Babylon

Babylon is a recurring historical and mythic setting in the book’s account of women’s changing status. It holds together two contrasting images: a region associated with the Great Goddess and female fertility, and a society whose laws and institutions organize women’s inheritance, marriage, and sexuality around family and male authority. The contrast makes Babylon more than a geographical reference; it becomes evidence for how women’s prestige and practical rights could coexist with their subordination.

Mythic and Religious Setting

In the book’s account of ancient cosmologies, female divinity first occupies a vast field of sacred power. The Great Mother is associated with fertility and with the natural world, and Babylon knows her as Ishtar. Yet the same discussion describes the gradual elevation of male gods: Ishtar becomes the wife of Bel-Marduk, while he is credited with creating the world and maintaining its harmony. The shift in divine rank offers a mythic image of a broader political and social change: female power remains visible, but sovereignty is assigned to a male figure.

The contrast is not simply between a powerful goddess and a powerless one. The book argues that women’s sacred status could combine reverence with fear and taboo, rather than amounting to control over their own position. Across the ancient accounts, woman may be treated as sacred, dangerous, or unclean, while men decide which divinities rule and what place women occupy. Babylon’s religious imagery therefore preserves the memory of female authority while also showing how patriarchal systems could absorb and subordinate it.

Creation Myth and the Establishment of Patriarchy

The book recounts an Assyro-Babylonian cosmology preserved in a text dating to the seventh century BCE but said to tell a much older legend. Aton and Tiamat, identified with the Sun and the Sea, give birth to the worlds and the great gods. When the younger gods become turbulent, Tiamat leads a struggle against Bel-Marduk. He challenges and kills her, divides her body, and uses its two halves to form the vault of heaven and the foundation of the terrestrial world. He then orders the universe and creates humanity.

The narrative makes the defeat of a woman-mother the prelude to a male god’s authority over creation. The book reads this myth alongside other stories of male victory over maternal right, while cautioning that the actual historical transition to paternal rights was gradual rather than a single violent conquest. The legends nevertheless matter: they turn a social order into a dramatic story in which the male subject triumphs over feminine chaos and claims the power to establish law and order. Babylon’s creation myth thus presents patriarchal authority not as a neutral arrangement but as an order imagined through the subordination of the maternal figure.

Law, Marriage, and Inheritance

Babylon also appears as a society whose legal arrangements granted women certain rights without overturning male-centered inheritance. The book notes that the Code of Hammurabi recognized a woman’s share in her father’s inheritance and provided that her father give her a dowry when she married. These provisions distinguish Babylon from accounts of more absolute female guardianship, but they do not remove marriage from the larger problem of preserving family wealth and posterity.

The surrounding discussion treats inheritance as a central mechanism of women’s dependence: control of property and descent shapes a woman’s place within the family and her prospects as a widow or wife. Babylon’s legal recognition of a paternal inheritance share and a dowry therefore marks a qualified protection, not equality. The evidence supports a more complex picture than either total exclusion or emancipation: women could hold defined claims, while their status remained structured by marriage, descent, and the family’s interest in transmitting property.

Sexual Institutions and the Public Use of Women

A separate account links Babylon to sacred prostitution. Citing Herodotus, the book reports that in the fifth century BCE every woman was required once in her life to give herself to a stranger at the temple of Mylitta, for a coin that she contributed to the temple treasury; afterward, she returned home to live chastely. The episode places a prescribed sexual act within a religious and civic institution, rather than presenting it as an individual choice.

The book situates this report in a wider discussion of hospitality and sacred prostitution, practices associated with fertility and the common good. It also describes how religious prostitution could pass into commercial exploitation when priestly authorities profited from it. Babylon consequently figures both as a place where sexuality was given ritual meaning and as an example of a system in which women’s bodies and social roles could serve institutional purposes. The account’s juxtaposition of the temple obligation with the woman’s later return to chastity underscores the regulation of women across different social settings.

Babylon in the Book’s Wider Argument

The book repeatedly uses Babylon to place women’s status within long historical processes rather than explain it through biology alone. Its myths register a transition from reverence for female fertility to the supremacy of male gods; its law records limited rights within a system concerned with inheritance; its religious customs show sexual conduct assigned a public and sacred function. Together, these references make Babylon a site where women’s authority, protections, and constraints appear in different forms, rather than a simple emblem of either a former matriarchy or uniform oppression.

Babylon’s significance lies in the tensions among these accounts. A goddess may dominate the religious imagination yet become subordinate to a male creator; a woman may inherit property yet remain situated within marriage and lineage; a ritual may be described as sacred while still prescribing women’s participation. The book uses those tensions to show how apparent honor or legal recognition need not translate into women’s power to define their own place.