Between a Queen and an Ordinary Woman: On Laodice and the Representation of Women in Cuneiform Sources in the Hellenistic Period

The paper examines how women are represented in cuneiform sources from Babylonia dating to the Hellenistic period. Two case-studies are taken into consideration. On the one hand, that of the Seleucid queen Laodice, the wife of Antiochus II, whose fame is connected to the role she played in the context of a royal land grant to the citizens of three Babylonian cities; on the other, that of those women, mianly from the elite, who had a part in contracts relating to the the sale and acquisition of real estate and prebends in Uruk during the Seleucid period. In a context where women were in general underrepresented in the sources,the investigation sheds new light on the way they are referred to, the reason why they appear, and their agency (especially with respect to their male counterparts), both in official and private documents.