And They Said, Let Us Make Gods in Our Image: Gendered Ideologies in Ancient Mesopotamia Susan Pollock and Reinhard Bernbeck

Gender and sexuality are key elements in the analysis of history and archeology “One reason for the centrality of gender and sexuality is that they are regularly referred to in contexts that have nothing directly to do with them.”

Late Uruk and Jemdet Nasr BCE

“The late fourth-millenium world was built to a significant extent on women: in reality on women’s labor and ideologically on a powerful goddess who could claim the principal city of the time as hers.”

…but women appear primarily as menial laborers on seals, statues, and pottery. “In other words, the same ideology that depicted a powerful deity as female also made clear that the epitome of human power was male.”