Daughters of Isis - Joyce Tyldesley Read online

  As might be expected, the true situation seems to have been less straightforward, and it would be a grave mistake to underestimate the economic importance of the Egyptian woman, just as it would be a mistake to ignore the contribution made by her children who, in the absence of any form of protective legislation, were able to take full-time jobs from a very early age. Many women did, in fact, need to work outside the home in order to supplement the family income. The work available to these women may be divided into three broad categories: those who were both well connected and well educated were able to take professional posts, usually as domestic administrators or supervisors; those with the appropriate skills and talents entered the female-dominated music, weaving and mourning industries; while those with little or no formal training entered domestic service.

  Several female job titles have been preserved on tomb walls and funerary stelae.3 However, these titles cover a relatively restricted range of duties, and it would appear that the professions open to women were limited both by tradition and educational opportunity. Once the purely honorary accolades (Sole Royal Ornament, King’s Acquaintance, etc.) and the more lowly servant’s tasks (Hairdresser, Grinding Girl, etc.) are excluded from the list, it becomes clear that the majority of the better-educated women worked either as domestic administrators or as supervisors of mainly female activities.4 Their work was almost invariably indoor work and often, but not always, they were employed by other high-ranking ladies who maintained their own retinues of mainly female attendants. This sexual division of labour is underlined by the many depictions of private life which show female servants attending to their mistresses while their husbands are served by men, and it extended into religious life where, as a general rule, Egyptian male gods were served by male priests and female gods by female priestesses.5 Even young children demonstrate a degree of segregation in their play, so that illustrations invariably show the boys devising their own games apart from the girls.

  The female supervisors and managers predominantly exerted their control over female workers engaged in what were perceived to be female activities. Thus, from the Old Kingdom onwards we know of women working as ‘Supervisor of Cloth’, ‘Supervisor of the Wig Workshop’, ‘Supervisor of the Dancers of the King’ and even ‘Supervisor of the Harem of the King’ – all typically female-linked occupations. These titles were not uniquely confined to women – there were certainly some male overseers of wig-making, dancing and music – but the female managers were, as a general rule, responsible for the women dancers and singers and the production of women’s wigs. However, although men occasionally supervised the female workers in these trades, we have no direct evidence for women ever managing male workers. The work of the female administrators was confined to private or royal households, and it is striking that, although there were literally thousands of scribes employed in the civil service, we know of no woman occupying an influential bureaucratic post. Similarly, but perhaps less surprisingly, we know of no women employed in any high-ranking capacity in the army or in agricultural administration.

  The highest-ranking administrative title ever held by a woman belonged to the Old Kingdom Lady Nebet, wife of Huy, ‘Sole Royal Ornament’ and ‘Hereditary Princess, Daughter of Geb, Countess, Daughter of Merhu, She of the Curtain, Judge and Vizier, Daughter of Thoth, Companion of the King of Lower Egypt, Daughter of Horus’. The vizier held the most powerful and prestigious position in ancient Egypt; a position which was, in theory at least, non-hereditary. As the king’s right-hand man he was frequently a member of the king’s immediate family and, second only in importance to his monarch, he acted as both senior civil servant and chief judge. It would certainly have been very unexpected for a woman to hold such an important position of authority and circumstantial evidence indicates that, although Nebet was clearly accorded the title of vizier, the actual duties of the office were undertaken by her husband, Huy.6 No other woman was accorded the honour of this title until the 26th Dynasty.

  The female administrators seem to have held their most influential posts during the Old Kingdom; evidence from the Middle and New Kingdoms indicates that women retained their salaried domestic work but were now no longer classed as supervisor or overseer, and were not included in even minor positions of authority in the royal palaces. We certainly know of several women ‘stewards’ and some ‘treasurers’ active in the private sector during the Middle Kingdom. One such professional administrator was the ‘Treasurer, Keeper of the Property of her Lord, Tchat’, whose name and titles are mentioned several times on the walls of the 12th Dynasty private tombs at Beni Hassan.7 The Lady Tchat worked as an official in the household of the influential local governor Khnumhotep where she was obviously held in the highest regard; reliefs in Khnumhotep’s own tomb, where Tchat is several times depicted standing close to the Mistress of the House, Khety, indicate that she played a prominent role in family life. Tchat combined her role of treasurer to the household with that of concubine to its master. Eventually, following Khety’s death, she gave up her official duties to marry Khnumhotep, thereby making her two surviving sons legitimate heirs to their natural father.

  The sky and the stars make their music for you while the sun and the moon praise you. The gods exalt you, and the goddesses sing their song to you.

  Verse from the Temple of Hathor, Dendera

  Music was a particularly lucrative career which was open to both men and women and which could be pursued either on a freelance basis or as a servant permanently attached to an estate or temple.8 Good performers were always in demand and a skilful musician and composer could gain high status in the community; for example, the female performing duo of Hekenu and Iti were two Old Kingdom musicians whose work was so celebrated that it was even commemorated in the tomb of the accountant Nikaure, a very unusual honour as few Egyptians were willing to feature unrelated persons in their private tombs. The sound of music was everywhere in Egypt, and it would be difficult to overestimate its importance in daily Dynastic life. The labourers in the fields sang popular folk songs as they worked, the sailors on the Nile matched their strokes to the rhythm of a traditional shanty, and the army marched to the sound of the drum and the trumpet. Leisure hours were filled with singing and dancing, nubile all-female song and dance troupes were a standard after-dinner entertainment, and even the heavy coffins were dragged to the burial grounds to the accompaniment of a rhythmic clapping. It is therefore deeply disappointing that, despite the survival of several instruments and many artistic representations of musical activities, we have very little idea of how this music actually sounded. In the absence of a recognizable music theory and notation, attempts to replicate the sounds enjoyed by the pharaohs are bound to be little more than interesting conjecture.

  Fig. 19 All-female dinner band

  The typical Egyptian secular orchestra included a large percussion section with rattles, clappers and drums helping to define the beat of the music, and strong wind and string sections with a combination of clarinets, double oboes and flutes and at least one harp. The players were supervised during the Old Kingdom by a conductor who stood in front of the performers, indicating the rhythm and pitch of the music by a complicated series of hand gestures. This conductor appears to have become superfluous to requirements at some stage during the Middle Kingdom, and was no longer depicted by the New Kingdom artist. At this time lyres and lutes were first introduced into Egypt from Asia; these very quickly became very popular additions to the standard postprandial ensemble.

  All the Egyptian gods and goddesses were understood to enjoy a good tune, and so the temples employed bands of musicians and choirs of singers and dancers to enhance communication

  Fig. 20 Female percussion group

  with the deities. These temple musicians, both men and women, were employed on a regular basis and given frequent coaching sessions by official instructors who worked hard to ensure that the clapping and singing were as perfect as possible. More high ranking were the official songstresses o
f the deity; many upper-class women described themselves as religious songstresses, even including their title on their funerary monuments; it would appear that this should again be classed as an honorary temple position rather than a paid job. These ladies were certainly held in highest regard, and at Abydos there was even a special cemetery reserved for the songstresses of a number of gods and their stillborn babies.

  Holy music for Hathor, music a million times, because you love music, million times music, to your soul, wherever you are. I am he who makes the singer waken music for Hathor every day at any hour she wishes.

  Middle Kingdom song to Hathor

  Very few of the gods actually played any instrument; the only one to be regularly depicted performing for his own evident pleasure was Bes, the ugly dwarf god who was associated with women and childbirth. Goddesses were generally more strongly identified with music than their male counterparts and, while the goddess Merit was recognized as the personification of music, it was Hathor, goddess of love, ‘Mistress of Music’ and attendant at royal births, who was most closely linked with music, in particular with one musical instrument: the sistrum which was played only by women. It was a rather large loop-shaped rattle with a long handle, often featuring the head of Hathor, which had initially represented the papyrus reeds of the Nile Delta where, mythology decreed, Hathor had been forced to hide with her young son. Eventually the sistrum lost all trace of its original meaning and instead started to serve as a religious symbol for life itself. It consequently became absorbed by other deities, and was particularly identified with the cult of Isis at the end of the Dynastic period. The playing of the sistrum was often accompanied by the rattling of the heavy menit bead necklaces which the female musicians carried in their spare hand. To a lesser extent, the round tambourine was also associated with both women and religion; New Kingdom illustrations suggest a link between this tambourine and the cults of both Hathor and Isis, while we know from the surviving temple birth houses that the beating of round tambourines was the appropriate way to mark the divine birth of a king.

  Music was occasionally associated with women for more prosaic reasons. The Turin Erotic Papyrus, for example, includes one scene where a prostitute has hastily dropped her lyre to copulate with an over-eager client, while a crude sketch on a piece of wood recovered from a New Kingdom Theban tomb shows a woman who is actually engaged in full intercourse with a man but who still clings on to her lute. The clear inference is that prostitutes used their musical skills to entice their clients, and a link between music, femininity, sex and even childbirth is again suggested by the Bes tattoos on the musical prostitute’s thighs. Less tastefully, to modern eyes, figurines which show male harpists with their instruments resting on disproportionately erect penises again emphasize the link between music and sexuality.

  The weaver in the workshop is in a worse position than the woman in labour. With his knees pushed up against his chest he is unable to breathe the air. If he misses just one day of weaving he is given fifty lashes. He has to bribe the doorkeeper with food to let him see the light of day.

  Middle Kingdom Satire of the Trades

  Throughout the ancient world cloth production was primarily associated with women. In near-contemporary Greece and Rome this specialization of duties was taken to extremes, and the mistress of the house was held responsible for the provision of all the cloth (invariably wool) which would be needed by her family. This included all the clothing, sheeting, towels and shrouds, and was a daunting undertaking for any woman. Fabric manufacture became a very highly rated domestic task, to the extent that wool-work, spinning and weaving, rather than knitting, eventually became synonymous with woman’s work and was expected of females of all ranks and ages. A virtuous wife could easily be identified by her skills at the loom, and even the most noble of Greek ladies was expected to spend a large part of her day weaving in order to provide the clothing for the household and its dependants.9 As the large and heavy loom could not easily be transported, this effectively condemned her to spending many hours working alone at home.

  The situation in Egypt was far more flexible. Commercial weaving was still a female-dominated industry, particularly during the Old Kingdom when the hieroglyphic sign representing ‘weaver’ was a seated woman holding what appears to be a long, thin shuttle, but not all women needed to learn how to weave. Cloth could easily be obtained by barter, and any surplus of home-produced linen could be exchanged for other household items at the market. Lower-class Egyptian men were not embarrassed to be seen working at the loom, and several labourers at Deir el-Medina happily excused their absence from work by explaining that they had needed to stay at home and weave. Larger-scale commercial weaving occurred in the workshops attached to temples and large estates where both women and, to a lesser extent, men were employed, and also in the royal harem where the finest of the royal linen was produced. Although the ladies of the harem may themselves have done some of the more intricate threadwork their real function was to supervise and train the female workers in the weaving sheds; weaving formed just one of the valuable economic sidelines of the royal women.

  Linen was by far the most important cloth produced in Egypt. Flax, the plant from which linen is derived, was not native to Egypt but was introduced in Predynastic times when it quickly became an important crop, essential for the production of both linen and linseed oil. Flax remained an economically valuable commodity throughout the historical period. When it is considered that the wrapping of one mummified body could use over 375 square metres of material, the importance of flax farming can be fully appreciated. Even though it was customary to recycle used household cloth and bandages in mummification, there must have been a constant demand for new linen.

  The actual manufacturing process was fairly simple if time consuming. The flax was harvested by pulling the whole plant out of the ground in order to preserve the stalk; the younger the crop, the finer would be the finished thread. After an initial preparation of the fibres the flax was spun on a small hand-held spindle to produce a ball of thread, the twist of the thread being to the left as flax naturally tends in this direction when drying. The spun thread was then woven into cloth on a loom. Horizontal hand-operated ground looms made of wood were used by both men and women in commercial workshops until the Hyksos invaders of the Second Intermediate Period introduced the more mechanically efficient vertical loom. This new-style loom was operated exclusively by men. The finished material was carefully marked in one corner by either the weaver or the owner, and was stored either as bolts or large sheets (up to 2 metres wide and occasionally over 25 metres long) in special woven baskets or wooden chests. A variety of grades of cloth was produced, with the finest and most delicate linens being rightly prized all over the ancient world.

  Death is before me today like a man’s longing to see his home when he has been many years in captivity.

  Middle Kingdom text

  Some women were able to gain employment as professional mourners, an exclusively female occupation. These specialists were hired to enhance the status of the deceased by openly grieving at his or her funeral. They were not, therefore, an essential part of the funeral ritual, although they did add to its impact. As far as we can tell from contemporary tomb illustrations, the job involved donning a traditional mourning dress of white or blue-grey linen and following the funeral cortége while making an ostentatious display of grief which included loud wailing, beating exposed breasts, smearing the body with dirt and tearing at dishevelled hair; all signs of uncontrolled behaviour, the ‘disorder of sorrow’, which presented a marked contrast to the sedate, spick-and-span image which Egyptian women normally admired. Occasionally, very young girls accompanied their mourning mothers to work, and the New Kingdom tomb of Ramose at Thebes shows a group of professional grieving women which includes a tiny girl whose youth is made apparent

  Fig. 21 Mourning women from the tomb of Neferhotep

  by both her small stature and her nakedness. A more important role
in the funeral ritual was played by the two women chosen to impersonate the two djeryt, Isis and Nephthys, the sisters of Osiris who assumed the shape of birds while searching the world for their dead brother. These two women wore an archaic form of sheath dress and a short neat wig. They walked next to the sledge which was used to drag the body towards the tomb, and had an entirely passive role in the ceremony.

  A few women also acted as official mortuary priests and, just like the often-quoted Hekanakhte, they received payment for ensuring that the tomb of the deceased was correctly maintained, with all the ritual offerings duly made. These roles were generally hereditary, with the care of the tomb being passed from father to son or daughter until the funding of the endowment expired.