“Women of Ancient Western Asia and (Questioning) Their Stereotypes“

with Dr. Pinar Durgun

Thursday,  January 22, 2026 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time  

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Modern perceptions of women in ancient Mesopotamia (or ancient Western Asia) are often shaped by persistent stereotypes: that women were universally oppressed, legally invisible, and confined to domestic or sexualized roles. This talk explores how our understanding of ancient women’s lives shifts when we challenge these assumptions and examine evidence across legal, economic, religious, and visual sources. Each category of evidence carries its own biases, privileging certain narratives while silencing others.

While patriarchal structures shaped Mesopotamian society and law codes emphasized control and restriction, other sources reveal women owning and managing property, participating in economic transactions, and holding significant religious offices within temple and palace institutions. Rather than seeking a single “status of women” in Mesopotamia, this presentation highlights the variety of lived experiences shaped by class, historical period, and institutional context. By bringing these fragmented forms of evidence into conversation, the talk invites us to reconsider not only women in the ancient world, but also how women’s histories are constructed, obscured, and reclaimed through material culture and its study.

Dr. Pinar Durgun is an art-historically trained archaeologist with a strong background in anthropology. She has a Ph.D. in Archaeology and the Ancient World from Brown University’s Joukowsky institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World. Her interests center around death and burial, image and identity making, materials and making in the ancient world. Her current research focuses on seals and seal making, and copies and copying in ancient Western Asia. With fifteen years of experience teaching and working in museums, Dr. Durgun is interested in how museums help us engage with the past and how they can better serve our communities today. She is currently the Jeannette and Jonathan Rosen Associate Curator and Department Head of Ancient Western Asian Seals and Tablets Department at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.

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Upcoming Scholar Salons (3pm Eastern Time):

Thursday February 5, with Dr. Joan Marler,  Topic: the legacy of Marija Gimbutas

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

 

” The Gifts of the Magi Were Meant for the Mother“
with Laura Shannon
Thursday,  January 8, 2026 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time  

   Facebook Live Promo Interview on 1/5/26:

In the Christian Nativity story, the Magi brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, symbolising Christ’s kingship, divinity, and death. In this presentation, I suggest that the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh were actually meant for the new mother, Mary. I will also consider the theory that the Magi were not only three, and were not only men, but may have included women healers and midwives among their number.

The original gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh – now preserved on Mt. Athos – take the form of gold filigree pendants and beads of blended frankincense and myrrh. These elements are now divided into smaller segments, but originally would have been joined together in one long loop, in the style of North African bridal necklaces of scented paste beads and flat gold filigree lockets.

The flat gold lockets were known as meskiyah, and were intended to contain fragrant substances. The beads, called skhab, are also powerfully fragrant, formed from resins and spices such as cloves and roses, or indeed frankincense and myrrh. These were ritually blended for a bride before her wedding in a custom which is still practiced today in North Africa.

With this and other artistic, iconographic, and medical evidence, I hope to shed light on indigenous value systems honouring mothers and childbirth, and to offer grounds for (re)placing the Holy Mother at the heart of the Nativity story, as the one for whom the sacred gifts were intended.

Laura Shannon has been researching and teaching traditional women’s circle dances worldwide for 40 years. With degrees in Intercultural Studies, Dance Movement Therapy, and Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred, she is currently a PhD candidate researching the roots of women’s ritual dance. A faculty member of the Findhorn Foundation Sacred Dance Department since 1998, Laura is also Founding Director of the Athena Institute for Women’s Dance and Culture; Director of the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual and the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete, following Carol Christ; and an Honorary Lifetime Member of the Sacred Dance Guild in recognition of her ‘significant and lasting contribution to dance as a sacred art’. Laura has published numerous articles and chapters on ritual dance in multiple languages, and as a musician and singer, has produced several recordings of traditional dance music. Laura lives in Greece and the UK.

See related article in Feminism and Religion

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Upcoming Scholar Salons (3pm Eastern Time):

Thursday January 22 “Women of Ancient Western Asia” “with Dr. Pinar Durgun

Thurday February 5, with Dr. Joan Marler, on the legacy of Marija Gimbutas

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event.