CHANNELING THE URGE: THE FIRST SEX LAWS FOR A FOUR-THOUSAND-YEAR-OLD Mesopotamian homicide case, the record is impressively intact. Decades of archaeological excavations have yielded multiple copies describing the case in detail, spelled out on broken clay tablets embossed with cuneiform writing. The duplication makes sense, given that the victim was Lu-Inanna, a high priest of Enlil—one of this civilization’s most important gods—and that the murder took place in Nippur, a holy city. By the time the trial came up, Nippur had been continuously inhabited for thousands of years.The charge was murder, although sex was all over the case. The accused were two freedmen, a male slave, and Lu-Inanna’s widow, Nin-Dada. Given the severity of the crime and the high status of the victim, the case was taken first to the king in nearby Isin. He took a good look, and then assigned it to the nine-member Assembly of Nippur.By the time the case reached the assembly, no one doubted that Lu-Inanna had been killed by the three male suspects, nor was there any question that they had told Nin-Dada what they had done. The key remaining issue was why Nin-Dada had not immediately given up the killers to the authorities. Rather, the record says, she “opened not her mouth, covered it up.” Had she participated in the murder? If so, her execution—most likely by impalement—was a certainty. If she had not, then what crime had she committed by keeping her mouth shut?First, a little law. It was forbidden in Mesopotamia not to report another person’s misconduct, especially when sex was involved. (It was no different in nearby Assyria, where, for instance, prostitutes were not allowed to wear veils: If a man observed a prostitute wearing a veil and said nothing, he would be whipped, have a cord forcibly run through his ears like a horse’s bridle, and then be led around town to be ridiculed.) Mesopotamian barmaids were required to eavesdrop on their criminal customers as they drank. If the barmaids heard something incriminating and failed to report it, they could be put to death. Adultery, at least when committed by women, was also punished harshly. A disloyal wife who had plotted against her husband was treated worst of all, by being stuck on a long pole and left to suffer a slow and very public death.There was no proof that Nin-Dada had ever had sex with any of the killers, or that she had taken part in her husband’s murder. Had she been well represented before the assembly, she might have squeaked through the trial with her life. Her supposed advocates could not have done a worse job, however. They presented a “weak female” defense, arguing that Nin-Dada was so helpless and easily intimidated that she had had no choice but to remain mute. As if that argument were not a sure enough loser, her defenders went even further, claiming that even if she had participated in the murder, she still would have been innocent because “as a woman . . . what could she do?”Even after four millennia and translation from a long-dead language, the anger in the assembly’s response rises from the tablets like heat:

" A woman who values not her husband might know his enemy . . . He might kill her husband. He might then inform her that her husband has been killed. Is it she who [as good as] killed her husband. Her guilt exceeds even that of those who [actually] kill a man"

The Sumerian verb for “to know” meant the same as “to have sex,” and Nin-Dada’s silence after her husband’s murder was enough for the assembly to conclude that she was hungry for such knowledge. Far from seeing her as a weakling, the assembly made clear that she should have braved any intimidation to see that the murder was avenged. Nin-Dada was sentenced to die.So go the brief lives and unnatural deaths of a Mesopotamian husband and wife, he murdered for unknown reasons and she for disrespecting her husband’s memory. They inhabited a world unknown to most of us, and barely understood by specialists at that.1