THE RESURRECTION OF ANCIENT EGYPT 



1015 



sirable. JMarriage with a sister was held 

 to be the sensible arrangement. The 

 gods themselves had set the example, for 

 the brothers Osiris and Set were mar- 

 ried to their sisters, Isis and Nephthys. 

 Thus King Aahmes of the eighteenth 

 dynasty married his sister, Aahmes Ne- 

 f ertari ; Tahutmes I married his sister, 

 another Aahmes, and Tahutmes IV con- 

 tracted a similar alliance, while we have 

 seen that our rules of consanguinity were 

 even further disregarded by Rameses II 

 in his marriages with his own daughters. 

 How such continual inbreeding produced 

 for hundreds of years successive lines 

 of kings on the whole so virile and ener- 

 getic as the average Pharaoh is some- 

 what of a problem. 



In the strange alliances we have a re- 

 flection of the important position as- 

 signed by the Egyptians to women and 

 the stress which was laid on the female 

 line in the matter of inheritance. The 

 royal title of a king was doubly con- 

 firmed by his marriage with his sister of 

 the same royal solar stock as himself, 

 and in the case of a king who was the 

 offspring of a marriage with an inferior 

 wife, his title was only held to be secure 

 when he had married a lady of genuine 

 royal descent on both sides — very often 

 his half-sister by the father's side. 



So great was the importance attached 

 to the female line that even an usurper 

 could legitimize his accession to the 

 throne by marriage with a princess of 

 the royal house. Thus after the debacle 

 which succeeded the disastrous reign of 

 Akhenaten, when the successful general 

 Horemheb seized the crown, he acquired 

 a legal title to the throne by marriage 

 with the princess Nezem-mut, sister of 

 Akhenaten's queen. The royal lady was 

 advanced in years, but she was still of 

 the true solar stock, and his union with 

 her was held to make Horemheb's suc- 

 cession quite legitimate. 



WHAT DID THK BRIDi: THINK OF IT? 



The influence of the chief wife was 

 evidently very great. Amenhotep HI 

 has left documentary evidence of his 

 great attachment to his wife Tyi in the 

 scarabs, which still record for us her 

 name and descent and eloquently suggest 

 the pride which he took in his clever 



consort. "She is the wife of a mighty 

 king, whose southern frontier is as far 

 as Karoy, his northern as Naharina." 

 More convincing still is the fact that, on 

 the very scarab which records the king's 

 marriage with the Mitannian princess 

 Gilukhipa, "the royal wife, the mighty 

 Lady Tyi, the divine one," is mentioned 

 on equal terms with the king before 

 the new queen is spoken of. What 

 poor Gilukhipa thought of it is another 

 story. 



Even after the death of her husband, 

 the chief queen still occupied her un- 

 questioned position at court, was named 

 ''royal mother," and had her own special 

 property, under separate management ; 

 while some of the queens, notably Aah- 

 hotep and Aahmes Nef ertari, the found- 

 resses of the eighteenth dynasty, had di- 

 vine honors paid to them after death for 

 many generations. 



On the whole, though there are certain 

 features, such as their loose ideas in the 

 matter of consanguinity, which shock our 

 modern sense of morality, the ideas and 

 the practice of the ancient Egyptians in 

 respect of the position of woman are re- 

 markably advanced and rational, compar- 

 ing very favorably with those of the 

 great nations of classical antiquity. Wo- 

 man was to the Egyptian not the slave 

 of man or the minister of his pleasures ; 

 she was his companion, his fellow-worker 

 on very equal terms, often his adviser, 

 not infrequently his ruler. 



Family life w^as accorded the position 

 of importance which it deserves, and, as 

 always where such a fact obtains, woman 

 held her unassailable position of respect 

 and usefulness in the eyes of all decent 

 men. Especially the relation of parents 

 and children presents one of the most 

 pleasant and wholesome features of 

 Egyptian life. There were dark shad- 

 ows, of course, on the picture, and im- 

 morality was not unknown in Egypt any 

 more than in other lands ; but the Land 

 of the Nile has little to fear from a com- 

 parison with any other nation of an- 

 tiquity in respect of its treatment of wo- 

 mankind. 



Our survey of the results of modern 

 exploration in Egypt must close with a 

 brief mention of the light, such as it is,, 

 which has been cast upon the question 



