abstract: Gender research in the archaeology of the Sudan and Meroitic studies is still a nascent field. Studies of gender are especially lacking in investigations concerning war and violence, which are usually written from an androcentric perspective, and often focus solely on soldiers, army, weaponry, battle representations, and images of enemies. The experiences of non-combatants in the context of war in ancient Nubia are rarely considered. The same tendency is observable with the gender background of war. This paper deals with gender structure in the lists of spoils of war, women and children as prisoners of war in representations of battle aftermath, feminization of enemies in royal texts, participation of royal women in war, and depictions of royal women smiting enemies based on Napatan and Meroitic sources. In gender as a frame of war, Kushite kings were represented as masculine, and their enemies as feminine. This binary opposition has also been observed in ancient Egyptian and Neo-Assyrian sources, and was clearly a shared vocabulary of the great powers of the second and first millennium BCE. Such a frame of war was based on a gender disposition of men as active and strong, and women as passive and weak. It “naturalized” Kushite domination over their enemies just as it “naturalized” male domination in ancient Sudanese society. However, the participation of Meroitic queens in conflicts and their depictions smiting enemies shows how the visual vocabulary of violence can be utilized even by some women, in their own expressions of power.
abstract: Gender research in the archaeology of the Sudan and Meroitic studies is still a nascent field. Studies of gender are especially lacking in investigations concerning war and violence, which are usually written from an androcentric perspective, and often focus solely on soldiers, army, weaponry, and images of battles and enemies. The experiences of non-combatants in the context of war in ancient Nubia are rarely considered. The same tendency is observable with the gender background of war. On the basis of Napatan and Meroitic sources, this paper deals with gender structure in the lists of spoils of war, women and children as prisoners of war in representations of battle aftermath, feminization of enemies in royal texts, participation of royal women in war, and depictions of royal women smiting enemies. In gender as a frame of war, Kushite kings were represented as masculine, and their enemies as feminine. This binary opposition has also been observed in ancient Egyptian and Neo-Assyrian sources, and was clearly a shared vocabulary of the great powers of the second and first millennium BCE. Such a frame of war was based on a gender disposition of men as active and strong, and women as passive and weak. It “naturalized” Kushite domination over their enemies just as it “naturalized” male domination in ancient Sudanese society. However, the participation of Meroitic queens in conflicts and their depictions smiting enemies shows how the visual vocabulary of violence can be utilized even by some women, in their own expressions of power.
