Catching Up: Museum Displays Parity of Women in Ancient Egypt

I have tons of older "saves" to post, let's see how far I get today!  First up:

Museum displays parity of women in ancient Egypt

By Ben Wedeman, CNN

Updated 0354 GMT (1154 HKT) March 9, 2018

Turin, Italy (CNN)Like many a bumbling tourist, this traveler was perplexed by the unexpected. People dressed differently, ate differently, wrote differently, did everything differently. The river flowed not from north to south but from south to north.

But what was most perplexing to the fifth century BC Greek historian Herodotus when he visited Egypt was the role of women. "Women attend market and are employed in trade, while men stay at home and do the weaving," he wrote.

The Egyptians, he concluded, "in their manners and customs seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind."

The women of ancient Egypt—the mighty and the modest—were considered equal to men, said Egyptologist Valentina Santini. "They could divorce. They could own property. They had many rights that women in subsequent civilizations didn't have."

Santini was showing me around Turin's Museo Egizio -- Egyptian Museum -- the oldest museum dedicated to ancient Egypt, founded in 1824.

We were in a room dedicated to Merit, a woman who lived around 3,400 years ago during Egypt's New Kingdom period. She died at the age of 25 from causes unknown. The boxes that contained her toiletries and other possessions are painted with images of a confident woman side by side with her architect husband, Kha, giving offerings to the gods and greeting visitors.

Antiquities on display demonstrate that women in ancient Egypt were equal to men. Here, Merit and her architect husband, Kha are pictured greeting visitors.

[My note:  Notice the evident affection between Merit and Kha.  Merit is turned toward Kha, you can see the line of her back all the way down to her buttocks through the sheer material of her dress.  Her left arm is tucked between Kha's left arm and his body, and it appears that Kha's right hand is holding both a lotus and is tucked underneath his arm, possibly holding Merit's hand.  They sit before an offering table that is filled with delicious items - bread, looks like fruits and possibly some vegetables and perhaps some cheese.] 

The variety of expensive goods she was buried with—a large wig made of human hair, loaves of bread, jewelry, toiletries, clothing—attests to her importance.

Women in Ancient Egypt

From the Biblical Archaeological Society (BAR) online -- if you don't subscribe to Shanks' excellent magazine, I urge you to do so!  The article that I've copied the text from contains several more images than included here, so please visit BAR (click on link in title to article) and check them out, they are fascinating and flesh out the context and article. 

This story presents an interesting analogy to the moral of the story about how masculine assumptions have colored so much of our "scientific" thinking from Day One.  All I can say is, remember the moral of the story about the female mustangs and the totally erroneous assumptions that were made about the stallion/leader of the herd being the sole father of all the foals birthed by the females in the herd...

Examining the Lives of Ancient Egyptian Women
The case of an ancient Egyptian woman named Tjat

Melinda Nelson-Hurst • 09/02/2014

 

Tjat, “sealer, keeper of
the property of her lord,
Tjat, born of Netjeru.”
Image copyright
Melinda Nelson-Hurst.

In the heart of Egypt, about 150 miles (ca. 240 km) south of modern Cairo near the city of Minya, lies a large and ancient necropolis at a site named Beni Hasan (see map). This location has been popular among tourists and academics because several of its massive, rock-cut tombs have beautifully decorated tomb chapels that have survived for millennia. These tombs provide troves of information for scholars to analyze and debate, but today I’d like to focus on one minor person in one tomb: an ancient Egyptian woman by the name of Tjat (see image right).
Tjat appears in the tomb of Khnumhotep II (tomb 3), a local ruler from around the middle of the Twelfth Dynasty (ca. 1900 B.C.). You may have heard about this tomb before because of its so-called scene of Asiatics (people depicted in the typical way that the ancient Egyptians used to distinguish people to the northeast of Egypt)—figures who have been variously interpreted as everything from local nomads to immigrants from the Near East to Biblical figures. However, much less attention has been paid to the woman named Tjat who appears in prominent positions in four different scenes throughout this tomb and is labeled there as a “sealer” (sometimes translated “treasurer”).
Who was Tjat and why does she appear within this tomb? Because of her prominent place (and that of her children) within these scenes (see image below), as well as other factors, scholars have assumed for over a hundred years that Tjat was the mistress and/or second wife of Khnumhotep II, who in turn is assumed to be the father of Tjat’s children. However, having studied Khnumhotep II’s family in some depth, I began to feel compelled to reassess this interpretation of Tjat. Might we, as scholars, have been too quick to categorize this woman as a sexual partner of Khnumhotep II because she did not easily fit other familiar categories? I would certainly say, “yes.” While we will never be able to answer all of our questions about ancient Egypt with any certainty, it is only through close study of both the details and the wider social and historical contexts that we might come a bit closer to the ancient realities of life.