Age and Masculinities During the Neo-Assyrian Period

Abstract

The age of an individual changes how other elements of identity, like masculinity, are expressed. For example, the modern expectations of “old men” and “young men” are very different. Here, I explore the differences between “young” and “old” men as expressed in the Neo-Assyrian textual corpus on the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc). This corpus offers a unique opportunity to incorporate recently developed word co-occurrence methods alongside a traditional close reading approach in order to explore the differences between old and young men in Neo-Assyrian texts. I demonstrate that young men were conceptually different from old men, and both were key to the construction of Neo-Assyrian hegemonic masculinities.