Early studies on women in cuneiform manuscript culture were influenced by historical preconceptions based on the place of women in the classical world or Islam and reinforced by historiographical myths, such as sacred prostitution and a pseudo 'women's language'. The term 'gender' entered Assyriologist discourse in the early 1990s. The idea was to understand why women often appeared in subordinate positions compared to men, why they were less present in texts and iconography, and how Mesopotamian society attributed roles to each sex. Cuneiform texts document women unevenly, depending on the period, place and context considered. Women are visible through their own writings in specific milieus of the early second millennium BCE.

 1 The term Assyriology includes more widely 'all scholarly fields related to the study of the ancient Near East in the time of the cuneiform cultures, from the fourth millennium BCE to the first century CE […] philological disciplines […], the history of the ancient Near East, and the archaeology and art history of the respective regions and periods', website of the International Association for Assyriology: <https://iaassyriology.com/> (accessed on 8 March 2023).