Unfortunately, during the Graeco-Roman period when the Greek laws, customs and language started to have a profound influence on the Egyptian way of life, the woman’s right to equal status was slowly but surely eroded away. At this time many Greek families settled in Egypt and closely cloistered Greek women protected by the legal guardianship of their kurieia started to live side by side with the free-born Egyptian women. Many Egyptians, seeing the exotic Greek lifestyle as preferable to their own, rushed to embrace the new modes of behaviour; indeed, we have documents confirming that several non-Greek women who had no legal need for a guardian actually applied to have one appointed, perhaps in the hope that others might mistake them for sophisticated Greeks rather than provincial Egyptians. By the Roman period, when Roman traditions were added to the Greek and Egyptian cultural mix, women had lost many of their former rights and privileges, so that although continuing local customs allowed them to remain less suppressed than the women living in Rome, they were nowhere near as emancipated as their Dynastic forebears had been.
2
Married Bliss
Found your household and love your wife at home as is fitting. Fill her stomach with food and provide clothes for her back… Make her heart glad, as long as you live.
Old Kingdom Wisdom Text
Those of an unromantic or cynical disposition may take the view that marriage is little more than a simple economic contract drawn up between a man and a woman, intended to create an efficient working unit and strengthen alliances while protecting interests in property and legitimizing children. Love may, or may not, be an additional bond which unites the participants; it is certainly not fundamental to a successful marriage. For women in particular the wedding ceremony, marking the important change in status from daughter to wife, also represents the recognized transition from child to adult and the start of a new role in society. Very unfairly, married women are almost universally regarded with more respect than their unmarried sisters; indeed, the view that an unmarried woman is a woman who has failed in her main role in life is one which is expressed with monotonous repetition by both men and women of different cultural backgrounds and different historical periods.
All these generalizations are true of marriage in ancient Egypt, where the formation of a strong and unified family provided much-welcomed protection against the harsh outside world. And yet the Egyptians, far more than any other past civilization, have passed on to us, through their paintings, their statues and, above all, their lyric love songs, their satisfied contentment with the romance of marriage. To marry a wife and beget many children may have been the duty of every right-thinking Egyptian male, but it was a duty which was very much welcomed: the Egyptians were a very uxorious race.
Tradition and biology combined to ensure that marriage followed by motherhood would be the inevitable career-path for almost all Egyptian women, and mothers trained their young daughters in domestic skills accordingly. Once a girl had reached adolescence she had no real social role, being neither child nor wife, and so she remained in a kind of protective limbo, living in her father’s house until a suitable match could be found. The best marriages were widely agreed to be those arranged between members of the same family, or between neighbours of the same social standing and professional class, and scribe Ankhsheshonq advised parents ‘don’t let your son marry a bride from another town, in case he is taken away from you’. Just as modern Egyptian peasants acknowledge the right of a paternal male cousin to claim the hand of his father’s brother’s daughter, so their ancient forebears gave preference to marriage between first cousins or uncles and nieces which would prevent the splitting of family property and the inherited right to work land, an important consideration in an agricultural community. The genetic implications of inbreeding do not seem to have worried the Egyptians unduly, although several examples of congenitally deformed skeletons recovered from local cemeteries suggest that occasional problems did occur.
The state itself was remarkably relaxed in its attitude to marriage and, unlike almost all other ancient civilizations, the Egyptians placed no official restriction on union s with foreigners. There was no perceived need to preserve the purity of the Egyptian race, so exotic beauties were frequently included in the New Kingdom royal harem, while a stela found at Amarna shows an Egyptian woman and her foreign husband, easily identified by his unusual hairstyle and dress, sitting peacefully
Fig. 6 Foreign women and their children
together sipping beer through straws. In marked contrast, both the Greeks and the Romans placed a very high value on the inherited right of citizenship which was legally confined to the upper echelons of society, and it was at least in part due to their desire to protect the purity of the bloodline that the tradition of segregating women from men developed. The Egyptian tolerance of mixed marriages extended to unrestricted slave-marriages, both between two slaves or between a free person and a slave: