The ancient Levant, Near East, and Mediterranean abounded in images of bodies. These bodies, whether human or animal, explicitly gendered or ambiguously rendered, shaped and reflected ancient concepts of power, status, and identity. Scholarship has often read them through binary and modern Western lenses, focusing on the female body as an object of the interpreter’s gaze while neglecting masculinities, ambiguities, and fluidities alike. The authors of this volume explore how visual media construct but also destabilise gender across time, culture, and material form by mapping visualizations of masculinity and femininity, challenging binary models, and combining iconographic, archaeological, epigraphic, and textual analyses. The contributions foreground the visual as a vital historical source, one that not only complements but also questions textual traditions, and highlights the materiality and context of objects as key to understanding how gender came to matter in the ancient world.

The ancient Levant, Near East, and Mediterranean abounded in images of bodies. These bodies, whether human or animal, explicitly gendered or ambiguously rendered, shaped and reflected ancient concepts of power, status, and identity. Scholarship has often read them through binary and modern Western lenses, focusing on the female body as an object of the interpreter’s gaze while neglecting masculinities, ambiguities, and fluidities alike. The authors of this volume explore how visual media construct but also destabilise gender across time, culture, and material form by mapping visualizations of masculinity and femininity, challenging binary models, and combining iconographic, archaeological, epigraphic, and textual analyses. The contributions foreground the visual as a vital historical source, one that not only complements but also questions textual traditions, and highlights the materiality and context of objects as key to understanding how gender came to matter in the ancient world.