Lisa K. Sabbahy - Daily Life of Women in Ancient Egypt

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LISA K. SABBAHY

The Greenwood Press Daily Life Through History Series

Copyright 2022 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sabbahy, Lisa, author.

Title: Daily life of women in ancient Egypt / Lisa K. Sabbahy.

Description: Santa Barbara, California : Greenwood, [2022] | Series: The Greenwood Press daily life through history series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021032128 (print) | LCCN 2021032129 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440870132 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781440870149 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: WomenEgyptHistory. | WomenEgyptSocial conditions. | WomenHistoryTo 500. | EgyptCivilization To 332 B.C. | EgyptHistoryTo 332 B.C.

Classification: LCC HQ1137.E3 S23 2022 (print) | LCC HQ1137.E3 (ebook) | DDC 305.40962dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032128

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021032129

ISBN: 978-1-4408-7013-2 (print)
978-1-4408-7014-9 (ebook)

26 25 24 23 221 2 3 4 5

This book is also available as an eBook.

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Our modern knowledge of ancient Egyptian civilization has been greatly helped by the fact that the hot, dry climate of Egypt has preserved many objects and written documents. Also, because temples and tombs were built to last for eternity, they were constructed out of stone blocks, and as a result, many of themalthough damagedstill stand. That said, temples and tombs reflect the state and the royal rulers and elite officials who built them. On the walls of these structures are carved and painted scenes that present a perfect, everlasting picture of the king and his land. Such idealized pictures hardly represent everyday life in ancient Egypt. It has to be pointed out that royalty and the elite made up a very small tip of the enormous pyramid of ancient Egyptian society, and because the king and his officials were all male, their view of life would only represent 50% of ancient Egypt anyway.

The study of Egyptology is heavily based on documents, of which many remain, not only on papyrus but also inscribed on the walls of temples and tombs. From what is known of the ancient Egyptian educational system, all schooling was for boys, to train them to be scribes and to grow up and work for the state. This discussion may seem like a digression on masculine domination in ancient Egypt, but it is important to understand why there should be a book on the daily life of women in ancient Egypt and why it is so difficult to actually write a book like that.

Around the 1980s, when archaeologists in general realized that the understanding of the past was primarily based on a male past, the reaction of some to make up for the lack of a holistic approach to ancient societies was put in a woman and stir. Hopefully, this approach will not appear in this book, although it is difficult to avoid it. Many topics such as kingship, the military, and administrative structure may seem to have been left out, but if a topic did not include women or there was no information relevant about women in it, it was not included in this book. That said, the author does provide substantially more information about elite women than non-elite women, but there was no real way to escape that. Elite and royal women had titles inscribed on stone monuments and had stone-built tombs or space in their husbands tombs, so scholars simply have more evidence about them. It must be pointed out, however, that this evidence may not reflect daily life, but again, eternal life in the afterlife.

A typical village woman would have worked hard, possibly suffered horribly in childbirth, cooked, cleaned, and raised children. When she died, at the age of twenty-five to thirty years, she would have been buried in a pit dug in the village cemetery, perhaps wrapped in a reed bundle with a bead necklace and possibly a small amulet or a vessel or two of food or drink. An archaeologist finding her burial would note the few objects present and how they compare to others in similar and contemporary cemeteries. The osteologist who studies her skeleton might note the skeletal changes in her toes, knees, and some of the vertebrae and conclude that she spent time grinding grain for bread and beer. A healed fracture of her left arm shows that someone in the village was a healer and put a proper splint on her arm. Her teeth would be worn down and several lost, which is to be expected when one eats bread that sand gets into. In other words, this woman was a very typical lower-class or lower-middle-class housewife, but what else can we learn about her? What about her dreams, thoughts, and likes or dislikes? What was her daily routine like? Very little about a typical womans life in ancient Egypt can be figured out, especially from the perspective of a modern mind deciding how an ancient person thought. These gaps in our knowledge are the reason why evidence from texts and artistic depictions, which are products of a mostly elite life, have to be depended on for information.

This book is broken into seven chapters, the topics of which often overlap. For example, discussing a priestess belongs in the chapter on religion, but as she is also paid for what she does as a priestess, the topic appears in the chapter on work as well. Each chapter starts out with a brief historical fiction paragraph based on ancient evidence, and at the end of select chapters, there is a short translation of a primary source to give readers an idea about how ancient Egyptians presented themselves.

on Personal Property covers a range of topics, including houses, furniture, cooking, cosmetics, clothing, and pets.

, Religious Life and the Afterlife, examines expressions of religiosity in daily life, important goddesses, the concept of the afterlife, mummification, the funeral, the tomb, ancestral cults, and the wise woman.