12 - 18 July 2001
Issue No.542
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 12 - 18 July 2001 Issue No.542 |
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Changing views of Ancient Egyptian women
Women in Ancient Egypt, Gay Robins, London: British Museum Press. First published 1993. Reprinted 1996, 1998 & 2001. pp205
This worthwhile book, currently in its third reprint, aims to provide a study of women in Ancient Egypt for the general reader. Only quite recently has the relative "invisibility" of women in histories of Egyptian life been questioned, and their contribution to Egyptian society studied in detail, and in this publication, Gay Robins offers fresh and revealing insights into women's lives.
In her introduction, Robins points out that to talk of women in Ancient Egypt as if they were a homogeneous group is misleading. Since this was a hierarchical society in which half the population was female, women were themselves ranked hierarchically, and women from the royal family, from the elite scribal class, from the minor professional class, and from the peasantry "would have had little in common except their ability to bear children," she writes, dividing her text accordingly. First come two chapters dealing with female members of the royal family, then chapters relating to women from the society's elites. Women ranked lower on the social scale are considered wherever the material allows.
There is not a great deal of evidence of the lives lived by women in Pharaonic times, or of what was expected of them, what was denied them, and what men thought of them. Nevertheless, Robins has managed to produce a remarkable picture of women's roles in a country ruled by a king and administered by an all-male bureaucracy. She shows how some exceptional women broke with tradition by assuming real power, how others held office in temple cults, and how others lived their lives in the context of the family.
Chapter Seven of the volume on the economic and legal position of women in Ancient Egypt is among the book's most rewarding, perhaps because it deals with issues that still exist today. It is interesting to read, for example, that among the surviving legal documents dating to the Middle Kingdom (2040-1640 BC) is the will of an official, Ankhreni, "trusted seal-bearer of the [Pharoah's] director of works" that leaves his property to his brother Wah, suggesting that Ankhreni had no surviving wife or children. Wah duly received his inheritance and made his own will leaving everything to his wife, who was granted the right to give what she wished to "any of her children that she shall bear me." In another Middle Kingdom document, a will was made "by Intef's son Mery, called Keby," in which he hands on his office to his son, annuls a will he had made in favour of the son's mother, who must have been a previous wife, and leaves his house to his yet-to-be borne children by another woman, presumably his new wife. Such documents testify to ancient domestic arrangements and to the legal regulations governing marriage and inheritance.
A third document, also from the Middle Kingdom, deals with a dispute between a man and his daughter over property. The father intended to give 15 slaves to his wife Senebtysy, in addition to the 60 he had already given her. However, his daughter, Tahenwet, brought a lawsuit against him claiming that the property had been given to her by her husband, but that her father had subsequently wrongly given it to his wife. Robins writes that the "document seems to comprise a private record of the father's rebuttal of the case, but it is too damaged to understand fully. Perhaps Senebtysy was the father's second wife while Tahenwet was the daughter of the first, which might have led to friction between them... The case shows that a woman could initiate a lawsuit on her own behalf," and this is the important point in understanding Ancient Egyptian women's legal rights.
As a result of the feminist movement and of the academic discipline of Women's Studies, the roles of women, both in the ancient past and more recently, have been reassessed, and this has led to a better understanding of female contributions to society. However, very often standard histories of Ancient Egypt give little space to women, if they mention them at all, and this makes Robins' research all the more fascinating. While she admits that it "is hard to examine the place and importance of women in a system we do not fully comprehend," Robins has been able to draw valuable conclusions from archaeological, textual, and representational material. As a result, evidence once ignored or discarded has been looked at afresh, and gaps in our knowledge filled. However, as Robins points out, scholars sometimes "carry with them sets of assumptions embedded in their immediate cultural outlook," some of which they may well be unaware of.
"When the ideal for a woman was that of a model wife and mother who did not go out to work or take part in public life, it is no wonder that scholars failed to notice the absence of women in public life in Ancient Egypt," she says. "If in writing about women they tended to concentrate on dress, makeup and jewellery, despite the fact that all these were also worn by men, it was because those scholars were the product of a society that associated such things with women and regarded male interest in them as unhealthy."
Another area where modern prejudice seems to have come into play relates to the issue of father-daughter marriages in the royal family. "This has aroused great passions among those scholars who wish to deny that the marriages existed as real unions. However, these strenuous objections seem to arise from a modern bias based on ingrained notions of incest in our society," Robins writes, suggesting that scholars have preferred to believe that king's daughters who were also king's wives received the title of wife to mark the fact that they sometimes substituted for the king's real wife in ritual functions. But "the problem with this line of reasoning is that it is based on today's prejudices and not on evidence from ancient Egypt. We have no idea how Egyptians would have regarded sexual relationships between kings and daughters."
The author of Women in Ancient Egypt has not glossed over tantalising gaps in the evidence. On the contrary, she has looked anew at the primary sources and offers fresh and revealing insights into women's life in Ancient Egypt, and, therefore, into Pharaonic society as a whole while not pretending that her picture is complete one. It would be nice to see this book distributed in Egypt.
Reviewed by Jill Kamil
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