Ancient Egypt is well known for its exoticism, its otherness. The ancient Egyptians worshipped strange gods with animal heads, built huge monuments and wrapped their dead in yards of bandages. Yet, at the same time, ancient Egypt seems strangely familiar. People went to work, made fun of those in authority, fell hopelessly in love, drank too much, and made fools of themselves. For us, in the twenty-first century, ancient Egyptian art, including depictions of women, is appealingly sensual and ‘modern,’ but at the same time exotic and distant. It is this combination of the familiar and the fantastic that makes ancient Egypt so compelling.
Even the ancients thought Egypt and its women strange. Herodotus, a Greek writer of the fifth century BC makes this quite clear, claiming the Egyptians had completely reversed normal gender roles. Such emphasis on the exoticism of Egypt, and its women, continues through to the works of Shakespeare and even to modern films such as The Mummy. In order to further entice us, sexuality, which is traditionally associated with women, is added to the pot.
We might suspect that the idea of weird, exotic women with lax morals and wanton sexuality was perhaps exaggerated by those wanting to show the superiority of the Greek and Roman, or our own, worlds, or just to tell a good story. However, this book will show that in many ways, ancient Egyptian women really were ‘strange’ when compared with us. This is hardly surprising as the period under discussion began over 3,000 years before the birth of Christ. One might expect to see a rather unfamiliar society with unusual attitudes to women. The bizarre picture presented here shows the absolute impossibility of ever fully understanding the past. Quite apart from the problems of lack of evidence or the myriad of ways one set of evidence may be understood, how can we empathize with totally alien beliefs?
In most societies, women are subservient to men. Generally, women have fewer rights and their work is confined to the home. When they work outside the home, they are not usually rewarded as well as men. It has sometimes been claimed that in ancient Egypt, women’s work always centred round the home, hence the pale skin of Egyptian women depicted in painting. However, a Fifth Dynasty tomb scene from Saqqara shows a woman steering a cargo ship while ordering a man to get her food, but not to obstruct her view. Not only is this women strikingly bossy – some might claim ‘unfeminine’ in her demands – she is in charge of a vessel and clearly not confined to the home. In this same period, Egyptian women are shown engaged in marketplace trade with men. Women weavers are rewarded with necklaces in the same way that men were given rewards by the king, and they also received bread, beer, oil and wheat, just like the male tomb workers. At least in the Old Kingdom, women conceivably had a certain amount of independence and status, though of course we do not know if they found it difficult to juggle demands of work inside and outside the home.
In later Egyptian history, women still seem remarkably liberated in many ways. We have a papyrus written by a woman weaver to the king. Despite the fact that he is the most important person in the land, a god on earth, this woman is not cowed, but audaciously points out that he is lucky to have her in his employment. In much later periods, the Divine Adoratrice, a female priestly postholder, held such wealth and status that she was second only to the king.
In the New Kingdom, Egyptian love poems describe the woman as the more active partner, seeking out and ensnaring male lovers. Furthermore, while it is usually assumed that, historically, most prostitutes were women, the earliest Egyptian tales where prostitution is mentioned describe women paying for sex. In one story, the wife of the high priest sends a box of clothing to a man in the town to get his attention. In another, a wife offers to make her brother-in-law fine clothing if he will sleep with her. In this period, textiles were a form of currency. All this might suggest that ancient Egyptian women were early feminists.
Attitudes to women’s procreation may also seem bizarre. In most societies, women are at the centre of the procreative process. Some would claim that this ability to create is the essence of female power. On the negative side, in such societies, the woman is usually blamed if a couple cannot produce children. However, in ancient Egypt, it was men who were considered the creators. In New Kingdom Deir el-Medina, a man is criticized because he cannot make his wife pregnant ‘like other men’. The woman was important in creation, but only as the arouser of the male and as a vessel for his child. This idea of the male creator extended to the world of the gods. There was no concept of mother earth, but rather the earth was personified as the male god, Geb.
The importance of the male as the centre-point for rebirth meant that for most of Egyptian history the deceased was identified with the reborn male god Osiris. Mythically, Osiris had to be revived from death by the sexual allure of his sister/wife, Isis. This belief led to depictions of the goddess Isis in the form of a bird hovering over the genital area of the deceased in order to sexually stimulate his phallus to life. As the deceased, whether male or female, is associated with the male god Osiris, the motif of Isis bird hovering over the genital area was even used if the deceased was female.
Other attitudes toward women may appear unusual. In many societies, women are not allowed the same freedom to drink alcohol as are men. Heavy drinking is considered especially immoral for women and certainly unfeminine. Often it is felt that since women are in charge of children, they need to be especially moral. While drinking was often discouraged in ancient Egypt, at times it appears to have been celebrated by both sexes. An ancient Egyptian tomb painting shows an elite woman vomiting through overindulgence in alcohol. A woman at a drinking party asks for 18 cups of wine because her throat is as dry as straw. The gentle goddess Hathor turns into a blood-lusting lioness, but is tricked into drinking huge quantities of beer which have been dyed red to look like blood. As a result, she returns to her peaceful and beautiful state. The return of the pacified goddess was celebrated by Egyptian men and women with a festival of drunkenness.
The opening lines of L. P. Hartley’s The Go Between, ‘The past is a foreign country’, contain a metaphor often quoted to emphasize the specificity, contingency and particularity of the past, and the fact that any attempt to understand it is thus an illusion. Furthermore, this strangeness (to our eyes) of the lives of ancient Egyptian women also disabuses the notion of the prototypical sisterhood claimed by some branches of feminism. One might also add that the problems of lack of evidence and the interpretation of ancient material in modern terms reinforce the futility of trying to understand past events.
But is the aim of understanding the past really so hopeless? One might argue that at the same time, all humans do share commonality, that there is some universal human experience, that we all live in the same world and that we are, more or less, all biologically the same.
Thus, certain aspects of ancient Egyptian women seem remarkably similar to those of today’s women. That we can appreciate this similarity is made possible by the incredible amount of surviving evidence. We can even witness poignantly personal events, both of ecstatic celebration and terrible tragedy. The birth of a girl child was celebrated at ‘the place of hard drinking’ and we can imagine her parents’ joy. Concerning tragedy, it is sometimes claimed that high infant mortality meant that mothers dared not become attached to their children and therefore, personhood was not ascribed until an individual had passed childhood. However, the evidence of a severely disabled child from Deir el-Medina – a young boy who could not have survived had he not received considerable help in his short life – shows that children were cared for. Mothers loved their children dearly. After death, the child was lovingly buried with bread, dom-fruit and jewellery, no doubt by his tearful carers.
Such incidents would have engendered high emotion; they are occurrences with which we can all sympathize and make us feel as though we can almost touch the past.
When we look beyond the individual at the broader picture, it sometimes seems that in over 4,000 years, the lives of most women are remarkably unchanged. Although we think of Egypt as being incredibly developed, it was a pre-modern country and sanitation, nutrition and health care were not as they are today. As was the case in the early twentieth century West, for most ancient Egyptian women, life was short and infant mortality high. A 40-year-old woman would have been considered old. For most individuals, lives would have involved the physically drudgery of carrying children and water, and hours spent grinding corn would have taken its toll on health. This tedious and labour-intensive activity remains the unenviable lot of millions of women today.
Women generally did not have the same rights or wealth as men. Ancient Egypt was a patriarchal society. Upper-class women rarely had their own tomb chapels or funerary stelae, but were instead interred in those of their male relatives. Texts from New Kingdom Deir el-Medina suggest that while both men and women could initiate divorce, it was largely men who did so. Where marriages broke down, women were socially and economically excluded, resulting in single mothers struggling to bring up families. This difference in status between men and women is something which many would recognize today. Today there are few, if any, instances of matriarchal societies.
Not only do women, at least from the Middle Kingdom, appear to have fewer grave-goods, but also, to some extent, seem to be the chattels of men. A man committing adultery wrongs the husband of his paramour, not his own wife. Wife beating does not seem to have been considered shocking, though it could be brought before the courts. Unfortunately wife beating is still considered acceptable in many societies today.
Most women would have worked on the land and/or within the household. Men then, as now, dominated the administrative hierarchy. Where there were female supreme heads of state, and there were only around six in 3,000 years of Egyptian history, these women made use of male symbols of kingship and may be better regarded as female kings, rather than queens.
However, not all women were confined to the home. Wealthy women could be spared continual nursing, sagging breasts and childcare by the wet nurse and maids, just as today, wealthier career women have nannies. Childcare then, as now, could be off loaded onto other, less wealthy, women. This of course suggests that then, as now, childcare was not rewarded quite so well as other forms of labour, though again, caring for the offspring of the wealthy might be one of the few means of enhancing status for more lowly born women.
While women worked just as hard as men, work in the home, or women’s work then, as now, does not appear to have been so highly regarded as men’s work. Cross culturally, work in the home is associated with less prestige than that outside the home; it is also associated with women. The pale skin colour of ancient Egyptian women suggests that ideally they worked indoors, protected from the sun. This artistic convention is used in many societies to differentiate male and female. It is also true that then, as now, women’s work, although largely domestic or related to the domestic, may well have greatly added to the family income. Women’s ‘kitchen gardens’ could earn enough to pay for servants and their weaving could purchase land. They also, of course, were vital in the upbringing of children and thus in the social conditioning of the populace.
As a curator of Egyptian antiquities, I have often heard male visitors to our galleries explaining excitedly to their wives and girlfriends that in ancient Egypt women wore very little. This is a common view of ancient Egypt, largely a result of the sensuous tomb paintings of Egyptian women displaying their charms, and enhanced by film and television. In many ancient reliefs, women are shown standing with their husbands; the women are holding a lotus, (a symbol of love), wearing a heavy wig (an erotic symbol) and are associated with animals representing sexuality such as the monkey, the duck and the goose. They are shown as perfumed, eternally young and beautiful, and wearing tight, see-through outfits. The Westcar Papyrus describes diaphanous net dresses worn by young women to amuse the king. This emphasis on female sexuality in Egyptian representation may not have been an accurate reproduction of most ancient Egyptian women, but the emphasis on female, as opposed to male, sexuality is again strangely familiar.
At the same time, women’s sexuality was both celebrated and feared. The dichotomy between the femme fatale and the faithful wife and mother is modern. The traditional Mills & Boon heroine is gentle, passive and good. James Bond’s female adversaries are dangerous and active, using their sexual wiles to entrap the male. This duality seems to have extended as far back as ancient Egypt. The ideal woman does not actively stride forward, but stands passively by her partner’s side. However, there are stories of women who use their feminine wiles to entrap men. Women were often blamed for the sexual weakness of men. A lone woman is a threatening siren to a good man. The dual nature of womanhood is also manifest in the portrayal of female goddesses. On the one hand, there are beautiful nurturing goddesses such as Hathor and Bastet, and on the other, fierce blood-lusting goddesses such as Mut and Sekhmet. Women’s passion is shown to move from one extreme to another.
Thus, a study of women in ancient Egypt seems to show that the particular and the universal are possible at the same time. While, generally, ancient women are much the same as modern women, when we look at the specifics, there are differences. The study of the past at once shows striking similarities and striking dissimilarities.
However, the purpose of this book is to encourage debate, and it is appropriate to end this introduction with some questions. Are we deluding ourselves that the ancient Egyptians were in any way similar to us? Do we not impose ourselves on the past, familiarizing that which is essentially exotic? The famous Berlin bust of Nefertiti conforms to modern stereotypical ideas of feminine beauty, and in popular works, Nefertiti is said to be the most beautiful woman the world has ever seen. At the same time, she is strangely distant; her enigmatic smile hides the secrets of 3,000 years. She has been considered the archetypal black woman, the stereotypical Nazi Aryan and the role model of modern Egyptian womanhood. Can we ever really understand her?