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Will be published in: T. Daryaee, M. Canepa, R. Rollinger, Proceedings of the fourth Payravi Conference on Ancient Iranian History IV: Contextualizing Iranian History: The Arsacids (ca. 250 BC -224 AD, 2024

Already two decades ago, Jeroen Duindam stressed the importance of royal courts as "the most general arrangement of power in pre-modern society, [that…] deserve to be analyzed in this wider perspective 1 ". This statement undoubtedly applies to ancient monarchies in general and to the Arsacids in particular. But as with many other aspects of Parthian history and culture, we face a main problem for reconstructing the characteristics of court and court-life: Due to the sparse data available from within the Iranian parts of the empire, we have little reliable information about this aspect of society. It is therefore no coincidence, that modern research on the Arsacids devotes only a few lines to their court. 2 Thanks to these studies, our knowledge of certain aspects has grown within the last years,especially what concerns royal women 3 , visual representation of court-life 4 or the role of the noble families 5 ,but it remains a desideratum to study the hierarchical structure of the court as heart of the dynastic state where lines of power and influence converged. The aims of this paper are threefold: Firstly, to evaluate the quality of the source material about Arsacids court and to define what 'court' meant to the dynasty. Secondly, to reconstruct the court hierarchy through the extant titulature and estimate the size of the court. Thirdly, to give examples of 'conspicuous consumption' and 'conspicuous leisure' as aspects of court-life through some ancient narratives. In the following pages, I attempt to defend the view that (1) the dynastic power structures at Arsacids court resemble those of early modern European monarchies and that (2) the line of tradition is stronger with Achaemenid than with Seleukid dynasties. 6 1. Methodological challenges

In the present paper, we want to show the relationship between Alexander the Great and the Persian women and evince the importance of that group of people, who sometimes are underestimate and obviated by the scholars. First, we will make a revision of the Royal Persian Women, focused in the Achaemenid Family, and the role they played in the monarchy to understand the paper that some of them took when Alexander appeared in their lives. Then, and being the largest part of this paper we will explain the episodes whose protagonists are the Persian Woman, the reaction of Alexander and the most important thing, how the Macedonian king acted towards them. We will see how they turned into the most important feminine figure in the life of Alexander the Great (except Olympias, the king’s mother) and staged some of the most curious episodes.

Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2018

This article serves as a contribution to the discussion of gender segregation at the imperial court of Byzantium. Evidence from the Palaiologan period shows that many of the elements of a women's court, as it was known from earlier centuries, were still present in the last centuries of the empire.

University of Houston Dissertation Repository, 2020

This dissertation provides the first overarching and comparative study of Hellenistic Egyptian queens, from the origins of the dynasty to the final ruler, Kleopatra VII. It explores the ways in which the Ptolemies developed a practice of royal incest, which was supplemented by the institution of a dynastic cult, during the reigns of the first three pharaohs of the dynasty. Their consorts and the later queens of the dynasty, who have been largely overlooked in the history of the Hellenistic world, used their position as one half of the deified, ruling couple to gain increasing access to power, culminating in several instances of co-rule, regency, and female sole-rule, the most notable being Kleopatra VII. While the pharaohs of the dynasty have been comprehensively studied, the queens are neglected and relegated to the academic trope of the “powerless woman,” one which this study disproves by verifying that these queens did, in fact, act with ruling interests. This dissertation overturns the antiquated interpretations of these queens, which characterized them as either good (obedient/docile) or bad (ambitious/conniving), that have persisted into modern scholarship, much to the detriment of both the legacies of these women and ancient history in general. Overall, this dissertation will provide both a rehabilitation of the reputations of these queens and the first informed and comprehensive overview of their ability to gain and wield public power. It will, ideally, also provide a methodology for similar studies that could be conducted on royal women elsewhere in the ancient world.

Journal of Archaeological Research, 2019

Comparative analysis of women rulers and main wives of kings in eight premodern states around the globe reveals similar patterns of political agency, or the opportunity and ability to take political action. Queen rulers, regents, and main wives substituting for their husbands in their absence made policy, but they had somewhat less political agency than male rulers. Main wives’ political agency took the forms of infuencing policy and people’s behavior (sometimes through their role as patron to others), interceding between their kin and their husbands, advocating for one party or the other, spying, and conspiring. Therefore, women’s political agency ought to be part of any political study. This study builds on the anthropological/archaeological study of agency by drawing attention to royal women’s political agency and showing how the analysis of structural rules and the roles of kings, queen rulers, and main wives illuminates the societal structure in which agency is embedded. By analyzing premodern societies this way, we learn that there is remarkable similarity of agency behaviors among royal women in the eight sample societies, even though the societies emerged independently of one another.

This study explores the different possibilities of what it meant to be a concubine in a late medieval setting. Conventional wisdom holds that concubinage was a gendered function of slavery, that is, a legal arrangement in which slave owners enjoyed licit sexual relations with their female property. While this was certainly the view of Muslim jurists and a historical reality for many enslaved women, this understanding of concubinage fails to take into account the different ways in which it was practiced in history. One notable example is found in the households of Timurid princes, who, as descendants of the famous conqueror Temur or Tamerlane (1336–1405), collectively ruled over the regions of Khurasan in eastern Iran and Transoxiana in Central Asia during the 15th century. Timurid sources from the later period list numerous women as royal concubines who were not slaves. Instead, they belonged to notable Muslim families whose pedigrees contemporaries deemed prestigious enough to record for posterity. This unusual feature of Timurid concubinage raises a series of questions. First, what motivated the later Timurids to take freeborn Muslim women as concubines? The highly competitive political environment of late 15th century Iran and Central Asia required would-be potentates seek out a wide network of supporters, which was achieved in part through securing marital alliances with important amirs and local notables. Given the Islamic proscription of taking more than four wives, Timurid princes felt more at ease in engaging in a legal fiction that permitted them to take freeborn Muslim women as concubines rather than exceeding the number of legal marriages allowed to them by the law. Second, if concubinage was a means of securing power and authority, was it possible for concubines themselves to participate in the broader political economy of Timurid Iran and Central Asia? If so, how did contemporaries look upon their involvement? Here the career of Khadija Begi Agha, a concubine who eventually became the legal wife of a Timurid prince, serves as an instructive example of a politically active consort who cultivated a diverse network of allies and supporters that she mobilized in times of dynastic conflict. The strong reaction she engendered from her contemporaries suggests that while the Timurids are well known for their inclusion of women as active participants in dynastic politics, women who traced their origins as concubines in royal households nevertheless faced censure for their involvement.

Semna – Estudos de Egiptologia III, 2016

The Near Eastern Late Bronze Age witnessed the increasing relevance of international diplomacy, evidenced by the Amarna Letters. This correspondence between mainly great powers but also vassal states demonstrates that diplomacy centered on the different kings, but also featured queens and princesses. Through an analysis of textual and material evidence, this paper argues that royal women were fundamental to this diplomatic system, though their roles and how they were perceived differed dramatically according to their relations (both familial and generational) and culture.

The historians of ancient Greece, as part of the elite of Greek communities, of their own time. By studying the works of these historians one can become familiar with these traditions and the common view on the world in Greek culture regarding various issues and concepts. The purpose of this paper is to study and analyze the Greek approach to women and the effect of this approach on the way the history of the Achaemenid Empire (ca. ((550 – ca. 330 BC) was written. Our central theme in this paper is the question of the connection between the Greek perspective on women and the reliability of narratives related to women in the accounts of Achaemenid history by Greek historians.

2014

Every father is the son of a mother. While this would appear to be a commonplace, studies of patrimonialism as a political system in the ancient Near East have rarely considered its implications. Royal women, as objects of exchange and as agents of political action, played a central role in negotiations between Late Bronze Age states and in dynastic struggles within these states. The relative positions of royal men were shaped by their relationships to royal women. In three case studies of texts from Ugarit, this dissertation elucidates the instrumentality and agency of women in the reproduction of royal households and in the formation of interdynastic alliances. The first case study considers Ugaritic letters from kings to their mothers. The letters reveal that royal women could maintain their positions as queens from the reigns of their husbands into the reigns of their sons. Furthermore, the forms of address and self-identification the king used in relationship to his mother sugg...

It seems, that the Iranian conception of royalty was strictly masculine. The article analyzes the position of women on the basis of inscriptions and iconography. The sources for the Sasanian period in Iranian history reveal the high role of the women in public sphere of functioning of the state

Book chapter in The Hellenistic Court, edited by A Erskine, L Llewellyn-Jones, and S Wallace, Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2017

Just as the Seleucid royal family was a far larger group than the reigning king, queen, and heir, the realm of Seleucid dynastic politics similarly extended beyond the confines of the main house and into the courts of the various subordinate dynasts who played a pivotal role in the administration of the Empire. Seleucid preference for rule via regional client proxy over direct administration of conquered territory has been well discussed, as have the means by which the Seleucid kings subordinated these regional potentates militarily, politically, and economically. 1 What has received less attention – though perhaps of equal importance in the broader framework of imperial strategy – is how the Seleucids interacted with their regional clients in the dynastic arena. As they were stitched into the imperial fold with pledges of loyalty, the newly-recognised kings of Cyrene, Cappadocia, and Armenia were likewise brought into the extended Seleucid family through a series of diplomatic marriages to Seleucid princesses, generally a daughter or sister of the reigning king. The tie of marriage was naturally meant to buttress the dynast's bonds of allegiance with an added strand of interrelation, further intertwining the fates of subordinate and overlord. Yet these marriages were far from being either instantaneous or even purely emblematic markers of solidarity, rather they signify only the beginning of a longer pattern of Seleucid intervention in the courtly politics of their clients. 2 The principal agents of such persistent interference, I shall argue, were the same Seleucid princesses whose marriages sealed these alliances in the first place. These women were neither meant to be merely passive tokens of legitimacy – i.e. the recognition within and without a kingdom of a reigning monarch's (and family's) rightful claim to rule – nor did they forfeit their connection to the house of their birth upon marriage. Instead they remained closely attuned to the currents of favour and opinion of both their nuptial and natal houses, frequently intervening in the affairs of

Byzantinoslavica, 2017

The authors who documented the lives of emperors –with very few exceptions, such as Procopius and Michael Psellos– were not particularly interested in their private or romantic aff airs. Occasionally they might mention imperial wives by name, but they would make extensive references to empresses only when their actions infl uenced political developments. What they neglected to do, however, was to approach those illicit incidents from a feminine point of view as well; as a result, certain questions emerge, revolving around the central reference point of the women concerned, both as parts of the regularity of marital relations and as agents leading to the disruption or circumvention. The aim of this study is to present, with the use of telling references from the above-mentioned sources, the distinct and/or interlocked “love” parts played by Byzantium’s crowned women, to attempt their categorization and to draw certain broad conclusions conerning their roles as wives, paramours and mistressess.

Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies (1759-1953)

Despite the fact that royal women in Antiquity played a major dynastic role, historical accounts either ignored them or mentioned them merely as appendages to kings. Beginning in the 1970s, a major change transpired due to the impact of women's and gender studies. Numerous studies on the role of royal women in Antiquity were published, shedding light upon previously unknown women. This new understanding of royal women in Antiquity has implications for historical scholarship and its methodologies as well as for attitudes towards contemporary female leaders, who can be viewed as a continuation of an ancient tradition. The escalating interest in royal women in Antiquity from the 1970s onwards has launched a plethora of studies bringing to light the varied roles and actions of royal women that were previously obscured. 1 This new knowledge has not only contributed to a better understanding of the role of women in Antiquity but also of the events and processes in which these women played a major role. June Hannam points out another effect of these historical studies: The writing of women's history has always been closely linked with contemporary feminist politics as well as with changes in the discipline of history itself. When women sought to question inequalities in their own lives they turned to history to understand the roots of their oppression and to see what they could learn from challenges that had been made in the past.

Routledge eBooks, 2020

This volume offers the first comprehensive look at the role of women in the monarchies of the ancient Mediterranean. It consistently addresses certain issues across all dynasties: title; role in succession; the situation of mothers, wives, and daughters of kings; regnant and co-regnant women; and role in cult and in dynastic image, and examines a sampling of the careers of individual women while placing them within broader contexts. Written by an international group of experts, this collection is based on the assumption that women played a fundamental role in ancient monarchy, that they were part of, not apart from it, and that it is necessary to understand their role to understand ancient monarchies. This is a crucial resource for anyone interested in the role of women in antiquity.

will be published in: B. Jacobs / R. Rollinger (eds.), A companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 vols., (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World), Malden, MA; Oxford; Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014

Following the theoretical thoughts of Joan W. Scott the ancient literary sources are studied with regard to ideas about gender and sexual differences in Achaemenid society. Therefore the Classical sources are confronted with indigenous Achaemenid evidence to set off the ‘occidental’ literary discourse and its impression of ‘oriental’ women and men. The question on lived gender relations is discussed by examining conceptions of manliness and femininity. Based on the extant tradition the focus is put on the Achaemenid elite and the king, who can be spotted as embodiment of hegemonic manliness.

This volume is dedicated to all of the pioneers in the study of women, gender, and the ancient Near East. Thank you for asking new and challenging questions; you cannot find something that you do not sense is missing.

JAOS 139.3 (2019): 687-692, 2019

In her recent book, Svärd uses theories of hierarchical and heterarchical power to reveal how women wielded power within the highest echelons of the Assyrian Empire. Svärd determines that the queen occupied a distinct position in the state hierarchy, separate from the king, and that only one woman at a time could be queen. The queen could retain her post even after the king died, though the new king could replace her if he deemed it necessary. The king decided the queen mother's role, depending on political circumstances. Both queens and queen mothers ran large, lucrative estates and participated in religious ceremonies. During the Sargonid period, military units were attached to their households. In some official spheres of action, their power could be qualitatively similar to that of the king, and in a crisis, they could even act for him. Other women associated with the palace, such as royal daughters, female administrators, and workers, were more apt to develop power heterarchically, through petitions, negotiation, or communication networks. Wishing to expand upon her theoretical approach, Svärd has studied diachron-ic changes in Assyrian queenship, concluding that the office developed to meet the needs of family and dynasty. In addition, I argue here that the demands of an expanding empire required the king to delegate authority to trusted relatives. Thus, as the empire reached its peak under the Sargonid kings, royal women naturally gained power and prominence, and kings benefited. For example, the queen's prosperous estates and business ventures allowed her to help fund the military as well as some temples and building projects, and so defray the costs to the throne. All of this shows that Assyrian women had individual agency and authority, and could influence the king's decisions. Despite the value of theory, it is also necessary to consider women individually, in the context of their times, and as they responded to unique circumstances.

This dissertation was written as part of the MA in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History of Macedonia aiming to enlighten the reasons for Philip II’s marital policy and provide information in relation to royal Macedonian women in his court. Philip II was the third out of the three sons of Amyntas III of the Argead dynasty, who ruled the kingdom of Macedonia from the backwater of the Hellenic world. Prior to his reign the kingdom was weak, unstable, possessing an impotent army that could not deal with their many aggressive enemies. His ascendance to the throne, his innovations during his reign and his multiple marriages were crucial for the transformation and expansion of Macedonia. Early in his reign he took five wives, part of his marriage policy to form alliances, aiming also to produce quickly male heirs to the throne. Two more weddings followed, the last one with a Macedonian noble probably of Argive descent that took place a little time before his assassination in 336 BC. All these royal women, including his mother queen Eurydice, his daughters and granddaughters seemed to play an important role in his monarchy and in shaping their dynasty’s image. Even his divinity was implied to project this image. Anyhow, his polygamy has possibly caused problems in his court and could be a reason for his assassination. Olympias, mother of his son Alexander and seemingly successor to his throne, was projected by some ancient authors, especially by Justin, as the mastermind behind his murder. The work of another ancient author, Plutarch’s Life of Alexander appears to have some elements in contrast with Alexander Romance, an epistolic novel with many alterations. What was the mirroring of these royal Macedonian women in these two? Keywords: polygamy, marriage alliances, prominent women, projection of monarchy, divinity