The right of a man to end an unhappy alliance by ‘repudiating’ an unsatisfactory wife is known from the 12th Dynasty onwards and almost certainly existed earlier in Egyptian history. The corresponding right of a wife to initiate a divorce is only documented from the New Kingdom onwards but, given that Egyptian law consistently treated married women as independent individuals, it would appear that it simply went unrecorded in earlier times. There are certainly very few recorded case histories dealing with a woman repudiating her husband; whether this indicates that women were less fickle or had lower expectations of their partners is not clear. It may be that, in a society which placed great emphasis on fertility, and consequently on youth, an elderly wife would think twice about rejecting her husband as she might well be unable to find a replacement willing to maintain her. As there were no legally defined grounds for divorce almost any excuse could be cited as a reason to end the alliance and in effect the marriage could be terminated at will. In practice, financial considerations and perhaps pressures from the two families concerned, who may well have been related, must have provided some restraint. There is no indication that divorce was regarded as a social stigma for a man, although the repudiated wife, particularly one rejected in favour of a younger and more attractive or more fertile bride, may well have felt publicly shamed.
Do not divorce a woman of your household if she does not conceive and does not give birth.
Late Period scribal advice
A diverse variety of reasons have been recorded for the ending of marriages, many of which would be familiar to the divorce lawyers of today. Marriages often failed because of mutual incompatibility, because the husband wished to devote himself to his work, or because one party had fallen in love with another. The rejection of an infertile wife was a common enough tragedy, although not one that society approved of. A 21st Dynasty letter which has survived from the workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina quotes the unusual and almost certainly apocryphal story of a man and wife who had been married for over twenty years. When the husband fell in love with another woman he looked for a reason to end his marriage, and decided on ‘I repudiate you because you have no sight in one eye.’ Not surprisingly his wife, who had been partially blind throughout the entire marriage, was not particularly impressed by her husband’s feeble excuse and roundly mocked him for taking twenty years to notice her deformity.
For a long time egyptologists believed that concubines, the official mistresses of both married and unmarried men, were accepted throughout Egyptian society although they were not generally accorded either the respect or the legal rights reserved for married women. It now appears that the number of official concubines may have been seriously overestimated as there has been an unfortunate tendency to classify all otherwise unidentified single women as concubines. A growing understanding of the textual evidence is starting to indicate that many of the unmarried ladies attached to households actually served as administrators, musicians or maids. Even in the letters of Heqanakht, where the Lady Iutemheb is described as hbsw.t, a term which has not been found in any other text but which has been traditionally taken to mean concubine, it is by no means certain that the lady in question was not an official second wife.5
Do not fornicate with a married woman. He who fornicates with a married woman on her bed, his wife will be copulated with on the ground.
Late Period advice to young men
Married women were certainly not allowed any degree of sexual licence and adultery – ‘the great sin which is found in women’ – was the most serious marital crime which a wife could commit, and one which would almost certainly lead to ignominious divorce and the total loss of all legal rights. Men in turn were expected to respect another man’s sole right of access to his wife, and indulging in sexual relations with a married woman was frowned upon, not for moral reasons, but because it was a sure and certain way of enraging a cuckolded husband. Even a relationship between a willing unmarried woman and a married man could be fraught with danger, and one letter which has survived from Deir el-Medina tells how a group of villagers ganged together to confront a woman known to be conducting a clandestine affair with the husband of a neighbour.6 The mob could only be prevented from seriously assaulting both the woman and her family by the timely intervention of the local police. The wronged wife had attracted the sympathy of her community, and the adulterous husband was ordered to regularize his affairs and obtain a divorce at once, as the people could not be restrained from acting for a second time. As in many cases of adultery the woman was clearly seen as a temptress corrupting a weak but essentially innocent man, and Egyptian myths and wisdom texts, all written by males, are full of dire warnings to stay clear of other men’s wives who would use all their feminine wiles to snare them into sexual relationships.