I did a lot of research for my Trans History talk this year, but I’m already learning new things that I wish I had included. I’ll blog about some of the more spectacular ones here.
For this update I have to give thanks to my Out Stories colleague, Robert Howes, who spotted a Radio 4 documentary about eunuchs. Naturally I gave it a listen. Fairly inevitably, I was disappointed.
Before I get to that, however, I have learned something new about one of my favorite ancient civilizations, the Assyrian Empire. We know now that they had aqueducts long before the Romans came on the scene. The radio program, via Professor Karen Radner of UCL, revealed that a single dynasty controlled the empire for its entire thousand-year existence. In all of human history, only Denmark has managed a similar degree of political stability. (For the benefit of clueless conservatives, in Egypt and China dynasties came and went like confetti.) Doubtless this means that the Assyrian kings were particularly ruthless, but it is impressive all the same.
The other thing I learned about the Assyrians is that they were the first Western(ish) civilization (possibly the first in the world) to make significant use of eunuchs, which is why Prof. Radner was on the program.
The disappointing thing about the program is that it follows the fairly standard cis narrative that castration is a barbaric practice inflicted on unwilling boys and men by despotic rules and greedy parents. The idea that anyone might wish to be castrated is so alien to cis people that they always erase the possibility from their versions of history. The reading list provided for the program includes a book about hijras, but they were not mentioned during the broadcast because they don’t fit the narrative. Modern-day hijras undergo castration voluntarily, because they identify as either third-gender or female.
The program did include a few minutes mention of the Roman-era cult of Cybele, which used castrated, cross-dressing priests very similar to the hijras. However, the panel all professed to have no idea why such people existed, other than in connection with the myth of Attis, Cybele’s consort, who is said to have castrated himself.
All of the mention of Assyrian eunuchs involves their use as bureaucrats and warriors (traditions that were passed down through Islam to the Ottoman Empire). However, it is fairly certain that the cult of Cybele owes something to the worship of the Assyrian goddess, Ishtar, and before her Sumeria’s Inanna. It is possible that the ritual castration of Attis is a more mild version of the ritual death of Ishtar’s corn-god consort, Tammuz. So I suspect that worship of Ishtar might also have involved eunuch priests. If they were anything like Cybele’s Galli, they would have cross-dressed. And of they were anything like the hijras many of them would have identified as women.
Obviously I need to do a bit of digging here, because much of this is speculation, but if I can find evidence then I will have traced the written history of trans people back another 1500 years.
I’m sure you know this already, but the Ancient greeks had the deity Hermaphrodite.
I do indeed. This person: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermaphroditus.
However, they were more an expression of divine androgyny than a representation of an actual intersex person.
There is some discussion of hijras in the few minutes of additional material that’s to be found on the podcast version.
I know Shaun Tougher, who was on the programme, and I’ll point him at this post, as I think he might find it interesting.
Thanks Tony. I’ll check out the podcast.
Also I’d love to talk to Shaun about eunuch priests in Byzantium. I gather that there were whole monasteries full of them. I’d been rather skeptical of stories of women monks like Saint Marina until I discovered how common eunuchs were in the Byzantine church.
If memory serves, and this is a big if since I’ve not looked at Cybele or the evidence around the cult in a while, outsiders used masculine gendered language for the Galli of Cybele (even Gallus, a second-declension noun, is effectively a masculine term); however, what (aside from that term) Galli & initiates referred to themselves or each other as I’m not sure we have any evidence to. So the modern attitude is the common ancient attitude, but not necessarily the attitude of the Galli or other initiates into the cult of Cybele.
Of course this is all made harder because, surprise surprise, it was a bloody mystery cult. Especially for a modern archaeologist or historian, that name is frustratingly accurate…
I have evidence from Valerius Maximus that the Galli were not regarded as wholly male. Is there a gender-neutral option in Latin? My knowledge is very rusty, but if not we can dispense with the linguistic argument.
The little I have read suggests that the Galli dressed as women, which is very like the hijra. They were buried as women.
I need to read Lynn Roller’s book, but it is £35 second hand and not available as an ebook. I should get Borgeaud too. Wish I had access to an academic library.
Latin does have three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. However, as Daniel says, the word Gallus is masculine, as indeed is the word eunuchos, and the Greek eunouchos. So, linguistically eunuchs are seen as degenerate men. I’d expect that all the potentially trans individuals such as Elagabalus or Favorinus will be referred to with masculine words. But that merely demonstrates that elite male Romans didn’t care about misgendering people.
I’m now heading down the rabbit hole of researching Favorinus. Thanks! 🙂
Oh, and University libraries can often be willing to let non-academics have at least reading access, if they are not obvious time-wasters, so it’s worth investigating (though in point of fact Bristol seems not to have Roller, and only has Borgeaud in French).