#mesopatamia

Reading “The Creation of Patriarchy” by Gerda Lerner, and she talks about the laws of the Middle Assyrian Empire (14th-10th century BCE). Like many ancient societies, Assyria gave fathers the right to kill their children and especially the right to commit infanticide, but at the same time there were brutally strict laws against abortion. If a married woman was found to have induced a miscarriage, she would be publicly executed and refused burial, this kind of punishment was only reserved otherwise for crimes of treason and assault on the king. A woman having an abortion was seen to be taking away her husband’s right to determine the life or death of his children and furthermore that this was a crime against social order and therefore the divinely ordained kings. The brutal control a state holds over a woman’s body through punishing abortion and the fear it has over her reproductive abilities is literally thousands of years old.

If you're 14 hundred years old and was born in Mesopotamia then you grew up in the Arab Empire just as Islam became a thing. The spread of Islam and the Muslim conquests begin with the unification of Arabia by the Islamic prophet Muhammad starting in 622. After Muhammad's death in 632, Islam expanded beyond the Arabian Peninsula under the Rashidun Caliphate (632-661) and then Umayyad Caliphate (661-750). The Muslim conquest of Persia in the 7th century led to the downfall of the Sasanian Empire. Also conquered during the 7th century were Syria, Palestine, Armenia, Egypt, and North Africa.