Gala

Where the word gala comes from

Nobody has dated the word. Gala appear in temple records from the middle of the third millennium BC, which is the earliest position on record, and no first attestation of the word itself is recorded.

Gala was set down with the sign sequence UŠ.KU. The first of those signs also carries the readings g̃iš3, penis, and nita, male; the second carries bed3, anus, and dur2, buttocks. A pun has been read into the choice. Separately, gala is homophonous with gal4-la, vulva. English holds the word in this sense only as a learned borrowing from Sumerian, with the plural left unchanged as gala or regularised to galas.

What a gala did for Inanna

The work was singing, and specifically singing laments. An Old Babylonian text has the god Enki create the gala for exactly that, to sing heart-soothing laments for Inanna. Their hymns were sung in eme-sal, a Sumerian dialect otherwise used to render the speech of female gods, and that choice of dialect is the single most cited piece of evidence for the gendered character of the office. Some gala took feminine names and feminine roles.

No count survives. The record says only that gala made up a large part of the personnel of temples and palaces, the two central institutions of a Mesopotamian city-state, and nobody has counted them. Lamentation and wailing may have been women's professions first, in which case the men who entered the role took on forms that were already feminine.

Why the gendered reading of gala is disputed

The evidence pulls two ways and nothing on file reconciles it.

On one side sit the proverbs. Sumerian proverbs refer to the effeminate character of the gala, and one of them turns on a gala declining to arouse what belongs to his mistress, meaning Inanna, which is read as implying homosexual proclivities. On the other side sit the administrative records, in which a great many gala have wives, children and large families, and in which some gala are women.

The phrase third gender attaches to the office through a paper title. Uri Gabbay's contribution to the 51st Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, held at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in July 2005 and published in 2008, is called The Akkadian word for "third gender" / the kalû (gala) once again, and the quotation marks stand in the title as it is cited. What that citation preserves of the argument is one observation: some gala and kalû are mentioned in Pre-Sargonic and Old Babylonian texts in connection with classes of women, maids and ḫarimtu-women, and the gala sometimes appears in the same passage as other functionaries. The material does not carry the gala as a settled instance of a Third gender category.

Whether the gala and the galli are connected

A link has been proposed to the galli or gallae, the eunuch priests of Cybele in Phrygia and later in Rome, resting on the resemblance between the two offices and on the resemblance between Cybele and Inanna. Wiktionary states the position without softening it: the connection has been suggested, and evidence is lacking. It credits the suggestion to Philippe Borgeaud's Mother of the Gods: From Cybele to the Virgin Mary, of 2004. More than two thousand years separate the two words, and nothing on file closes that distance. Whether a gala was castrated is not stated anywhere in the material either, which is one of the several places where the two priesthoods are assumed to match without being shown to.

Why the festive English gala is unrelated

Two unrelated words share the spelling, and a search for one returns the other. The everyday English gala, a festive occasion, came through French en gala and is recorded from the 1620s in the now obsolete sense of festive dress; the sense of a festive occasion is first recorded in 1777. Behind the French sits Italian or Spanish gala, and behind that Old French gale, rejoicing, the whole group being cognate with gallant. Klein's alternative traces the Italian to Arabic khil'a, a fine garment given as a presentation, and the French form probably kept its final vowel to avoid colliding with gale, scabies. Neither route touches Sumerian. A third gala, the stage name of an Italian pop singer, accounts for a further large share of what the word returns online.