Female Administrators in Ancient Iran

Article - Colby College: 

Marta Ameri, assistant professor of art, has published an article titled “Who Holds the Keys? Identifying Female administrators at Shahr-i Sokhta” in Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies. The article compares the physical and iconographic aspects of seals found in the cemetery of the third millennium BCE Iranian site of Shahr-i Sokhta with those of seals used for administrative sealing to identify different groups of people responsible for controlling goods and resources. 

Ameri uses the observed similarity between seals used for sealing and those found buried in women’s graves to suggest that women were responsible for most of the administrative sealing at Shahr-i Sokhta in the mid-third millennium BC, and to call into question the often-unchallenged assumption that men were by default responsible for administration in ancient societies.