AGENCY OF WOMEN IN MESOPOTAMIAN RELIGION OF THE SECOND MILLENNIUM B.C.

This work explores the female religious agency in Mesopotamian religion and how this particular type of agency influenced the status of women inside the society they lived in using a large variety of sources such as letters, laws, ritual and cultic texts, prophetic texts, magic and medical texts, incantations, prayers and hymns.

The actions and gestures that women were able to perform, be them specific or similar to those of men, be them individually performed or under supervision, consciously enacted or under possession, are being discussed using an interdisciplinary approach, combining specific concepts from the field of religious studies with those coming from women and gender studies areas, such as patriarchy and kyriarchy, all of them passing through the filter of agency.