Chapter 31 - Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
Harem Politics: Royal Women and Succession Crises in the Ancient Near East (c. 1400-300 BCE)
In the ancient Near East the royal harem was at the centre of political life. The royal harem was often a particular centre of intrigue, rebellion, and even assassination. Within this hierarchy of peoples, contradictions arose as to the function of the harem’s role in creating political stability and continuity and gave rise to dangerous conflicts and in all Near Eastern courts, personal intrigues within the harem generated significant power politics. The manoeuvrings of wives and concubines in ensuring privileged positions for their sons in court hierarchy show how genuine political power-struggles operated among females of the court. These reports of amphimetric conflicts demonstrates the importance of the harem as a political institution. This particular strain of courtly tension, where polygyny was practised on a grand scale, but where there was no role for an official ‘queen’ or first wife, royal wives often hated each other; the various groups of paternal half-siblings hated each other too; but the most intense hatred of all was reserved for the relationship between children and their stepmothers. Moreover, in a policy of absolutism, where empires were considered to be the personal domain of the royal family, it was natural that the important women within the royal family would assume legitimate roles of authority.
By Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones is Chair of Ancient History at University of Cardiff (Wales, UK). He is a noted specialist on rulership and court society in the Ancient Near East and has published extensively in this area including King and Court in Ancient Persia 559-331 BCE (Edinburgh, 2013; Persian translation, 2015), The Hellenistic Court (Classical Press of Wales, 2017) and articles on royal women of Persia, Egypt, and the Near East. Future publications include monographs on Kleopatra III and Kleopatra Thea (Routledge), and a study of Achaemenid Iran (Routledge). He also works on reception studies, having published Designs on the Past: How Hollywood Created the Ancient World (Edinburgh, 2018) and his new project looks at ancient imagery in court portraiture and theatricals c. 1550-1800..
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Keywords
Harem; Wives; Concubinage; Empire; Assyria; Persia; Israel; Egypt Succession; Amphimetric
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