Her husband’s surname “Çığ” in Turkish means blizzard, storm, while the patronymic “İlmiye” refers to an elite class of state officials who dealt with religion, justice and education during the Ottoman period. As for her first name ‘Muazzez’, it simply means ‘majestic’. All these three elements compose the image of this unique woman who dedicated her life to reveal the cultures that flourished in the Turkish lands before the arrival of the ancient Greeks and to highlight their historical value.

Turkey’s first female Sumerologist, Muazez Ilmige Cig, also known as “the last Sumerian queen”, was born in 1914, when the Ottoman Empire was collapsing. But the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th was also a period when hundreds of thousands of Russian Tatars, due to the persecutions of the Russian administration, immigrated to the Ottoman Empire and settled there permanently. To such a family belonged Mouazez, who was born in Bursa, where her parents had taken refuge a few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War. Five years later we find her teacher father having moved to Smyrna, where, however, due to the landing of the Greek Army, the family was again forced to move to the north, to Tsorum (Euchaneia) on the Pontus.

Champion of the secular state

Since then, the life of the young Mouazez has been parallel to the great political and social upheaval that led to the dissolution of the Ottoman State, the abolition of the power of the sultans and the establishment in 1923 of a new state, that of the Republic of Turkey.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of the new state, immediately proceeded with sweeping reforms that transformed Turkey into a secular nation. Important elements of the reforms that would modernize Turkish society were education, science, the reduction of women to an equal position with men, economic development and nationalism. Atatürk believed that a society that did not educate its women could not develop. “As long as half of society is chained to the ground, the other half is impossible to ascend to the heavens” he said. “Let us be brave in the question of women” he wrote in his diary. The wind of a new society, modern, with western standards and far from Islam, gave a great impetus to the young women of Turkey at the time. Apart from being required to remove the Islamic headscarf and wear Western clothing, they could and wanted to study.

Muazez Cig is perhaps the last representative of a whole generation of women in Turkey who acquired a university education with a vision of modernizing the country to Western standards. These women studied sociology, medicine, history, archaeology, pedagogy, music, theater alongside their male fellow students and brought a new breath to Turkish society.

Bringing order to the abyss of cuneiform inscriptions

In 1926 she entered the Women’s School of Bursa and graduated in 1931. She began her education at the Hattitology department of Ankara University in 1936 and graduated in 1940. She married Kemal Tsig, also an archaeologist, Director of the Top Kapi Museum. He started working in the three Archaeological Museums of Istanbul. He specialized in the Sumerian, Assyrian and Hittite cultures. He made important contributions, particularly in the decipherment and publication of the Sumerian inscriptions. Scientific research on these peoples, who lived in the lands of today’s Turkey before the ancient Greeks and Romans, brought to light important cultures that had developed their own language and writing, diplomacy, law and social structures. Mouazez Chig contributed enormous work to the research of these societies when, from 1940, she began her ten-year career at the Museum of Ancient Oriental Works – one of the three institutions that make up the Archaeological Museums of Constantinople – as an expert on thousands of cuneiform inscriptions that remained untranslated and unclassified in the museum archives. Together with her colleagues, she sorted and numbered thousands of inscriptions written in Sumerian, Akkadian and Hittite languages ​​in the museum’s storage. He created an archive of cuneiform texts from 74 thousand inscriptions, which he decoded together with other researchers, attracting the attention of foreign scientists to this region of the world that was once an important center of culture. He wrote many books on the Sumerian and Hittite civilizations. In 2000 she received the title of First Expert of Cuneiform Writing and Sumeriology from the University of Istanbul.

Defender of women’s rights

But beyond her commitment to archaeological and linguistic research on the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Muasez Cig maintained to the end the dynamism and appeal for scientific knowledge of the women of the first phase of the Turkish Republic. Although times had changed, especially after 2000 and the rise to power of the Islamic Justice and Development Party, Chig continued to defend women’s rights and advocate secularism.

In the mid-2000s, when the Justice and Development Party began to visibly erode the secular character of the Kemalist state by promoting Islam, Chig clashed several times with AKP supporters. And he was one of those educated people in Turkey who warned about the danger of Islamization of Turkish society. In fact, in 2006 he caused strong reactions when he claimed that the headscarf worn by Muslim women did not originate in the Muslim world, but had been worn 5,000 years earlier by Sumerian priestesses as a means of sexually initiating young men!

Highly prolific, prolific, Mouazez Ilmige Chig worked until the end. And the end came on November 17, 2024. He died in the Mediterranean coastal city of Mersina at the age of 110 years and 150 days. At the time of her death she was the oldest person in Turkey.