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Same-sex interaction is not a frequent topic in Mesopotamian literature, but neither is it unknown: the Epic of Gilgames, the Middle Assyrian Laws, excerpts from omen literature, and texts referring to people with ambiguous sexuality are regularly mentioned when the issue of homosexuality is raised with regard to cuneiform sources.
These sources suggest that love between male persons, as well as some kind of intimate interaction between males (much less often between females), was quite as thinkable in the world of the audience of Mesopotamian texts as it is worldwide in different times and cultures. The question is rather how this interaction was interpreted by the ancient readerships and by modern scholarship; in other words, what conception of gender is implied in the understanding of relationships between people of same sex? The title of this paper indicates that in the language of modern scholarship there is a category of "homosexuals," that is, a definable class of human beings whose common denominator is that they are sexually oriented towards their own rather than the opposite sex. The underlying assumption here is that of an individual sexual orientation, whether due to "nature" or "nurture," that has a fundamental effect on the sexual behavior of the person in question. This, again, rests on the idea of an individual "sexuality," a deep-seated domain in human body and mind that presides over the person's life from her cradle to her grave and is only partially controlled by the person herself.
It is well known that the idea of "sexuality" is based on sexological research since the last part of the ninteenth century CE. (I use the term "sexology" as a shorthand for the psychiatric, psychological, and social-scientific studies on human sexual conduct and its causes; cf. Crozier 2008). The modern categories of homo- and heterosexuality, as well as the fully developed differentiation implied by the acronym LGBTQ, make perfect sense today when sexological categorizations of people have become self-determining classifications of their identity, life-style, and self-conception. It is equally well known that ancient written sources were not composed with the above-described idea of "sexuality" in mind and do not categorize human gender and its manifestations accordingly. Hence the title of this essay is a conscious anachronism.
In my Homoeroticism in...