WOMEN LIFE IN ANCIENT EGYPT

The citizeness Taaper was brought. She was examined by beating with the stick. They said to her, Come tell us the story about this piece of copper which you said was in the possession of the field labourer Peikharu . . . She said . . . Now I happened to be sitting hungry under the sycamores and the men chanced to be trading copper as we were sitting hungry . . .
There was brought the citizeness Shedehnakht the wife of the field labourer Peikharu who was a maid servant . . . She was examined by beating with a stick; her feet and hands were twisted. She was given the oath by the Ruler on pain of mutilation not to speak falsehood . . . 
They said to her, When you were a maid-servant with the wab-priest and thief Tetisheri it was you who opened for those who went in . . . tell me of men whom you saw . . . She said I did not see it. If I had seen it I would tell you. She was examined again by beating with the stick. She was given the oath by the Ruler not to speak falsehood. She said, I saw no one at all. If I had seen I would tell you.

These extracts from a 3,000-year-old court document now in the British Museum, poignantly describe the questioning of several people, including two women, concerning the theft of a copper carrying pole from the tomb of a chief priest of Amun worth the equivalent of about eight months’ wages for a workman. These women are obviously not of the elite as one of them describes herself as ‘sitting hungry’. Both are subject to torture to extract confessions.  The paltry amount of metal about which they are questioned contrasts with the great wealth of goods placed in royal tombs. The gold coffi n of Tutankhamun, which alone weighed c. 100 kg,would have been worth 3,000 years’ wages for a labourer.3 These accounts remind us that life for the majority of Egyptians – most of whom were field labourers and wives of labourers – was not one of ease, and contrasted with the vast wealth of royalty. This book is about rich and poor – the wives of field labourers and the wives of kings. I begin by considering whether their lives were so vastly different from one another. In many societies, including our own, the majority of wealth is in the hands of only a very few people. In ancient Egypt, the king was the most important person and around him, the royal family and courtiers were the elite. Below these people were scribes, the men of the bureaucratic machinery of state, and skilled artisans. Next came the largest group, which consisted mainly of agricultural workers, peasant farmers, herdsmen, fishermen and labourers. Finally, there would be the poorest of poor who were destitute, such as beggars. It is a popular, and entirely erroneous myth, that the ancient Egyptians employed vast teams of slaves. In fact, there was no specific term for the slave in ancient Egypt, though the terms hem or bak are sometimes translated as ‘slave’. Hem is used of servants dependent upon a household; bak is similarly used, but implies a strong sense of loyalty to the lord (often the god or king). While certainly some of these people might have had little freedom, only very few of them could be bought and sold, and it is usually agreed that compared to other societies in the ancient world, the Egyptians had very few slaves. There was a certain amount of social mobility, although a peasant farmer would not have been expected to become a scribe. In addition to the social inertia caused by lack of mixing among the classes, the lower social orders could never aspire to be members of the bureaucracy because this depended on the ability to read and write. Estimates for the percentage of people who could read and write in ancient Egypt generally vary between 1 and 4 per cent. Of course, women were not a homogeneous group, but whether rich or poor, all women were certainly disadvantaged in comparison to men of the same social class. Women had fewer life chances and, for all classes, their lives were overshadowed by the dangers of giving birth. Additionally, it seems to have been acceptable to physically punish disadvantaged adults. Rich women may not have been as subject to beatings from social ‘betters’, but they still may have endured such from higher status relatives, and in turn beaten their social inferiors. Generally, women were seen as more passionate than men and whether as dangerous femmes fatales, or nurturing housewives and mothers, their role was to encourage and support the male. This does not mean that all ancient Egyptian women had unhappy lives; the role of women may have lacked the status and advantages of men, but it does not follow that ancient Egyptian women felt oppressed. Exclusion from active and aggressive professions, for example, meant they were not coerced into the army. Ancient Egyptian women do not appear to have been unable to ask for what they wanted and, as is the case today, the role of wife and mother was exactly what many ancient Egyptian women desired. While all social classes of women in ancient Egypt shared some things in common, there were differences between the rich and poor. The huge difference in social status in ancient Egypt is often underplayed, partly due to intrinsic bias in the evidence and partly due to romanticism; representations of women tend to concentrate on the wives of the great and the good, and this elite lived differently from the poor. It is difficult to judge the extent of poverty in ancient Egypt, but we can say that compared to the twentieth century in the developed world, the lives of most ancient Egyptians were short and marked by grinding poverty and drudgery. Women who survived childhood would be lucky to live beyond forty. Work was hard and monotonous; bosses ill-treated workers and there was little recourse to courts and justice. Children grew up quickly and were sent out to work at an early age to support the family. Egyptian women in such households had neither the luxury of leisure, nor the time to beautify themselves. Instead, they would spend hours each day in the back-breaking tasks of grinding corn to make flour, weaving and looking after children. Some would have helped in the fields. These women wore clothes that would have been darned and redarned and they would have had few possessions. Lower-class women, like other less advantaged groups, would have been abused by their superiors. The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant explains the diffi culty experienced by the non-elite in gaining justice. While the title suggests the hero of the story is of the lowest social class, he is actually a merchant or pedlar and yet is subject to abuse by those of higher status. Women seem not to have used the courts as much as men (see Chapter 3), and justice would have been doubly difficult for poorer woman. Poorer women would have been more dependent upon male relatives than richer women, and thus widowhood, especially without family support, would have caused great hardship. The beautifully painted wooden coffi ns we so commonly see in museums were simply unaffordable for the average Egyptian. Elite women, such as the wives of courtiers, had very different lives. However, while more of this group might have been expected to live to old age, this rarely in fact occurred. Many of these women would have died in childbirth and, like their poorer sisters, would have been expected to produce large families. Wet nurses would have taken charge of children, and later, tutors would have freed such women from constant childminding. They would have had maidservants to assist them and, thanks to a better education, might well have been able to read and write. Thus, they could easily run large households, keeping accounts of goods and chattels. Many would have been priestesses, working one month in four in the temple. At banquets, such women would have been clad in fine linen, perfumed and adorned with colourful collars of semi-precious stones. If widowed, elite women would have been able to keep their own property, plus one third of that acquired while married; they would not have been destitute.  In death, elite women would have been interred in the tombs of their male relatives.

Sex and gender are often confused. Put simply, sex consists of the biological and psychological differences that defi ne men and women, whereas gender refers to the socially constructed roles and activities considered acceptable for both men and women. Thus, women are sexually different from men in that they can give birth, while modern female gender differs from that of men in that women are still likely to do more housework than men. As gender is socially constructed and varies from society to society, other aspects of society, such as class, may influence it. Some scholars have even suggested that class differentiation gives rise to gender, that is, the division of people into rich and poor, or powerful and less powerful, has forced men and women into different roles. There is some evidence from ancient Egypt that differences in the roles of men and women are, indeed, more apparent among the rich than the poor. A study of artefacts from Deir el-Medina tombs suggests that middle and upper-class men were buried with more jewellery and other possessions than their wives, whereas, for the lower classes, there is very little differentiation in grave goods between the sexes. However, this may simply indicate that archaeology cannot show gender differences among the poor since they had very few objects anyway; it could well be that the behaviour and treatment of poor men and women was very different, but not in ways which would show up in their tombs. Studies have shown that higher status women in ancient Egypt would have found themselves better off in terms of access to good food and luxury goods, but at the same time their personal freedoms would have been more restricted than that of their less wealthy sisters.

Poor women would have needed to work in the fields to feed their families and this would have been seen as an unladylike activity by wealthier women. However, such outdoor toil possibly allowed for a freer way of life which may have been the envy of wealthy women restricted to more feminine, indoor activities. One argument for viewing class, rather than gender, as a dividing principal in ancient Egypt is that richer women were freed from childcare and housework. This should have meant that in ancient Egypt wealth reduced gender differentiation. Needless to say, by hiring maidservants and wet nurses, richer women simply pushed the burden of domestic work onto poorer women. In 1884, Friedrich Engels (in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State) suggested that the status of women declined with the emergence of economic classes. Engels saw private property as disadvantaging women. Men would want to pass property on to sons, hence the need to control the virginity and fidelity of women. In ancient Egypt, evidence that class difference creates gender might be found in the transition from Predynastic Period sexual equality to inequality within the hierarchical Dynastic society. This is discussed in the next chapter. The situation is complex, as we cannot say which factors in the growth of the state may have led to loss of female power. Some have seen kinship, rather than economics, as important, while others have looked to the rise of militarism.

By Carolyn Graves-Brown in the book 'Dancing For Hathor- Women in Ancient Egypt', Continuum UK, London, 2010, pg. 7-11. Edited and adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.