Masculinities and Third Gender: Gendered Otherness in the Ancient Near East

By: Ilan Peled

There is a distinct human phenomenon in ancient Near Eastern history: persons who were born males, but under various social and historical circumstances their masculine identity was considered to be ambiguous. These persons can be classified as belonging to a third gender.

How did ancient Near Eastern societies treat cases of deviation from the normative social order, in which people were arranged in two distinct gender categories: masculine and feminine? What was the social status of those who belonged to a different class of gender? What attitude did their surrounding community show them?

Third gender persons comprised distinct groups in society with clearly defined titles. What was the significance of this fact? What were the differences between the various sub-categories of third gender figures? What did they all have in common, beyond their basic relation to the third gender? No less important are historical changes in social attitudes towards this class of people.

My book, Masculinities and Third Gender: the Origins and Nature of an Institutionalized Gender Otherness in the Ancient Near East, uses as its framework the theory of hegemonic masculinity, developed by R.W. Connell, which sees ruling social elites consisting of hegemonic men who aspire to suppress women and non-hegemonic men. In light of this theory, the book analyzes the third gender group of persons as belonging to a non-hegemonic group of men. In Mesopotamia, the terms that describe these persons were grouped in numerous lexical lists, which supply us with the frame and boundaries of the research. To a lesser extent, the grouping of these persons is apparent in narrative and literary compositions. Two aspects of the research are discussed in the book: masculinity, and third gender. Though the two are naturally related, they are by no means identical.

The most notable of these titles were gala/kalû, assinnu, kurgarrû and lú-sag / ša rēši. Other similar titles that were documented less frequently were kulu’u, girseqû, tīru, SAG-UR-SAG, pilpilû, nāš pilaqqi, sinnišānu and parû. Their sexual and gender ambiguity was realized in numerous and diverse manners. Occasionally, it bore a clear physiological form, in the shape of castration. But mostly, their lack of procreativity constituted another form of gender ambiguity, as it contradicted one of the most important gender functions in the ancient Near East, the siring of offspring.

The common denominator of all these figures appears to have been a concept of flawed manliness. But effeminacy was not necessarily the key factor, as some of these figures seem to have been rather masculine indeed. For example, two of the goddess Ištar’s male most prominent cult attendants were the assinnu (written phonetically or in logograms (lú) ur-munus, literally “man-woman”) and the warrior-like kurgarrû. Presumably, each was the mirror opposite of the other and represented one of Ištar’s attributes, erotic love and sexuality, and aggressiveness and war. In contrast, girseqû and tīru were childless males who worked in palace administration. But third gender individuals were not necessarily of low social status. For example, from the third millennium through the first, the gala/ kalû was a performer of lamentation songs in the Emesal dialect of Sumerian.