Inventory of lexemes of action verbs, a new methodology for gender studies research. An example with ʿAnatu of Ugarit

International audience; Ugarit literary materials in alphabetic cuneiform have been mainly studied by Ugaritologists with a biblical background, their research pursued by their scientific heirs ; de facto their approach is less favorable to an impartial study of power relationships between different entities of opposite biological (as opposed to social) gender.Avoiding the trap of subjective interpretation makes it essential to use as neutral a tool as possible. The inventory of lexemes (IoL) proves to be such a tool for transparency analyses. Among other things it enables to highlight action verbs for each studied entity, be it divine or human, male or female. To determine social sex, the IoL of action verbs has been as unbiased a methodological tool as possible. Its interest is three-fold :1) for a “female”, to distinguish verbs associated to ‘heteronormativity’ or to the ‘performativity’ of sexual gender ; 2) to draw up statistics of action verbs to determine the agency of involving all entities and their influence ; 3) taking into account socio-political context and cultural areas, a semantic and comparative analysis of commonly used Ugaritic verbs will make it possible to analyze the lexical choice of verbs used by entities of social sex ‘man’ or social sex ‘woman’ from a representative corpus from Mari, Ebla, Emar, Nuzi, Ḫatti and Sumerian texts.For example, the IoL of West Semitic goddess ʿAnatu, one of the main protagonists of the Baʿlu Cycle from Ugarit, will be established. Let us consider the verb mḫṣ, “to kill or beat” used six times to describe ʿAnatu’s actions. What are the other verbs used for the same purpose in the same semantic field? In what sociopolitical and cultural context is it used elsewhere in the Ugaritic corpus ? By which biological or social sex?This parallelism will not be limited to the Ugaritic corpus but will be also compared to a list of equivalent action verbs belonging to the same semantic field in Hittite (kuen-), Sumerian (SIG3/RA) and Akkadian (maḫāṣu). The major objective is to determine whether the social sex of ʿAnatu can be determined, and her decisions legitimated, by examining the semantics of the action verbs according to the contexts and culturalareas.