Violence and Gender: Vulnerable Bodies, Precarious Lives and Resistance in the Mari Letters

Abstract

The aim of this article is to delve into the forms of violence exerted on women from the Old Babylonian sources of Mari (1775-1762 BCE). This documentary corpus has a large “feminine correspondence” where women are present everywhere, those of the elite in particular, but also others from subaltern sectors, such as the servants of queens and princesses, slaves, women of the common. All of them are crossed, although in different ways, by the masculinizing mechanisms of power that position them in places of compliance with the norm, increasing the vulnerability of their bodies, crowding them into a precariousness that in many cases puts their lives in danger. Our objective is to tackle these multiple mechanisms of violence without ignoring class hierarchies and possibilities of resistance and solidarity. Although it is true that conceptions of gender violence are very current, it seems pertinent to us to historicize violence and revisit ancient sources from this perspective.