The theme is explored too by E. M. Tetlow, Women, Crime, and Punishment in Ancient Law and Society, vol. I (New York: Continuum, 2004) and, with an eye to modern conflict, see Kathy Gaca, ‘Girls, Women, and the Significance of Sexual Violence in Ancient Warfare', in E. D. Heineman (ed.), Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 73-88.

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Source: Fagan Garrett G., Fibiger Linda, Hudson Mark, Trundle Matthew (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 1: The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 756 p.. 2020

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