‘my Vulva is the Vulva of a Bitch! His Penis is the Penis of a Dog’: Representation of Women in Nīš Libbi Therapies
MUKHERJEE, Saikat
The libbu inaššīšu or nīš libbi corpus (lit. raising of heart/ emotion/ thoughts) (Couto-Ferreira 2009; Zisa 2021), spanned across Old Babylonian period to first millennium BCE, deals with the diagnoses and recovery of “sexual desire” in Ancient Mesopotamia. Despite having dealt as a repertoire concerning reduced sexual desire and erectile dysfunction in men (Biggs 1967; Zisa 2021), the corpus also provides extensive information about women and their sexual horizon. Ranging from anointing the vulva with pulverised ointment (No. D.2: 21-23) to incantation for the sexual virility in her husband (No. M.1: 8-9) women in the corpus had been referred to as a benign participant in sexual intercourse and/or direct beneficiary of the therapeutic treatment. This paper tries to investigate the associate and/or autonomous representation of women and the construction of a parallel semiotic identity in the corpus that dealt with the loss of male sexual desire.
Keyword: women, libido, metaphor, identity, treatment.
Session 4. Crafting Identity and Clusters through Material Culture, Iconography and Texts [info]