#ancient sumer

Ibbi-Suen, King of Sumer and Akkad of the Third Ur Dynasty, died around 2000 B.C.E. bringing one of the world's earliest royal eras to an end. His exact manner of death is not recorded, but several clay tablet notes by his shaman Cho-Nisalk were preserved, including this strange etching on a shard of sandstone, pictured here on the left:

The shaman's annotations seem to theorize that the king was dying from an infestation of tiny spider-like creatures called "Faij" which were filled with tinier spiral-shaped things, referred to in cuneiform as "Two Twisting Serpents Of Names," or in short-form Akkadian, "Deyeneh."

These tiny Faijes would place their Deyeneh in the king's body, and the serpents would breed and make more spiders, which spread to more of his body.

vase shard with ibex | c. 3900 - 3500 BCE | found in Ĝirsu (modern-day iraq)

sorry I just had to share it, i always think of those two issues of w.i.t.c.h.

it would be even funnier if he mentioned god of fire, but he did not, Šakkan is a sort of shepherd deity of the plains and of big grass-eating domesticated animals, also with some fertility and stuff, sort of

One of the various elements that goes into all history, not just women's history, is that history begins with a vastly different world where less than 5% of the population could read and write, and where histories worked very differently and reflected the literate audience of the time. As a general rule scribes were overwhelmingly masculine and had some of the usual cliquish elements of such groups then and now. This is why an overwhelming number of the women who appear in more traditional, as opposed to the harder and deeper work of social histories, are elites, rulers and nobles, and why the view of women's lives is shaped by that of an elite caste who were not necessarily typical by any means of how most women lived, any more than their male counterparts were of men at the time.

This is also why women's history tends to zero in on specific personalities who rose both in spite and because of these biases in specific ways, a pattern that lasts well into the 20th Century in different parts of the world. In this case a bartender named Kubaba became one of the rulers of Kish, which at the time was the central hegemon of all Sumer, and in this sense could retroactively be called the first Empress. She predates Sobeknefru and Hatshepshut by a millennium, and this too makes a point about the nature of elites and power. The women who were parts of these groups were always able to fit into various holes, so to speak, in how power worked and to seize and hold it in various ways.