Phallic Fertility in the Ancient Near East and Egypt

Abstract

In the modern west, reproductive fertility is a women's issue. The critical processes of conception, pregnancy and parturition all involve women far more than men. The debate about abortion is fought on (and in) the female body; fertility treatment targets the potential mother's reproductive system; surrogate motherhood invades another woman's reproductive system; and most birth control is aimed at women. The relentless emphasis on the feminine nature of fertility has caused modern scholars and others to cast this understanding onto the study and reconstruction of the past. Female statuettes from the ancient world, naked and clothed, have been interpreted as ‘fertility figurines’, while every goddess in the ancient pantheons – be she mother or virgin or both – tends to be described as a ‘fertility goddess’. Various and sundry ‘mother goddesses’ were discovered throughout the ancient world in nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship. Today, many reconstructed neopagan religions are devoted to a monotheistic ‘Great Goddess’ who is understood to have survived the spread across Eurasia of the Indo-Europeans with their patriarchal sky god which ended the peaceful reign of the ‘Great Mother’. The pendulum is now swinging the other way concerning the ‘female = fertility’ equation, especially in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern territories once most susceptible to its lures. In 1989, Jo Ann Hackett pointed out the innately sexist implications of the theory that females are nothing but wombs. There is also growing interest in the fecund male, as shown by recent publications on the masculine role in fertility in both Egyptian iconography and Sumerian literature. This chapter develops, for the early literate cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, the new emphasis on the understanding of fertility as a masculine attribute, in which it is the life-giving fluids of the penis, rather than what goes on in the womb, that creates new life. I focus on mythology – a rich surviving resource – from a swathe of territory from Egypt through the Levant and Mesopotamia into Anatolia, over a period stretching from around the end of the fourth to the early first millennium bc, although the bulk of the material comes from the second millennium. It was in their tales of creation and generation that the residents of the ancient Near East and Egypt were most explicit about their notions of gender vis-a-vis fertility, for both deities and humans.