Royal Women and Female Agency
Greek fixation with the cruelty of Persian royal women might be read as a literary trope, and these stories no doubt served an important moralistic purpose in the Greek-speaking world, but it is crucial to set the Greek tales of harem-based rivalries, intrigues, double-dealings, murders and executions within the context of bone fide Achaemenid dynastic politics (550-330 bce).
Persia was controlled by an absolute ruler - that is not orientalist cliche, it is a fact - and absolute monarchies are open to a particular form of political tension which usually focuses on the royal family and on the noble families which surround the king, and within such institutions the women of the ruling family often rise to positions of political agency not through any formal route to power but by other, less recognised means. Greek authors (some more consciously than others) explore (and exploit) that vital facet of the reality of ancient court life. Michael Fowler and John Marincola have stressed that it is wrong to see Persian royal women completely and solely as literary ‘types' created by Greek authors, suggesting that many modern scholars have been ‘too critical of Greek depictions of Persian women'. Drawing comparisons to the influential royal wives and mothers of the Hausa women of dynastic Kano in Nigeria, they support the idea that Achaemenid women had ‘considerable political influence... at times even influencing the succession'.[731] This view, without doubt, is true.What we need to acknowledge is that women's political acumen at (any) court arose from the close access they had to the king through intimate contacts. As Jeroen Dunidam puts it: ‘Between the sheets, crown and sceptre lost their spell. And no one could get closer to the royal ear. Wives and mistresses (and for different reasons mothers and sisters) were therefore influential...
the confidante served as a broker of the king's [power].'[732] Why, for instance, does Herodotus (Hdt. 7.3) call Darius I's wife Atossa ‘all powerful'? Herodotus provides the answer in an earlier scene (Hdt. 3.134) in which the queen, lying in bed next to her husband, persuades the king to launch an expedition against Greece. The story is fictitious, of course (how would a Greek know about the bedroom secrets of monarchs?), but it shows that Herodotus was capable of understanding the ways in which royal women could (and did) influence policy and that pillow-talk could have significant consequences.While a connection between the barbarian milieu and violence seems to be essential to the Herodotean view of the world of the Persian court, another Greek author, Ctesias of Cnidus, who as a royal physician resided at the court of Artaxerxes II in the opening decades of the fourth century bce, sees things very differently and, given his agenda for recording Persian dynastic history ‘from the inside', is more than likely to have recorded the real actions of court women.[733] The political machinations of Achaemenid court women are, in fact, reflected in other court chronicles and histories of the same, or adjacent, periods: in the Hebrew Bible, for instance, the Davidic court history's depiction of Bathsheba, a principal wife of King David of Israel and the mother of King Solomon, shows her to be a powerful guardian of the throne and a skilled game-player in dynastic succession policies.[734] The NeoAssyrian royal annals record how Zakutu (Naqia) held onto the reins of
Violence and the Mutilated Body in Achaemenid Iran power and established a sense of concord at an otherwise politically divided and dangerous court as her grandson Assurbanipal ascended the throne.9
Leslie Pierce's important study of harem politics at the Ottoman Turkish court has illuminated a world in which domestic rivalries among the harem women had a direct impact upon Ottoman imperial policy; her work helps cement our understanding of the longue duree of the harem's existence as the nexus of dynastic power.10 Across time and space, harem women of countless court societies went head to head with one another to secure their own status (and even their lives) but primarily to solidify the status and ambitions of their sons in a series of amphimetrically propelled clashes and struggles. To facilitate these power plays, revenge killings, torture and violent punishments were commonplace. As we will see, the royal harem of Persia felt the tensions of the disputes as keenly as any other court society, and the women of the Achaemenid court utilised methods of gaining or securing power (for themselves or for their offspring) as ruthlessly as the women of any other royal dynasty.11
More on the topic Royal Women and Female Agency:
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- CLITORAL RELATIVISMFEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION IN “TOLERANT" ISLAMIC INDONESIA
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- The Royal Graves and Death Pits of Ur
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- Afrianty Dina. Women and Sharia Law in Northern Indonesia: Local Women's NGOs and the Reform of Islamic Law in Aceh. Routledge,2015. — 202 p., 2015