{"product_id":"women-in-ancient-egypt-the-history-of-the-lives-and-social-roles-of-egyptian-women-1","title":"Women in Ancient Egypt: The History of the Lives and Social Roles of Egyptian Women","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e \u003cspan\u003eFrom the unification of the Two Lands around 3100 B.C. to the death of Cleopatra in 30 B.C., more than three thousand years elapsed, and across that immense span the Egyptians wrote, painted, carved, and buried more about themselves than any other early people. A great deal of what they left behind concerns women. Wives appear beside their husbands on tomb walls. Mothers receive offerings from their sons. Daughters inherit estates. Queens rule. Widows go to court. Goddesses preside over the dead. The Egyptian woman is, by the standards of the ancient world, unusually visible, and the modern reader who looks for her finds a great deal to see.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat that record shows has surprised observers for thousands of years, including some of the ancient writers themselves. When Herodotus traveled in Egypt in the middle of the 5th century B.C., he came from a world in which respectable women stayed indoors, did not transact business, and were represented in law by a male guardian, so what he found along the Nile struck him as a near-total inversion of the natural order. Egyptian women, he reported, went out to the markets and carried on trade while their husbands sat at home and wove, and they carried loads on their shoulders while men carried them on their heads. The reversal was so complete, in his telling, that it became one of the organizing themes of his entire account of Egypt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA second Greek witness, writing four centuries after Herodotus, went further still. Diodorus Siculus, who compiled a universal history in the 1st century B.C. and devoted its opening book to Egypt, reported that the Egyptians had so far inverted the natural relation of the sexes that the queen held greater power and honor than the king, and that among ordinary married couples the husband agreed, in the very marriage contract, to obey his wife in all things. This was almost certainly an exaggeration, so it should not be read as a literal account of Egyptian domestic life, but like Herodotus’ work, it rested on a foundation of fact. Egyptian marriage contracts did protect the wife’s property and secure her maintenance, and the Egyptian wife did hold a standing within the household that a Greek wife did not. The Greeks who wrote about Egypt were not inventing the independence of its women - they were straining the language of their own patriarchal world to describe something it had no category for, and in the straining, they sometimes overshot the mark.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Egyptians organized their understanding of the universe around a concept they called \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003emaat\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, a word usually translated as truth, balance, order, or justice. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003eMaat\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e was personified as a goddess, the daughter of the sun god, and it stood for the proper arrangement of all things, such as the regular flooding of the Nile, the rising of the sun, the rule of the king, and the order of human society. Within that order, men and women were not identical, and their roles were not interchangeable. Men dominated public office, the army, the scribal bureaucracy, and the formal priesthood. Women were associated above all with the household, with childbearing, and with the management of domestic and agricultural property. But the two were understood as complementary halves of a balanced whole, and that conception of balance left Egyptian women with rights and freedoms that women in most other ancient societies lacked. The wife was not, in the Egyptian scheme, a subordinate member of her husband’s household but a partner in it, with property of her own, a name of her own, and standing of her own before the law.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat is remarkable about Egyptian women is not that they escaped patriarchy, because they did not, but that within a patriarchal society, they retained a degree of legal and economic independence that had few parallels in the ancient world. The balance of \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003emaat\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e did not make them equal to men, but it did make them individuals in their own right.\u003c\/span\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Books Prime","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45914075103423,"sku":"67386b1a-6f36-4868-a199-d0c88ac50495","price":20.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0761\/7550\/7647\/files\/ef9a93da9b54c0d6f16fa9b406b847a9.jpg?v=1785054286","url":"https:\/\/books-prime.com\/products\/women-in-ancient-egypt-the-history-of-the-lives-and-social-roles-of-egyptian-women-1","provider":"Books Prime","version":"1.0","type":"link"}