Infertility in Ancient Western Asia Societies

Infertility is among humanity's oldest and most universal problems. In the societies of Ancient Western Asia, it was framed not merely as a biological condition but as a multifaceted issue that shaped social order. This study examines how infertility was perceived in Mesopotamian and Anatolian contexts within a cultural-historical framework that spans legal regulations, medical practices, religious beliefs, and social attitudes. Employing a qualitative, comparative, and philological methodology, this analysis examines cuneiform medical and legal texts from Mesopotamia and Anatolia, in conjunction with dictionaries and catalogs, in dialogue with contemporary medical literature. By correlating philological evidence from ancient sources with modern scholarship on reproductive health, the article proposes an original interdisciplinary approach and highlights the historical continuity of concepts, terminology, and practices. Within this approach, infertility is conceptualized as a complex phenomenon extending beyond individual pathology, shaped by social status, moral norms, divine will, ritual practices, and legal principles. Sources are thematically organized under medical, social, and legal headings, and the relationships with fertility, lineage continuity, inheritance, and gender roles are analyzed systematically. The scope covers Old Babylonian, Middle Assyrian, and Hittite legal corpora alongside ritual prescriptions, thereby illuminating the connections between reproductive matters and social organization, legitimacy, domestic authority, and property regimes in antiquity, and providing a comparative basis for discussing analogous perceptions in the modern period.