Daughters of Isis(13)

The most obvious difference between our modern and the ancient Egyptian marriage is the complete lack of any prescribed wedding ceremony. There was no Egyptian word meaning wedding, no special bridal clothes to be worn, no symbolic rings to be exchanged and no change of name to indicate the bride’s new status. There may have been the consumption of a special wedding meal, perhaps involving the eating of salt, but this is only a tentative suggestion based on the interpretation of one broken line of text.3 In the absence of all other visible evidence for wedding ceremonies, we must assume that the cohabitation of the happy couple served as the only outward sign that the marriage negotiations had been successfully concluded, and so it was by physically leaving the protection of her father’s house and entering her husband’s home that a girl transferred her allegiance from her father to her husband, becoming universally acknowledged as a wife. She took with her all her worldly possessions, the ‘goods of a woman’, which are usually specified as including a bed, clothing, ornaments, mirrors, a musical instrument and an expensive shawl which may well have been the equivalent of our bridal veil. The nuptial procession, where the young bride in all her finery was escorted through the streets by a happy crowd of friends and relations, must have been an occasion for great family rejoicing; the ancient Egyptians were inveterate party-givers who seized every opportunity for throwing a lavish banquet, and we may assume that the wedding celebrations went on well into the night.

We do not know how much importance or ritual, if any, was attached to the consummation of the marriage. Until comparatively recently the defloration ceremony formed a definitive part in the celebration of an Egyptian wedding, being witnessed by a variety of married female relatives who could vouch for the honour of the new bride and her family. Indeed, the deflowering most often occurred with the young bride firmly restrained while either the groom or a female relation used a finger covered in clean gauze to break the hymen and draw the blood necessary to prove her purity. In ancient Egypt, where the chastity of unmarried females was not considered to be of overwhelming importance to society, the consummation of the marriage may well have been a more private and less harrowing ceremony. It does seem likely that consummation was necessary to make a marriage legally valid and binding, as is the case in many societies today. Certainly in contemporary Mesopotamia, where the bride was expected to prove herself fertile, the marriage was not a true marriage until conception had occurred, and it was only after the birth of a child that the dowry became payable.

The groom was not required to pay his new father-in-law a bride-price, although in a tradition arising during the New Kingdom he was expected to hand over a token gift of money and sometimes corn to his wife. The actual financial value of this payment varied, ranging from negligible to the purchase price of a slave, and it seems to have represented a consideration which made the marriage agreement binding on both parties, perhaps somewhat as a new husband is today expected to provide his wife with a wedding band during the marriage ceremony. Whether this tradition is the survival of an earlier custom of actually making a payment to the father, either as compensation for removing the bride and her services from her birth-family, as consideration to mark the transfer of the right of ownership of the bride, or even a straightforward purchase price paid for the bride, is unclear.

In his turn, the father of the bride contributed to the well-being of the happy couple by donating wedding presents of domestic goods and food, often continuing to supply substantial quantities of grain for up to seven years, until the union   became generally recognized as well-established, therefore a true marriage rather than a simple ‘living together’. Towards the end of the Dynastic period it became fashionable to record these ‘dowries’ in a legal contract which could be used to prevent dispute and protect the economic rights of the woman and her children in the unhappy event of a divorce. These marriage contracts were not a part of the marriage itself, and were often drawn up after the couple had produced several children.4 The example quoted below represents a Graeco-Roman contract, with the Egyptian-born Horemheb agreeing that his wife Tais will be adequately compensated should the marriage fail:

If I divorce you as my wife, and hate you, preferring to take another woman as my wife, I will give you two pieces of silver beside the two pieces of silver which I have given you as your woman’s portion… And I will give you one third of everything which will be owned by you and myself furthermore.



It is very difficult for us, looking back from a different culture and through thousands of years, to really understand the accepted day-to-day rights and duties of Egyptian married life. We may know that the husband was almost invariably the breadwinner while the wife worked in the home, but we cannot fully appreciate the subtleties of the situation, particularly as women have left no record of their daily existence, thus, we have no idea of how the wife expected to be treated by her husband, or how each regarded the function of the other. Did husbands view their wives as equal partners in the marriage, or were they considered to be inferior in every way? Were women deferred to within the home, or were they verbally abused? Was wife-beating unheard of, or accepted by both as an absolutely normal aspect of family life scarcely worthy of comment? Inscriptions from the tomb-chapels of the Old Kingdom suggest that the perfect wife was both submissive and compliant, ‘she did not utter any statement which repelled my heart’, although this ideal did not necessarily reflect real life, and Ankhsheshonq’s comment ‘may the heart of a wife be the heart of her husband’, hints that marital disagreements may have been more common than men liked to admit. Scribal instructions, written for the guidance of young unmarried men, generally suggest that in an ideal world the husband would treat his wife with respect while retaining control of his household and its members. Perhaps the best indication of how the husband himself perceived his moral duty towards his wife can be gleaned from reading a detailed letter written during the 19th Dynasty by a man wishing to ingratiate himself with the dead wife whom he believed to be haunting him: