THE RESURRECTION OF ANCIENT EGYPT 



1009 



have laughed over the well-worn jests 

 whose theme is the affection subsisting 

 between a man and his mother-in-law. 

 To an Egyptian these jests would have 

 had no point at all. To his mind it was 

 the natural thing that the connections of 

 his family by his wife's side should take 

 a deeper interest in his affairs than his 

 blood relations. 



When a man succeeded in life it was 

 his maternal grandfather, of all people 

 in the world, who was supposed to take 

 the deepest interest in his success. 

 ''When he is placed at the head of the 

 court of justice, then the father of his 

 mother thanks God." The same source 

 was turned to when influence was wanted 

 to secure a position for a young aspirant. 

 A young officer is received into the royal 

 stables "for the sake of the father of his 

 mother." Strangest of all, when the 

 same young soldier goes to the wars, he 

 leaves his property "in the charge of the 

 father ot his mother." 



Such importance being ascribed to the 

 relation of motherhood, we naturally 

 find that great importance was attached 

 to the state of marriage. The oldest of 

 Egyptian books, the Precepts of Ptah- 

 hotep (fifth dynasty) 5 declares that he is 

 wise "who founds for himself a house 

 and takes a wife." Marriage was re- 

 garded as the only satisfactory condition 

 of life, to be entered upon at an early 

 age ; and all the evidence, monumental 

 and literary, suggests to us that the ideal 

 of the relationship between man and wife 

 was singularly high, and that the hus- 

 band treated his wife, not as his servant, 

 but as his equal. 



Of course, there were differences be- 

 tween ideal and practice, in Egypt as 

 elsewhere. Doubtless the Egyptian was 

 no fonder than we are of washing his 

 domestic dirty linen m public, and we are 

 not obliged to accept the theory that the 

 relations of man and wife were ideally 

 perfect in Egypt merely because the 

 documents give us no evidence to the 

 contrary. Still, there is something very 

 engaging and suggestive in the common 

 representation of an Egyptian house- 

 hold — the wife sitting beside her hus- 

 band with her arm affectionately round 

 his neck, while the children stand beside 



their parents, and the youngest daughter 

 crouches by her mother's chair. A race 

 which habitually chose to have its family 

 relationships so pictured can scarcely 

 have been false all the time to so tender 

 an ideal. 



TWO WIVES CREATE A^^ECTlONAT^ 

 CONEUSION 



Polygamy was the rare exception, and 

 it is very uncommon to find two wives 

 ruling in the same house at one time. 

 Ameny, one of the princes of Beni-hasan 

 and a man of much importance in the 

 reign of Amenemhat II of the twelfth 

 dynasty, had two wives at the same time, 

 and, curiously enough, they seem to have 

 been on very good terms with one an- 

 other — at least the one wife named her 

 daughter after the other, who returned 

 the compliment, and, one fears, caused 

 unbounded confusion in the household, 

 by naming all her three daughters after 

 her associate wife. 



Want of means would naturally re- 

 strain the average Egyptian from such a 

 luxury as Prince Ameny could safely in- 

 dulge in; but that this did not always op- 

 erate is seen from an instance of polyg- 

 amy at the other end of the social scale. 

 One of the tomb-robbers of the time of 

 the Ramesides possessed two wives, who 

 are gravely named in the legal documents 

 of his trial "The Lady Taruru and the 

 Lady Tasuey, his second wife." Evi- 

 dently a luxurious as well as a light-fin- 

 gered gentleman. 



Men of the upper classes, as in all 

 Eastern countries, had their harems, 

 where the women of the house lived a 

 more or less secluded life, though there 

 appears to have been but little of that 

 jealous seclusion of them which obtains 

 in Mohammedan countries. In the tomb 

 of the Divine Father Ay, a priest of the 

 eighteenth dynasty who held the throne 

 for awhile in the decadent period after the 

 death of Akhenaten, there is a represen- 

 tation of the women's apartments which 

 shows how the members of the harem 

 were supposed to occupy their time. We 

 see them eating, dancing, playing music, 

 or dressing one another's hair, while the 

 rooms behind their living apartments 



