Reply To: Social stratification in the Ancient Near East

[Gabe]

The first thing that really stuck out to me was how in the Cylindrical Seals the figures are identifiable as women because of their fringed skirts and pulled back hair, which is super fascinating because (for better or worse) those same qualities could be used to identify someone as a woman today in our society. That goes to show how enduring some of these social structures are! The fact that these people cared about writing down their transactions and laws, from the earliest cuneiform tablets to Hammurabi’s Stele, shows that they were concerned with stability and creating something that would last. So it’s not surprising that their culture was socially stratified without much up and down social movement. It seems like their mythology reflected this, as we can see with the depictions of the rulers and Gods. Of course life probably was more comfortable for people in higher social positions. As discussed in the video, the punishments laid out by Hammurabi’s code certainly favored the privileged.