Daughters of Isis - Joyce Tyldesley

by Daughters of Isis- Women of Ancient Egypt (epub)

  The servant who is not beaten is full of curses in his heart.

  Late Period employment advice

  An Egyptian woman of good character could always find employment as a servant; the lack of modern conveniences, such as electricity and plumbed water, meant that there was a constant demand for unskilled domestic labour. A servant’s wages were relatively cheap, and most middle- and upper-class homes had at least one maid who could be trained in domestic skills while helping out with the more arduous household chores. Girls entered domestic service at a relatively young age, and anxious mothers relied upon responsible householders to protect their inexperienced daughters while providing them with a good basic training. This concern for the welfare of the younger servants is well illustrated by a private letter written during the New Kingdom. The Scribe Ahmose had become worried about the fate of a servant girl who had been specifically entrusted to his protection but who had unaccountably disappeared, apparently on the orders of his superior, the treasurer Ty:

  What is the reason for taking away the servant girl who had been given to me but who has now been given to someone else?… As far as I am concerned I am not worried about the loss of her value, as she is very young and does not yet know her work… But her mother sent a message to me, saying ‘You have allowed my child to be taken away when she was entrusted to you…’10

  Domestic servants appear to have been closely tied to their master’s services, but they could lose their position if their behaviour was not considered appropriate to their situation:

  Now, as soon as you receive this letter from Sahathor, have the housemaid Senen thrown out of my house. See, if she spends just one more night in my home, watch out! I will hold you responsible for any evil which she may do to my concubine.

  Middle Kingdom letter written by Hekanakhte

  Servants should not be confused with slaves who, although in many cases required to perform the same range of tasks, remained at all times the legal property of their masters and mistresses.11 Owners had many rights over their slaves who could be sold, transferred, emancipated or rented out at will, but they acknowledged a corresponding duty to feed, clothe and care for their property, just as they cared for the well-being of their free servants. Despite the popular movie scenes which show Cecil B. de millions of slaves toiling, suffering and dying under the hot Egyptian sun, slavery was relatively rare in Egypt. Such slaves as there were were either born into slavery or else represented the unfortunate victims of war:

  I have brought those whom my sword spared as numerous captives, pinioned like birds before my horses, also their wives and children in their thousands and their cattle…

  Inscription of Ramesses III

  Some slaves were also imported into Egypt by foreign slave-dealers. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that all the foreign workers in Egypt were slaves; the comparative buoyancy of the Egyptian economy attracted many professional weavers, singers and dancers, and immigrant workers from Asia were a common feature of everyday Dynastic life. A few free-born Egyptians actually chose to enter voluntary slavery by executing a legal contract of self-sale or self-dedication, thereby extricating themselves from a burden of debt due to their now-owner; that free-born Egyptians were prepared to take this irrevocable step, binding on both themselves and their descendants, suggests that the life of the Egyptian slave was perhaps not quite as harsh as we might imagine.

  Whether the female slaves, or indeed the female servants, were expected to provide sexual services for their masters and their house-guests is unclear, although we know that many unmarried slave women did bear children during their captivity. Similarly, it is not clear whether the brothels of Dynastic Egypt were staffed by free women or by slaves. Certainly all other slave-owning societies, past and present, have expected their female slaves to sleep with their masters as and when required, while the less conventional Greeks also expected pretty young boy slaves to be available to the men of the household. The case of Nenufer and Nebnufer who purchased a slave woman expressly for the purpose of breeding heirs has been discussed in Chapter 1. Under Egyptian law the children of such a union would be born into slavery, but could easily be freed and adopted by their owner/ father. We must assume that this couple were not alone in choosing to use a slave as a surrogate mother, and the Bible suggests that this may have been a standard practice at this time:

  Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children; and she had a handmaid, an Egyptian whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said unto Abram, ‘Behold now, the Lord has restrained me from bearing; I pray thee, go in unto my handmaid; it may be that I may obtain children through her’… And Sarai took Hagar her maid and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife.

  Gen. 16:2

  Ultimately, every Egyptian was a servant of the king, who could call upon the services of his people as and when he felt necessary. This he did under the long-established system of corvée, or conscripted labour, whereby all Egyptians were bound to donate their labour to royal projects such as the building of a public monument or the digging of irrigation ditches. Only those who were already employed on important projects, such as the higher-ranking servants of the local temple, were legally exempted from this conscription, although the administrators and those wealthy enough to pay a bribe or send along replacement labour quickly exempted themselves from their public duty. The heavy burden of the corvée therefore fell upon the poor, the uneducated and the peasants while the worst of the hard labour – a trip to the gold mines in the Sudan – was reserved for convicted felons and prisoners of war. All the corvée work was hard and highly unpopular and, to add insult to injury, paid only subsistence rations. The punishment for avoiding the work was, however, extremely harsh, and those tempted to desert could be faced with a lifelong prison sentence, interspersed with yet more periods of forced labour. Women were not automatically exempted from the corvée, and a Middle Kingdom register giving the names of eighty deserters includes the case of Teti, daughter of the Scribe Sainhur, who was found guilty and who suffered ‘… an order issued to execute against her the law pertaining to one who flees without performing his labour duty’.

  On that day the workman Menna gave a pot of fresh fat to the chief of police Mentmose. Mentmose promised him ‘I will pay you for it with barley obtained from my brother. My brother will guarantee the transaction. May Re keep you in good health.’

  Ostracon from Deir el-Medina

  Many women were able to make an important contribution to their family economy without actively seeking employment outside the home. Although tradition decreed that the work of men and women should be more or less separated, and that outdoor labour should be depicted as the prerogative of men, comparison with modern Egypt suggests that many women did, in fact, help their husbands with their daily work. For example, we know that the wives of fishermen were expected to gut and then sell their husbands’ catch, and a few tomb illustrations show women labouring in the fields alongside their menfolk, picking flax, winnowing wheat and even carrying heavy baskets to the storehouses. Women are not conventionally illustrated ploughing, sowing or looking after the animals in the fields, but they are shown providing refreshments for the labourers, while gleaning was an approved female outdoor activity recorded in several tomb scenes; women and children follow the official harvesters and pick up any ears of corn which have been left behind. Of equal, or perhaps greater, importance were the small-scale informal transactions conducted between women, with one wife, for example, simply agreeing to swap a jug of her homemade beer for her neighbour’s excess fish. This type of exchange, which formed the basis of the Egyptian economy, allowed the careful housewife to convert her surplus produce directly into usable goods, just as her husband was able to exchange his labour for his daily bread.

  The few attendance records which have survived from Deir el-Medina indicate that this type of freelance trading by both men and women made an important contribution to the household budget. Officially the necropolis labourers worked a te
n-day week, spending eight days in temporary accommodation in the Valley of the Kings and then returning home for a two-day rest. The full working day was eight hours long, with a midday meal break. However, the labourers were never unduly pressured to turn up for work on a regular basis and there were many holidays so that, as one ostracon shows, out of fifty consecutive days only eighteen were working days for the whole crew. Even on an official working day many labourers absented themselves with a variety of rather lame but apparently acceptable excuses ranging from the need to brew beer and weave to the need to build a house, and so relaxed were the authorities that the standard monthly grain ration was always paid over, regardless of the number of hours actually worked. Therefore, anyone wishing to increase his personal wealth was well advised to abandon any thought of working overtime at his official job and to concentrate instead on a spot of private enterprise which would bring an immediate reward. Not surprisingly, cottage industries flourished at Deir el-Medina, with enterprising weavers, brewers, dressmakers and potters supplementing their official income by supplying the immediate needs of their neighbours, while the skilled draughtsmen, artists and carpenters moonlighted by working unofficially to provide funerary equipment for the wealthy Theban aristocracy.

  *

  Fig. 22 Trading in the marketplace

  Throughout the Dynastic period Egypt had no official currency. Barter, the exchange of one article or service for another, formed the basis of every transaction, no matter how trivial. Unfortunately, this reduces any modern attempt to calculate the true cost of dynastic living to little more than educated guesswork, as ‘prices’ were always both comparative and infinitely variable. It is quite simply impossible to state that a duck or a house or a funeral cost so much without understanding the full value placed on all types of commodities by a particular person at a specific time. Although the government, which acted as both the major employer and the major collector of surplus produce, was able to operate a crude price-control mechanism by regulating wages and the release of stored foodstuffs on to the market, there was no official policy of price-fixing, and the law of supply and demand was consequently paramount.

  Despite the lack of coinage, shopping in Egypt was not always a totally haphazard experience as there was a universally recognized benchmark available as a point of reference for anyone wishing to conduct a serious transaction. This deben, a standard weight of copper, represented an intermediate stage between the use of money and true barter and allowed the Egyptians to develop a unique system of price referencing whereby any two commodities could be equated in value. Therefore, although the deben did not take the physical form of a note or coin, it was understood by everyone that, for example, at a given time during the New Kingdom a pig was priced at 5 deben of copper. Anyone wishing to buy a pig therefore had to find either 5 deben of copper or, more typically, a combination of other goods or services which were collectively also valued at 5 deben. It was then necessary to find a pig owner who valued the offered goods enough to make the swap. Some idea of the relative values placed on items at a given time can be gained from the study of surviving price lists. We know, for example, that during the New Kingdom the pig mentioned above was a pricey item when compared to a goat which was usually valued at two or three deben. This reflected the general scarcity of swine in Egypt at this time. In contrast a pair of shoes usually cost between one and two deben while a coffin, a very expensive item requiring both wood and skilled labour, was priced at over twenty deben of copper.12

  The collector of taxes lands on the riverbank. He surveys the crops and assesses the tax payable, attended by menials who carry staves and Nubians wielding clubs. He orders ‘give us grain’, but there is none available to give. The farmer is beaten savagely, being tied up and ducked head first into the well. His wife is also tied up, as are his children. The neighbours all run away. And, after all this, there is still no grain to give.

  New Kingdom Wisdom Text

  The lack of currency did not mean that there was no taxation; taxes in kind were levied on all the primary producers as a contribution towards the royal expenditure which could not be entirely matched by the income from the royal estates. The tax collector was one of the most feared of the Egyptian bureaucrats. He arrived regularly at harvest time, assessed the crops with an expert eye, and then extracted immediate payment from the farmers, using physical violence whenever necessary. Tax defaulters were summoned before the local magistrate and received summary punishment, while those who could not pay were conscripted into the forced labour gangs. A scene painted on the wall of the New Kingdom tomb of the vizier Rekhmira shows the tax man in action, accepting a diverse selection of goods and cattle from a local mayor; the items used to pay the tax include grain, cakes, rope, mats, goats, sacks, pigeons and metal ingots, and must have presented immediate storage problems for the official.

  The recognized system of bartering meant that those householders who managed to acquire a substantial surplus of perishable foodstuffs, perhaps by producing a glut of home-grown vegetables or by making too much bread for family consumption, were able to offer their goods to a wider public by trading at the local market where they would in turn benefit from a more varied range of exchange goods. Here, every market day, local traders and visiting merchants spread out their temporary stalls to fill the crowded streets and alleys of the town, arranging their merchandise to best advantage in wide wicker baskets. Professional traders were in the minority, and the whole market was far more like a present-day garage or car-boot sale than a formal shopping centre. There was always an exciting variety of goods on offer, and the stands ranged from those of the professional jewellers who tempted potential customers with alluring and expensive displays of baubles, bangles and seals to the more humble stalls of the local peasants offering the most basic of market produce: bread, beer and gutted fish. Itinerant craftsmen took full advantage of the market crowds to sell their services, while small snack bars did brisk business serving delicious take-away food and reviving drinks to the jaded shoppers.

  Several tomb scenes combine to provide us with a clear impression of the hustle and bustle of an Egyptian street market. On the walls of the Old Kingdom tomb of the officials Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep at Sakkara a full-scale town market is in progress. Fruit, fish and vegetable stalls are all doing a roaring trade, two potters are competing to attract attention to their own wares and the haberdasher unrolls a bolt of his finest cloth to tempt a potential buyer. Over by the beer stand, at least one customer is already feeling somewhat tired and emotional. As the predominantly male shoppers stroll around with their practical shopping bags slung across their chests, a seller of lettuce and onion bargains with a man carrying a large jug of beer, ‘Give me some of your product and I will give you sweet vegetables.’ More excitingly, over by the vegetable stall, a trained security monkey is arresting a naked thief by biting him in the leg. One thousand years later, in the New Kingdom Theban tomb of Ipuy, the market ambience is virtually unchanged. Here, by the quayside, astute women traders have set up temporary stands to tempt the newly disembarked and newly paid sailors, helping them to convert their standard grain rations into a range of other goods. Bread, vegetables and fish are again on offer, and the ubiquitous beer stall is well stocked and ready for its first thirsty clients. Anyone who has ever enjoyed the cheerful bustle of a modern Egyptian village market will immediately recognize that, despite the presence of coinage and the absence of beer stands, there has been very little obvious change in the three thousand years since Ipuy’s tomb was painted.

  Make a holiday! And do not tire of playing! For no one is allowed to take his goods with him, and no one who departs this life ever comes back again.

  Middle Kingdom Song of the Harpist

  Fig. 23 Trained security monkey arresting a thief

  The Egyptians were a people who knew how to make the most of their spare time. Whole families enjoyed spending the day together, and picnics at the tombs of the ancestors or boating exp
editions on the Nile were always a popular treat. More exciting were the days spent hunting and fishing in the marshes when, as some tomb scenes suggest, the entire family squeezed into a light reed boat in order to watch the men of the household attempt to bring down birds with a traditional curved throwing stick. Given the fragile nature of these delicate boats it would appear that the artists must have employed a degree of artistic licence in their endeavours to portray a happy family day out; otherwise we would expect to see fairly frequent scenes of capsized boats and dripping-wet families. In contrast, hunting in the desert was acknowledged by all to be a dangerous and expensive sport, reserved for upper-class men and the professional hunters who accompanied each expedition.

  Back at home, many a happy hour could be spent playing with the children and the household animals.13 Pets played an important part in Egyptian family life and dogs and cats and, to a lesser extent, monkeys and even geese are frequently included in family groups, sitting proudly beside their owner’s chair. The majority of the dogs shown in these scenes appear to be lovable mongrels, although the presence of several distinctive whippet and saluki-like animals suggests that deliberate breeding was at least partially successful. These dogs, who were given suitably descriptive names such as ‘Ebony’, ‘Antelope’ or ‘Good Watcher’, made loyal companions while fulfilling the useful role of guard and hunting dog. At the end of their lives they were often accorded an elaborate burial, and poignant doggy graves with expensively mummified bodies encased in miniature canine coffins have been recovered at several archaeological sites.

  However, despite its useful work, the dog was not universally admired, and many Egyptians interpreted the dog’s affectionate loyalty as a sign of cringing servility and weakness. Cats, with their mysterious aloofness and natural independence, attracted far more respect, becoming invested with several symbolic implications. In particular, as cats were customarily depicted sitting under a woman’s chair and rarely depicted in association with a man, they became recognized as symbols of femininity and female sexuality. Several powerful female cat deities emerged, and the cult of the goddess Bast, centred on the town of Bubastis in the Nile Delta, became hugely popular during the Late and Graeco-Roman Periods. Cats were certainly a useful addition to any household; not only did they protect against snakes and vermin, but they also played an important role in hunting waterfowl.