A Suitable Job for a Woman: Powerful Ancient Women Where You Don’t Expect Them

When I studied Classics in college several millennia ago, I was taught that Greek women were powerless and marginalized. By extension, that conclusion seemed to apply to any ancient woman I might encounter in my studies. There were those mythological exceptions like Medea, but such violent women merely revealed the inner fears of men toward women, or so the scholarship claimed.

Refreshingly, this understanding of ancient women is changing in the face of a wider range of evidence and scholarly perspectives. When I began to explore who the historical Briseis, whom we meet in Homer’s Iliad, might actually have been for my novel Hand of Fire, I found an abundance of powerful women. They lived on the far side of the Aegean from Greece in what is modern Turkey, both in the area on the western coast around Troy and in the dominant Hittite empire to the east, to which Troy was bound culturally and politically.

Briseis, the captive woman who sparks the bitter conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon in the Iliad, seems like an unlikely candidate for a powerful woman. Homer gives her only a handful of lines despite her major role in the plot and she’s a slave, but Briseis, it turns out, had serious clout in her world.

While Homer stays mostly mum about Briseis, contemporary archaeology has brought to light thousands of clay cuneiform tablets from Hittite sites. These tablets have a lot to say about a likely job for Briseis. Briseis could have been a Hittite hasawa—an impossible word to translate, but for convenience, a healing priestess. Such women, literate and highly trained, held sway in the royal courts as well as more mundane environments. Hittites believed that these priestesses had the power to keep the divine and human worlds in harmony. Without their intervention, infertility and famine would ravage the population and even the gods would go hungry without the animal sacrifices offered by man. They also cured illnesses, delivered babies, performed divinations and served as therapists.

I enjoyed creating this ancient woman in her environment before Achilles came along and enslaved her. On a personal level she has many doubts and fears to overcome, but her society views her as a leader and protector. For a teenager, as she is at the opening of my novel, that’s a lot to rise to, especially in the middle of a war, and it’s lucky she’s had some major preparation. That she is also headstrong and passionate is perhaps less helpful, but makes her a more intriguing character.

But even once Briseis is a captive, I could continue to portray her as a powerful person with an important social role to play. No self-respecting Mycenaean Greek warrior would have shown disrespect to a priestess with such a strong divine connection. We sometimes forget how receptive ancient civilizations were toward each other’s religious traditions. They all had many gods; welcoming in some new god seemed like smart policy. You never knew how powerful the next guy’s god might be. Only with the rise of monotheistic religions, each of which assumed a lock on the one correct approach to divine power, did religious strife become a dominant thread in human history.

Finding the historical role of hasawa gave me access to a far stronger character than I had imagined I’d find in this Late Bronze Age context of the Trojan War. Thank you, contemporary archaeology and scholarship.

Briseis’s job as a healing priestess is too complex to analyze in all its variety here (although if you’re interested, see the article called “The Hittite Hasawa: priestess, therapist, healer, diviner and midwife”), but one of the most remarkable aspects of her job was her training as the person who recited the sacred tales.

Hittites believed the gods had to be present in their lives for prosperity to flourish. If things were bad, one or more key gods must have abandoned them, and a rite must be performed to bring the god back. The healing priestess was called in. She invited the missing god with sacrifices and other rituals, but primarily she brought about the god’s return by telling a story, a myth.

We think of myths as quaint stories. To the Hittites they were powerful, sacred magic. Within the context of a ritual festival, the healing priestess would tell how a particular god in one of the sacred stories had been brought back from anger and isolation into proper relationship with the other gods and man. By magical analogy, these words, which were viewed as infinitely powerful, would bring about the return of whatever god or gods had caused the drought or crop failure or whatever the problem might have been. These festivals involving recited myths were performed to ward off trouble before it happened, and also to maintain harmony between the human and divine worlds. There is a Hittite proverb, “the tongue is the bridge”: that is, the bridge between man and gods. And the bridge builder was the healing priestess. Her words worked the magic.

Is there a more exciting job to portray for a writer than a woman who can change the fate of her people through her stories?