However, all this written evidence needs to be treated with a due degree of caution. It should always be remembered that our record is both incomplete and randomly selected – that even though many texts have survived many more have been destroyed, leaving whole aspects of life simply unrecorded. Those documents which do survive present us with several problems of interpretation. Although we are able to translate literally many of the words which the Egyptians used we do not come from the same cultural and social background and, just as a visitor from the planet Mars equipped only with a dictionary would have trouble understanding the radio commentary to a football game or the meaning of the words of a pop song, so we may be missing some of the more subtle nuances and colloquial expressions which would have been clear to the intended reader. This is particularly true of the romantic love songs and the myths and legends, where the Egyptians deliberately employed metaphors and double entendres to add a pleasing twist to their message. The Egyptian habit of exaggerating or even inventing the glorious deeds carved on monumental inscriptions simply adds to our confusion; the Egyptians themselves could see no reason why they should not usurp the monuments, and even the actions, of their illustrious forebears.
Above all, it should be remembered that literacy was confined to a very small percentage of the population, almost all of whom were male members of the middle and upper classes. The surviving documentary evidence therefore deals primarily with matters which concerned a restricted section of the community, and is both written from a male viewpoint and intended for a contemporary male reader. Even where a text purports to be by a woman – for example, the love poetry written from a young girl’s viewpoint – it was often composed by a man and therefore gives a male interpretation of a woman’s assumed feelings. Since most women could neither read nor write, many matters of purely feminine interest are simply excluded from the written record.8
The ship commander Ahmose, son of Abana, the justified, speaks, and says: ‘I speak to all of you. I speak to let you know of the favours which have come to me. I have been rewarded with gold seven times in the sight of the whole land, with male and female slaves as well. I have also been endowed with very many fields. The name of the brave man is preserved in his deeds; it will not perish in the land forever.’
From the New Kingdom autobiography of Ahmose, son of Abana9
In a tradition which started during the Old Kingdom, many Egyptian men of high rank and breeding made a permanent record of their daily activities and achievements. This lengthy and stylized ‘autobiography’ was preserved on the walls of their tomb. Typically, these texts detail the trials and triumphs of the deceased’s life and, although invariably written in an exaggerated and, to modern eyes, rather boastful style, they can provide the student of Egyptian history with a great deal of information concerning the life of their subject. Unfortunately women, as the secondary occupants of the tomb, have rarely left us this type of information. We have no female autobiographies to compare with those of the men,10 and the rather muted epithets which are traditionally used to praise a dead woman ‘Whom the People Praised’ or ‘Guardian of the Orphan’s Heart’ are both vague and rather meaningless.
Prescription for safeguarding a woman whose vagina is sore during movement: You shall ask her ‘What do you smell?’ If she tells you ‘I smell roasting’, then you shall know that it is nemsu symptoms from her vagina. You should act for her by fumigating her with whatever she smells as roasting.
Extract from the Kahun Medical Papyrus
Only one particular type of document offers us the opportunity to see the real Egyptian woman stripped of her modest veil of privacy. The so-called Medical Papyri11 – handbooks listing all the known symptoms and suggested cures for a variety of common ailments and accidents – combine with the details recorded from the surviving human burials and mummified remains to provide us with a fascinating insight into the daily life of the Egyptian doctor and his patients. This scientific evidence indicates that the average indigenous Egyptian woman was relatively short in stature with dark hair, dark eyes and a light brown skin. She had an average life expectancy of approximately forty years, assuming that she was able to survive her childhood and her frequent pregnancies.
The idyllic scenes which decorate many tomb walls give the impression that the Egyptians were a fit and healthy race untroubled by sickness. This impression is flatly contradicted by the medical evidence which indicates a population at the mercy of a wide variety of debilitating and life-threatening diseases ranging from leprosy and smallpox to spina bifida and polio. Even less serious-sounding afflictions such as diarrhoea, coughs and cuts could prove fatal without modern medicines, while the majority of the population suffered intermittently from painful rheumatoid joints and badly abscessed teeth. The 18th Dynasty Edwin Smith Papyrus paints a vivid picture of the dangers which could be encountered in a society where major building projects were conducted with only the most minimal of safety precautions and where warfare was relatively common. This papyrus, a specialized work dealing with the treatment of horrific industrial wounds, includes typical case histories: ‘Instructions concerning a gaping wound in his head smashing his skull’ or, more seriously, ‘Instructions concerning a gaping wound in his head penetrating to the bone, smashing his skull and rendering open the brain’. Not surprisingly, this latter was classed among the ailments ‘not to be treated’.
The reverse of the Edwin Smith Papyrus presents us with information more relevant to a study of women. At some time in the past an Egyptian scribe or doctor has used the back to jot down a curious assortment of magical texts and prescriptions for a variety of complaints. These include a ‘recipe for female troubles’, two prescriptions ‘for the complexion’ and one recipe ‘for some ailment of the anus and vicinity’. In their apparently random mixture of practical advice, scientific knowledge and superstitious ritual these prescriptions clearly indicate the thin line that always existed between ancient medicine and magic. Indeed, the Egyptian physicians did not attempt to differentiate between the effectiveness of rational scientific treatment and amuletic or supernatural cures, just as they did not distinguish between medical complaints and problems such as persistent dandruff and facial wrinkles which we would now regard as cases for a beautician rather than a doctor. Instead, they took the view that all people were born healthy, and that disease and infirmity, if not the direct result of an accident, were caused either by a parasitic worm or by an evil spirit entering the body. It therefore made sense to take practical measures to alleviate uncomfortable physical symptoms while relying on magical spells to banish the evil spirit and thereby cure or remove the illness.
The Ebers Medical Papyrus, also dating to the 18th Dynasty, is perhaps the most scientifically advanced of the Egyptian medical documents. It is less specific in its content than the Edwin Smith Papyrus, but shows the same mixture of sympathetic magic and good advice when dealing with more common Egyptian ailments, internal diseases and general afflictions such as baldness and bad breath. The section dealing with specific male problems is very short, detailing four particular illnesses (itching, priapism, impotence and gonorrhoea). The much longer section on women’s matters deals primarily with reproduction and associated problems such as contraception, breastfeeding and child welfare. Surprisingly, for a country whose funerary rites encouraged the dissection of the deceased, knowledge of the internal workings of the female body was fairly limited. Gynaecology was not a specialist subject, and there were some strange misunderstandings with regard to the function of the female organs. For example, although the position of the cervix was known, no mention is recorded of the ovaries, and the uterus itself was believed to be fully mobile and capable of floating freely within the female body. As a wandering womb was thought to cause the patient great harm, various means were developed to tempt the itinerant organ back to the pelvis, the most widely used being the fumigation of the unfortunate patient with dried human excrement.
Prescription to cause a woman
’s uterus to go to its correct place: tar that is on the wood of a ship is mixed with the dregs of excellent beer, and the patient drinks this.
Extract from the Ebers Medical Papyrus
There was also a mistaken assumption that a healthy woman had a free passageway connecting her womb to the rest of her body, an assumption which became absorbed into later Greek medical wisdom. Many fertility tests were designed to locate any obstruction in this corridor which would prevent conception. The Kahun Medical Papyrus therefore advised that the patient should be seated on a mixture of date flour and beer; a fertile woman would vomit after this treatment and the number of retches would give a sure indication of the number of potential pregnancies. A similar prescription is recommended by the Berlin Medical Papyrus. Alternatively, in a test later used by Hippocrates, a garlic or onion pessary could be inserted in the vagina and left overnight; if by morning garlic could be detected on the patient’s breath she was thought able to conceive. Occasionally, physicians were able to pinpoint the exact cause of female sterility: when the king of the Hittites contacted his ally Ramesses II requesting the services of an Egyptian doctor who could help to cure his sister’s childless marriage the king wrote back pointing out, with more truth than tact, that as the lady in question was about sixty years old, hopes of a cure were slim.
Then the peasant said to his wife, ‘Look, I am going down to Egypt to bring food from there for my children. Go and measure out for me the remains of last year’s barley which is in the barn.’ His wife measured out twenty-six gallons of barley for him. The peasant then said to his wife, ‘Look, you keep twenty gallons of barley as food for you and your children. Now make these six gallons of barley into bread and beer for me to eat on the days which I am travelling.’
From the Middle Kingdom Story of the Eloquent Peasant
Egyptian fiction was a relatively late development, gradually growing in subtlety from the straightforward action-packed heroic tales popular during the Old Kingdom to the more complex and challenging allegories of the Middle and New Kingdoms. Throughout the Dynastic age, however, women were included in the stories only as subsidiary figures peripheral to the main plot. Wives and daughters may have provided food and clothing for their intrepid menfolk but they never accompanied them on their adventures, appearing content to stay behind and run the home. Indeed, the extreme male-oriented content of the stories and their undoubtedly masculine appeal make it difficult to dismiss the impression that surviving Egyptian fiction represents only those tales which were told by men to men. It may well be that the corresponding stories popular among groups of women were never written down; this would certainly explain the dearth of romantic fiction and the complete absence of domestic details which would presumably not be of interest to men. The consistent portrayal of loyal but passive and rather insignificant wives and daughters in the surviving fiction confirms the impression presented by the contemporary paintings and sculpture, that Egyptian men and women led essentially separate lives with different but complementary duties.
Towards the end of the Dynastic period, when Egypt was experiencing increasing foreign influence, the tradition of writing about good but rather negligible women was suddenly halted as scribes started to depict more realistic females with both a good and a bad side to their character.12 Indeed, soon the women included in the stories were more bad than good. This abrupt change of attitude is apparent in both the fictional tales and the scribal instructions which were used as set texts in all Egyptian schools; by the Late Period scribe Anhsheshonq was writing about wives in a way that suggests that he himself did not enjoy an entirely happy home life:
Let your wife see your wealth but do not trust her with it… Do not open your heart to your wife, as what you say to her in private will be repeated in the street… If a wife does not desire her husband’s property, she is in love with another man.
Ankhsheshonq held a very ambivalent attitude towards women, for in the same work he also expresses his admiration for the good woman of noble character, who ‘is like food which arrives in times of famine’. Did he feel that a good woman was a rare thing? Or were his comments on untrustworthy wives simply the ancient equivalent of the disparaging ‘mother-in-law’ jokes still popular with some male comedians today?
Several fictional females were presented in a distinctly unfavourable light. The 19th Dynasty Story of Two Brothers, for example, tells of the rift which developed between the brothers Anubis and Bata when Anubis’s scheming spouse first attempted to seduce her brother-in-law and then, her amorous advances rejected, accused him of attempted rape:
Now the wife of his elder brother grew afraid so she took fat and grease and made herself appear as if she had been beaten, in order to tell her husband, ‘It was your younger brother who beat me.’ Her husband returned home in the evening according to his daily routine. He reached his house and found his wife lying down and seeming to be ill. She did not pour water for his hands in the usual manner, and she had not lit a fire for him. His house was in darkness and she lay vomiting…
Anubis, foolishly trusting his false wife, instantly prepared to kill his brother who, magically forewarned by his favourite speaking cow, was forced to run away from home to face a life of danger, drama and adventure. Unfortunately Bata also proved to be a bad judge of the female character, and he too was eventually betrayed by a faithless wife.
A similarly unpleasant woman was featured in the New Kingdom Tale of Truth and Falsehood where the rather naive Truth, already betrayed and blinded by the lies of his more devious brother Falsehood, was seduced by a glamorous but selfish lady. Although the woman bore Truth’s son she treated her former lover very badly, making him serve as the humble doorkeeper of her house. It was only when the son was old enough to question his paternity that Truth was finally accorded his correct position in the family.
When I see you my eyes shine and I press close to look at you, most beloved of men who rules my heart. Oh, the happiness of this hour, may it go on for ever! Since I have slept with you, you have raised up my heart. Never leave me!
New Kingdom love song
Lyrical love songs and romantic poems were popular throughout the Dynastic age. These semi-erotic verses, with their explicit references to sexual intercourse mingled with a series of more veiled allusions to love-making, allowed young Egyptian girls a chance to express their own sexuality by making it quite clear that a woman can desire a man just as a man desires a woman. There is always a danger that the verses represent wishful thinking on the part of male poets wistfully conjuring up enchanting images of a non-existent world full of sexually receptive females. They do, however, indicate that Egyptian society was unusually relaxed in its attitude towards the relationships between two unattached and consenting parties, and was apparently untroubled by women expressing feelings of love and sexual arousal.
Keep your wife from power, restrain her… In this way you will make her stay in your house.
Old Kingdom scribal advice directed at young men
The role of the woman in Dynastic art and literature is very much the image of a stereotyped female seen through the eyes of the man. In paintings and in sculpture she represents the dutiful wife, daughter and mother, while in literature she provides a loyal support for her more adventurous spouse. She is invariably passive and submissive; her private life and thoughts are very much a blank. Although this type of evidence does give us some understanding of Egyptian family hierarchy – we can see, for example, that the husband clearly considered himself to be the head of the household, and can guess that men had little understanding of the woman’s daily routine – the real woman still remains tantalizingly hidden behind a mass of convention and tradition. This idealized image of the Egyptian woman and the Egyptian marriage can, to a certain extent, be balanced by a consideration of how women were actually treated within the community.
Unfortunately, no Egyptian book of laws has survived. However, there is enough evidence in the form of court documents an
d legal correspondence to show that, in theory at least, the men and women within each social class stood as equals in the eyes of the law. This equality gave the Dynastic Egyptian woman, married or single, the right to inherit, purchase and sell property and slaves as she wished. She was able to make a valid legal contract, borrow or lend goods and even initiate a court case. Perhaps most importantly of all, she was allowed to live alone without the protection of a male guardian. This was a startling innovation at a time when the female members of all other major civilizations were to a greater or lesser extent relegated to a subordinate status and ranked with dependent children and the mentally disturbed as being naturally inferior to males. The contemporary written laws of Mesopotamia and the later laws of Greece and Rome all enshrined the principle of male superiority, so that the regulation of female behaviour by males was seen as a normal and natural part of daily life throughout most of the ancient world.13
Daughters of Isis - Joyce Tyldesley Page 4