“4000 Year-Old Tablets Reveal Women Have Always Loved Shoes!” proclaimed a headline on the webpage of Cornell University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. The article in question was about the Garšana Tablets, a group of 1,600 cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia that were once part of the personal archive of a Sumerian princess named Simat-Ištaran. The tablets cover the years between 2031 and 2024 BC, and they reveal that Simat-Ištaran ran the estate after the death of her husband, a general named Šu-Kabta. They provide scholars with fascinating new evidence about the place of women in Sumerian society. For example, the tablets show that women worked as laborers and even supervisors, and they received the same wages as their male colleagues.
In light of all the fascinating things revealed by the Garšana Tablets, it seems strange to emphasize Simat-Ištaran’s shoe collection. While the article itself provides a more holistic overview of the material, the headline’s appeal to a gender stereotype is still annoying. I suspect that the author was trying to come up with a hook that would draw in members of the general public, but surely something like “4000 Year-Old Tablets Reveal Surprising General Equality” would have been equally eye-catching.
Codex Lochianus 