Prescription to cause a woman’s uterus to go to its correct place: tar that is on the wood of a ship is mixed with the dregs of excellent beer, and the patient drinks this.
Extract from the Ebers Medical Papyrus
There was also a mistaken assumption that a healthy woman had a free passageway connecting her womb to the rest of her body, an assumption which became absorbed into later Greek medical wisdom. Many fertility tests were designed to locate any obstruction in this corridor which would prevent conception. The Kahun Medical Papyrus therefore advised that the patient should be seated on a mixture of date flour and beer; a fertile woman would vomit after this treatment and the number of retches would give a sure indication of the number of potential pregnancies. A similar prescription is recommended by the Berlin Medical Papyrus. Alternatively, in a test later used by Hippocrates, a garlic or onion pessary could be inserted in the vagina and left overnight; if by morning garlic could be detected on the patient’s breath she was thought able to conceive. Occasionally, physicians were able to pinpoint the exact cause of female sterility: when the king of the Hittites contacted his ally Ramesses II requesting the services of an Egyptian doctor who could help to cure his sister’s childless marriage the king wrote back pointing out, with more truth than tact, that as the lady in question was about sixty years old, hopes of a cure were slim.
Then the peasant said to his wife, ‘Look, I am going down to Egypt to bring food from there for my children. Go and measure out for me the remains of last year’s barley which is in the barn.’ His wife measured out twenty-six gallons of barley for him. The peasant then said to his wife, ‘Look, you keep twenty gallons of barley as food for you and your children. Now make these six gallons of barley into bread and beer for me to eat on the days which I am travelling.’
From the Middle Kingdom Story of the Eloquent Peasant
Egyptian fiction was a relatively late development, gradually growing in subtlety from the straightforward action-packed heroic tales popular during the Old Kingdom to the more complex and challenging allegories of the Middle and New Kingdoms. Throughout the Dynastic age, however, women were included in the stories only as subsidiary figures peripheral to the main plot. Wives and daughters may have provided food and clothing for their intrepid menfolk but they never accompanied them on their adventures, appearing content to stay behind and run the home. Indeed, the extreme male-oriented content of the stories and their undoubtedly masculine appeal make it difficult to dismiss the impression that surviving Egyptian fiction represents only those tales which were told by men to men. It may well be that the corresponding stories popular among groups of women were never written down; this would certainly explain the dearth of romantic fiction and the complete absence of domestic details which would presumably not be of interest to men. The consistent portrayal of loyal but passive and rather insignificant wives and daughters in the surviving fiction confirms the impression presented by the contemporary paintings and sculpture, that Egyptian men and women led essentially separate lives with different but complementary duties.
Towards the end of the Dynastic period, when Egypt was experiencing increasing foreign influence, the tradition of writing about good but rather negligible women was suddenly halted as scribes started to depict more realistic females with both a good and a bad side to their character.12 Indeed, soon the women included in the stories were more bad than good. This abrupt change of attitude is apparent in both the fictional tales and the scribal instructions which were used as set texts in all Egyptian schools; by the Late Period scribe Anhsheshonq was writing about wives in a way that suggests that he himself did not enjoy an entirely happy home life:
Let your wife see your wealth but do not trust her with it… Do not open your heart to your wife, as what you say to her in private will be repeated in the street… If a wife does not desire her husband’s property, she is in love with another man.
Ankhsheshonq held a very ambivalent attitude towards women, for in the same work he also expresses his admiration for the good woman of noble character, who ‘is like food which arrives in times of famine’. Did he feel that a good woman was a rare thing? Or were his comments on untrustworthy wives simply the ancient equivalent of the disparaging ‘mother-in-law’ jokes still popular with some male comedians today?
Several fictional females were presented in a distinctly unfavourable light. The 19th Dynasty Story of Two Brothers, for example, tells of the rift which developed between the brothers Anubis and Bata when Anubis’s scheming spouse first attempted to seduce her brother-in-law and then, her amorous advances rejected, accused him of attempted rape: