He is a neighbour who lives near my mother’s house, but I cannot go to him. Mother is right to tell him ‘stop seeing her’. It pains my heart to think of him, and I am possessed by my love of him. Truly, he is foolish, but I am just the same. He does not know how much I long to embrace him, or he would send word to my mother.
New Kingdom love poem
The matchmaking involved a series of negotiations conducted between the father of the bride and either the groom or, less commonly, his father. Yet again Ankhsheshonq had an opinion on the selection of a suitable partner, recommending that his son should ‘choose a prudent husband, not necessarily a rich one, for your daughter’. A widow was able to negotiate on behalf of her fatherless girls, but it was not until the very end of the Dynastic period that matrimonial tradition was relaxed enough to allow the bride and groom to negotiate their own marriage. Although surviving texts make it clear that the bride was ‘given’ in marriage by her father to the groom we have no idea whether this was purely a conventional turn of phrase, directly comparable with the tradition of fathers symbolically ‘giving away’ their legally independent daughters which still survives in western marriage ceremonies, or whether the daughter had little or no say in the choice of her husband. The idea of the caring Egyptian father of many family portraits deliberately contracting his daughter to marry against her will, or refusing to permit a love match without good reason, is certainly difficult for us to accept, and we have no textual evidence to suggest that women were ever forced into marriage.
There were no legal age restrictions on marriage, although it has generally been assumed that a girl would not be considered eligible before the onset of puberty and menstruation, which would have occurred at about the age of fourteen. A 26th Dynasty document recording a father’s refusal to agree to his daughter’s wedding because she was too young and ‘her time has not yet come’ supports this view. However, evidence from Rome, where female puberty was legally fixed at the age of twelve regardless of the physical development of the girl concerned, indicates that ten- or eleven-year-old brides were not uncommon, and we have no reason to doubt that such young girls were also married in Egypt. Indeed, it is only within the past fifty years that in modern rural Egypt marriage with girls as young as eleven or twelve has been prohibited by law. There is certainly textual evidence from the Graeco-Roman period for Egyptian girls marrying as young as eight or nine, and we have a mummy label, written in demotic, which was made out to identify the body of an eleven-year-old wife.
The bridegroom, particularly in an uncle–niece marriage, was likely to have been considerably older and more experienced than his immature child-bride; Ankhsheshonq recommended that men should marry when they reached the age of twenty, while scribe Ptahotep considered that a youth should not marry until he had become a respectable man. To assume that the young brides were not sexually active before the onset of their periods would be very naive and, despite the availability of a range of contraceptives, the problem of fertile but physically immature children themselves becoming mothers must have contributed to the high levels of infant and maternal mortality during pregnancy and childbirth.2 Strabo gives some indication of the widespread acceptance of pre-pubertal sex by describing at some length the religious dedication of a young and beautiful high-born girl to the service of Amen or Zeus: ‘She becomes a prostitute and has intercourse with whoever she likes until the purification of her body takes place.’ By the purification of the body Strabo meant the onset of her menstrual periods. Although it is possible that Strabo may have misunderstood the situation, or may have been misled by helpful locals inventing lurid stories to interest the foreigner, it is clear that this story is regarded as one of general interest, and not one of revulsion.
I see my sister coming. My heart exults and my arms open to embrace her. My heart pounds in its place just as the red fish leaps in its pond. Oh night, be mine forever, now that my lover has come.
New Kingdom lover’s song
In western societies marriages have become union s with strong legal implications which are matters of concern to the state bureaucracy. They may in addition be regarded as religious union s requiring the approval of a priest. This outside involvement creates an established wedding protocol, with a requirement to take certain legal vows, register with various authorities and in some countries even undergo simple blood tests. As a result, it becomes relatively easy for anyone to determine whether or not a couple are actually married, and the moment of the actual wedding is usually clearly defined. The ancient Egyptians took a very different approach to marriage, regarding it as a purely personal matter between two individuals and their families which was of little or no concern to the state and which required no associated religious or legal ceremony. There was therefore no compulsory registration of the marriage, and although a form of marriage contract could be drafted either at the time of the wedding or, more usually, later, this was not a legal necessity and certainly did not constitute a marriage agreement. Consequently, although the Egyptians themselves were very clear about who was and who was not married to whom, the intricacies of their family life are now not always apparent to us.