Power in general and women's power in particular has been understood mostly in a hierarchical way in earlier research on Mesopotamian women. Hierarchical power structures were important in Mesopotamia, but other kinds of power structures existed as well. This study, which focuses on women in the palaces of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (c. 930-610 BCE), draws attention to heterarchical power relations in which women were engaged in the Neo-Assyrian palace milieu. Heterarchical power relations include power relations such as reciprocal power, resistance, and persuasion. Although earlier research has certainly been aware of women's influence in the palaces, this study makes explicit the power concepts employed in previous research and further develops them using the concept of heterarchy. The study is based on primary cuneiform sources and presents a detailed description of women in Neo-Assyrian palaces. However, it additionally shows that by applying modern theories of power to the study of ancient texts, one can gain important new insights into the dynamics of ancient society.

Muinainen Lähi-itä on ensimmäisten todellisten suurvaltojen koti. Siellä muotoutuneiden sivilisaatioiden, kuten Sumerin, Assyrian ja Babylonian, perintö on kulkeutunut läpi vuosituhansien tähän päivään asti. Alue tunnetaan kirjoitustaidon ja maanviljelyn kehtona, ja sinne johtavat monien nykyisten tieteiden ja taiteiden juuret. Muinaisen Lähi-idän imperiumit kuljettaa aikaan ennen ajanlaskun alkua ja herättää eloon Mesopotamian, Levantin ja Arabian niemimaan yhteiskunnat ja kulttuurit. Teoksessa kuvataan kiehtovasti elämän eri puolia arjesta, politiikasta, uskonnosta ja taloudesta tieteeseen, taiteeseen, kansallisuuteen ja sukupuolten moninaisuuteen. Koko historiansa ajan yhteiskunnat kohtasivat sotien, katovuosien, epidemioiden ja ilmastonmuutoksen kaltaisia mullistuksia ja jopa romahtivat kokonaan. Toisaalta viimeaikainen tutkimus on kiinnittänyt huomiota siihen, että yhteiskunnat olivat joustavia ja pystyivät sopeutumaan suurtenkin muutosten edessä.--

One of the ways meanings of words can be understood is based on their distributional properties. Such methodology offers an interesting quantitative viewpoint on the study of the lexicography of long-extinct languages. This chapter explores the use of Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI), a well-known statistical word association measure used in collocation analysis. PMI is applied to the data in order to gain insights on the semantic nuances of Akkadian verbs of seeing (amāru, naṭālu, palāsu, dagālu, ḫiātu, barû, and subbû). To evaluate the data-driven results, the findings are compared to previous philological work by Ainsley Dicks. The analysis of the top-ranked PMI-extracted collocates provides a good overview of the typical semantic differences between the seven verbs of interest.