Marc van de Mieroop (2004: 149-51) has suggested that because stereotypical harem images have not been sufficiently interrogated by scholarship, it is too often assumed that any indigenous evidence for harems in ancient societies reflects the oppressed status automatically expected of women in these cultures. While there is no compulsion to abandon the term ‘harem’, we do need to readdress our perception of it as an oppressive sphere. Because popular conceptions of the harem (from Chariton on) always feature a lack of freedom for women and their imprisonment within the gilded cage of the royal palace, harem women are usually perceived as sad, lonely, sometimes desperate individuals. Take, for instance, an emotive description of the harem women at the Siamese royal palace written by Anna Leonowens (later of The King and I fame) in 1873:
[The women] have the appearance of being slightly blighted. Nobody is too much in earnest, or too much alive, or too happy. The general atmosphere is that of depression. They are bound to have no thought of the world they have quitted, however pleasant it may have been; to ignore all ties and affections; to have no care but for one individual alone, and that the master. But if you become acquainted with some of these very women. . . you might gather recollections of the outer world, of earlier life and strong affections, of hearts scarred and disfigured and broken, of suppressed sighs and unuttered sobs. (Leonowens 1873: 40)
These are intense words, emotional rather than rational, involved rather than detached, perhaps even melodramatic. And that is part of the difficulty in trying to get to grips with the idea of the harem, since the word arouses emotions - and in Leonowens’ case ‘harem’ denotes a depressing lack of freedom. But the idea that ‘freedom’ must be linked to ‘visibility’ is a construction of the modern (i. e. post-industrial) west and has been given even greater emphasis in our own age, in which a cult of celebrity has distorted all rules of public and private in the most alarming ways.
‘Freedom’ in the modern sense of the word does not equate with ancient concepts of public visibility. In Near Eastern antiquity, as in ancient Greece, a high-ranking woman felt no honour in being put before the public view (Llewellyn-Jones 2002: 155-214) so that true authority and prestige lay in a woman’s removal from the overt public view and in her separation from the public gaze. This was certainly the case among high-status women, for whom numerous social conventions (including veiling and the demarcation of space) ensured their public invisibility and thereby boosted their sense of honour and, simultaneously, the honour and status of their male kin. In Persia it was important for the status and honour of Achaemenid royal women that their public invisibility was publicly demonstrated. The Hebrew book of Esther opens with the story of Queen Vashti (an ostensibly fictional character operating in a historically viable space), who is holding a feast for the court ladies in the harem of the palace at Susa while the king and his nobles dine outdoors in the garden (Esther 1:9). The drunken Great King commands Vashti to appear before his male guests but, shocked and reviled by the suggestion of appearing before non-blood-kin males, Vashti refuses and her rebuff of the king’s orders brings about her swift downfall. This story, reminiscent in many ways of the themes in the Herodotean tale of Gyges and Candaules’ wife (Herodotus 1.8), finds further reflection in the Greek sources, which confirm that the royal women of Persia did not drink with their husbands and that the appearance of such high-ranking women in male company would be thought improper (Plutarch, Artaxerxes 5.3; Moralia 140b).
The play on visibility and honour and shame would help explain the complete absence of the human female form in the official palace art of the Empire; indeed, women are rarely depicted at all in Achaemenid art and then are represented only in small-scale works, although sometimes of precious and semi-precious materials (Brosius 2010a; Llewellyn-Jones 2010a, 2010b). Women were not readily looked upon in real life so as to augment and ensure their social honour and they were not viewed in large-scale artworks for the same reason. The high social rank of royal females, like that of the Great King himself, was stressed by their conspicuous invisibility (again, not to be confused with seclusion). While we should not necessarily believe Plutarch’s exaggeration that Persian women were locked away behind doors, his reports (and those of other Greeks) of women travelling in curtained carriages (harmamaxae) is certainly believable and gives us a sense of how the Persians conceived of elite women’s public life.
The harmamaxa was a deluxe four-wheeled ‘chariot wagon’ composed of an enclosed box, long enough to recline in, which was richly upholstered and decorated with hangings. It was a vehicle supremely suited to transporting women and it was used by Persians for ‘shuttling their harem about’ (Oost 1977/8: 228; see also C13) and perhaps it was this type of vehicle that was provided for a group of women called duksisbe. . . puhu Misdasba pakbe, ‘royal ladies. . . girls, daughters of
Hystaspes’, who are recorded travelling from Media to Persepolis in PFa 31 (Brosius 1996: 93). When the king travelled with his court and set up camp, the harmamaxae could be placed together to produce a harem wing on wheels (as suggested by Herodotus 9.76; see Miller 1997: 51). That Artaxerxes II’s wife, Stateira, had a harmamaxa which often appeared with its curtains open, in order that the young queen might greet the women of the Empire, is highly unusual (D4; Plutarch, Moralia 173f, says that Artaxerxes encouraged his wife to do this). Certainly her imperious mother-in-law, Parysatis, regarded Stateira’s eccentricity as a breach of court protocol and an affront to decorum; in this respect, the king’s mother is probably more in accord with orthodox royal conceptions of female visibility. Interestingly, royal concubines operated in this sphere of high-status invisibility as well (D5). Xenophon (Hellenica 3.1.10) recalls that Mania, the extraordinary female governor of Dardanus, a dependant of the satrap Pharnabazus, watched and even commanded battles from the protection of her curtained wagon. This demonstrates best of all the way in which women participated very actively in society while retaining a sense of harem.
The same can be made of Greek tales of royal women hunting (Ctesias F15 §55; Athenaeus 12.514b). The hunt could be enjoyed without breaching rules of segregation by controlled access to game parks or even the erection of screens behind which the royal women could sport freely; both these measures were adopted for Mughal harem women (Lal 1988: 60, 129, 185-6, 201).
The royal women of Achaemenid Persia did not live in an oppressive purdah, nor did they inhabit a world of sultry sensuality, but they certainly formed part of a strict hierarchical court structure which moved in close proximity to the king. As a component of his harem (in the true sense of the word), they followed in the peripatetic lifestyle of the court. There can be little doubt that their honour and chastity were carefully (self-)guarded, but this does not mean that royal women were dislocated from interaction with wider court society or that they lacked autonomy. But it is logical to recognise the royal harem as a vital component of Persian court culture and to recognise its political importance in the maintenance of dynastic power: women gave birth to future heirs and vigilantly - sometimes ferociously - guarded their and their offspring’s positions within the ever-changing structure of court hierarchy (see Chapter 5). The Achaemenid dynasty was essentially a family-run business and at the heart of the operation was the harem. For the women of the royal family, prestige and access to power lay in their separation from the public gaze and in their intimate proximity to the king, whether as his mother, wife, daughter, sister, concubine, mistress, or even slave. But restricted visibility did not mean lack of freedom.
World History
