Women in ancient Egypt

Among the upper classes of society, a woman usually did not work outside the home, and instead supervised the servants of the household and her children's education.

However, depictions usually show a husband and wife in an affectionate attitude with their children, so we assume most families were generally happy, but marriage was more realistic.

Marriages in ancient Egypt were usually exclusive, but it also was not uncommon for a man of high economic status to have more than one wife.

Despite what the laws stated, it was suggested that women made more family decisions and controlled more of the home than usual.

Women had control over most of their property, could serve as legal persons who brought cases to the court, and even worked in public.

Husbands did not take total control over their wives property because women had a degree of independence in ancient Egypt.

365 B.C, a new marriage contract was emerged which mainly protected women from divorce, placing more financial burdens on men.

[8] There is much evidence of complex beliefs and practices in ancient Egypt related to the important role fertility played in society.

It became more common for women to gain the throne in ancient Egypt, as with Hatshepsut, who took the place of her nephew Thutmose III.

It is necessary to recognize that a woman at such a high level of authority remained extremely rare and it was not until the Twenty-sixth dynasty of Egypt that a similar situation can be found.

There has been a modern trend to refer to the women's quarters of the Pharaoh's palace in Ancient Egypt as a harem,[15] though this is an anachronism.

While the women and children of the pharaoh, including his mother, wives, and children, had their own living quarters with its own administration in the Palace of the Pharaoh, the royal women did not live isolated from contact with men or in seclusion from the rest of the court in the way associated with the term "harem".

In Contes populaires (Popular Tales), Gaston Maspero describes the fatal misadventure of Bytaou, the humble farmhand at the home of his brother Anoupou.

But she is punished in turn; Anoupou discovers much later that he had been fooled by his wife, whom he kills, and throws her body to the dogs.

Romance was present in Egyptian literature, for example, in a papyrus at the Leyden Museum: I took you for my wife when I was a young man.

Here is what I have done when I was a young man and I exercised all the high functions of Pharaoh, Life, Health, Strength, I never abandoned you, saying to the contrary: "That it was by being with you!"

As with Greek divinities, many were related to one another, by blood or marriage, such as Isis and her sister Nephthys, both the respective wives of Osiris (the god of the dead) and of Set, themselves brothers.

In the case of the goddess Isis, who was associated with many principles: as the wife of Osiris who was killed by his brother, she was connected to funeral rites.

The goddess represented the era's regard for women, because it was crucial to maintain the spirit in her image, it was this idea of eternal life and of maturity that Isis reflected, venerated as the Celestial Mother.

Unlike revered women in other cultures, the concept of chastity wasn't relevant to the ancient Egyptians' religious practice.

In the New Kingdom, however, texts show that women had their own legal identity and could even purchase and inherit land without the need for male consent.

Hatshepsut, unsatisfied with her status as second best to her father, took it to clarifying her divine conception, so as to legitimize her ruling as pharaoh by recording the miracle of her birth on the walls of the second terrace.

In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte led a campaign in Egypt that would be a military fiasco, but which enabled him to return to France with drawings and observations by artists and scientists that he had brought on the expedition.

In this way, clothing styles changed, and women during the Napoleonic Empire adopted styles associated with ancient Egyptian women, combined with the influence of Ancient Greece and Rome: corsets were abandoned (only temporarily), as well as petticoats, and the raised Empire waist was the popular dress silhouette.

Dresses were lighter, and were decorated with motifs from Antiquity, for example palm trees, one of the symbols of the goddess Isis.

During the 1950s and 1960s, a number of costume dramas were produced, putting on screen Egyptian women imagined during this era where filmmakers want to show glamour.

This passion for the queen is explained by the tumultuous life that she lived, full of intrigues, romances (her two most famous lovers being Julius Caesar and Marc Antony), her power, and her tragic death (she died by suicide).

The best-known of these caricatures today are those appearing in such media of popular culture as the Astérix comic books of René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo.

Playing on the glamorous image created by cinema, the authors satirize the fascination that Cleopatra exercises on those around her, focusing especially on her nose and exaggerating her queenly status by depicting her as capricious and temperamental, far-removed from the ideal of the seductive woman so often imagined.

In a more general manner, this image of Egyptian women, forceful, behind a mysterious and magical veil, and exercising a seductive power, continues to this day, for example in the American series Stargate SG-1, or again in Luc Besson's film The Fifth Element (1997).