Our Oriental Heritage

  It was a well-organized government, with a better record of duration than any other in history. At the head of the administration was the Vizier, who served at once as prime minister, chief justice, and head of the treasury; he was the court of last resort under the Pharaoh himself. A tomb relief shows us the Vizier leaving his house early in the morning to hear the petitions of the poor, “to hear,” as the inscription reads, “what the people say in their demands, and to make no distinction between small and great.”86 A remarkable papyrus roll, which comes down to us from the days of the Empire, purports to be the form of address (perhaps it is but a literary invention) with which the Pharaoh installed a new Vizier:

  Look to the office of the Vizier; be watchful over all that is done therein. Behold, it is the established support of the whole land. . . . The Vizierate is not sweet; it is bitter. . . . Behold, it is not to show respect-of-persons to princes and councillors; it is not to make for himself slaves of any people. . . . Behold, when a petitioner comes from Upper or Lower Egypt . . . see thou to it that everything is done in accordance with law, that everything is done according to the custom thereof, (giving) to (every man) his right. . . . It is an abomination of the god to show partiality. . . . Look upon him who is known to thee like him who is unknown to thee; and him who is near the King like him who is far from (his House). Behold, a prince who does this, he shall endure here in this place. . . . The dread of a prince is that he does justice. . . . (Behold the regulation) that is laid upon thee.87

  The Pharaoh himself was the supreme court; any case might under certain circumstances be brought to him, if the plaintiff was careless of expense. Ancient carvings show us the “Great House” from which he ruled, and in which the offices of the government were gathered; from this Great House, which the Egyptians called Pero and which the Jews translated Pharaoh, came the title of the emperor. Here he carried on an arduous routine of executive work, sometimes with a schedule as rigorous as Chandragupta’s, Louis XIV’s or Napoleon’s.88 When he traveled the nobles met him at the feudal frontiers, escorted and entertained him, and gave him presents proportionate to their expectations; one lord, says a proud inscription, gave to Amenhotep II “carriages of silver and gold, statues of ivory and ebony . . . jewels, weapons, and works of art,” 680 shields, 140 bronze daggers, and many vases of precious metal.89 The Pharaoh reciprocated by taking one of the baron’s sons to live with him at court—a subtle way of exacting a hostage of fidelity. The oldest of the courtiers constituted a Council of Elders called Saru, or The Great Ones, who served as an advisory cabinet to the king.90 Such counsel was in a sense superfluous, for the Pharaoh, with the help of the priests, assumed divine descent, powers and wisdom; this alliance with the gods was the secret of his prestige. Consequently he was greeted with forms of address always flattering, sometimes astonishing, as when, in The Story of Sinuhe, a good citizen hails him: “O long-living King, may the Golden One” (Hathor the goddess) “give life to thy nose.”91

  As became so godlike a person, the Pharaoh was waited upon by a variety of aides, including generals, launderers, bleachers, guardians of the imperial wardrobe, and other men of high degree. Twenty officials collaborated to take care of his toilet: barbers who were permitted only to shave him and cut his hair, hairdressers who adjusted the royal cowl and diadem to his head, manicurists who cut and polished his nails, perfumers who deodorized his body, blackened his eyelids with kohl, and reddened his cheeks and lips with rouge.92 One tomb inscription describes its occupant as “Overseer of the Cosmetic Box, Overseer of the Cosmetic Pencil, Sandal-Bearer to the King, doing in the matter of the King’s sandals to the satisfaction of his Law.”93 So pampered, he tended to degenerate, and sometimes brightened his boredom by manning the imperial barge with young women clad only in network of a large mesh. The luxury of Amenhotep III prepared for the debacle of Ikhnaton.

  4. Morals

  Royal incest—The harem—Marriage—The position of woman—The matriarchate in Egypt—Sexual morality

  The government of the Pharaohs resembled that of Napoleon, even to the incest. Very often the king married his own sister—occasionally his own daughter—to preserve the purity of the royal blood. It is difficult to say whether this weakened the stock. Certainly Egypt did not think so, after several thousand years of experiment; the institution of sister-marriage spread among the people, and as late as the second century after Christ two-thirds of the citizens of Arsinoë were found to be practising the custom.94 The words brother and sister, in Egyptian poetry, have the same significance as lover and beloved among ourselves.95 In addition to his sisters the Pharaoh had an abundant harem, recruited not only from captive women but from the daughters of the nobles and the gifts of foreign potentates; so Amenhotep III received from a prince of Naharina his eldest daughter and three hundred select maidens.96 Some of the nobility imitated this tiresome extravagance on a small scale, adjusting their morals to their resources.

  For the most part the common people, like persons of moderate income everywhere, contented themselves with monogamy. Family life was apparently as well ordered, as wholesome in moral tone and influence, as in the highest civilizations of our time. Divorce was rare until the decadent dynasties. The husband could dismiss his wife without compensation if he detected her in adultery; if he divorced her for other reasons he was required to turn over to her a substantial share of the family property. The fidelity of the husband—so far as we can fathom such arcana—was as painstaking as in any later culture, and the position of woman was more advanced than in most countries today. “No people, ancient or modern,” said Max Müller, “has given women so high a legal status as did the inhabitants of the Nile Valley.”97 The monuments picture them eating and drinking in public, going about their affairs in the streets unattended and unharmed, and freely engaging in industry and trade. Greek travelers, accustomed to confine their Xanthippes narrowly, were amazed at this liberty; they jibed at the henpecked husbands of Egypt, and Diodorus Siculus, perhaps with a twinkle in his eye, reported that along the Nile obedience of the husband to the wife was required in the marriage bond98—a stipulation not necessary in America. Women held and bequeathed property in their own names; one of the most ancient documents in history is the Third Dynasty will in which the lady Neb-sent transmits her lands to her children.99 Hatshepsut and Cleopatra rose to be queens, and ruled and ruined like kings.

  Sometimes a cynical note is heard in the literature. One ancient moralist warns his readers:

  Beware of a woman from abroad, who is not known in her city. Look not upon her when she comes, and know her not. She is like the vortex of deep waters, whose whirling is unfathomable. The woman whose husband is far away, she writes to thee every day. If there is no witness with her she arises and spreads her net. Oh, deadly crime if one hearkens!100

  But the more characteristically Egyptian tone sounds in Ptah-hotep’s instructions to his son:

  If thou art successful, and hast furnished thy house, and lovest the wife of thy bosom, then fill her stomach and clothe her back. . . . Make glad her heart during the time thou hast her, for she is a field profitable to its owner. . . . If thou oppose her it will mean thy ruin.101

  And the Boulak Papyrus admonishes the child with touching wisdom:

  Thou shalt never forget thy mother. . . . For she carried thee long beneath her breast as a heavy burden; and after thy months were accomplished she bore thee. Three long years she carried thee upon her shoulder, and gave thee her breast to thy mouth. She nurtured thee, and took no offense from thy uncleanliness. And when thou didst enter school, and wast instructed in the writings, daily she stood by the master with bread and beer from the house.102

  It is likely that this high status of woman arose from the mildly matriarchal character of Egyptian society. Not only was woman full mistress in the house, but all estates descended in the female line; “even in late times,” says Petrie, “the husband made over all his property and future earnings to his wife in his marriage s
ettlement.”103 Men married their sisters not because familiarity had bred romance, but because they wished to enjoy the family inheritance, which passed down from mother to daughter, and they did not care to see this wealth give aid and comfort to strangers.104 The powers of the wife underwent a slow diminution in the course of time, perhaps through contact with the patriarchal customs of the Hyksos, and through the transit of Egypt from agricultural isolation and peace to imperialism and war; under the Ptolemies the influence of the Greeks was so great that freedom of divorce, claimed in earlier times by the wife, became the exclusive privilege of the husband. Even then, however, the change was accepted only by the upper classes; the Egyptian commoner adhered to matriarchal ways.105 Possibly because of the mastery of woman over her own affairs, infanticide was rare; Diodorus thought it a peculiarity of the Egyptians that every child born to them was reared, and tells us that parents guilty of infanticide were required by law to hold the dead child in their arms for three days and nights.106 Families were large, and children swarmed in both hovels and palaces; the well-to-do were hard put to it to keep count of their offspring.107

  Even in courtship the woman usually took the initiative. The love poems and letters that have come down to us are generally addressed by the lady to the man; she begs for assignations, she presses her suit directly, she formally proposes marriage.108 “Oh my beautiful friend,” says one letter, “my desire is to become, as thy wife, the mistress of all thy possessions.”109 Hence modesty, as distinct from fidelity, was not prominent among the Egyptians; they spoke of sexual affairs with a directness alien to our late morality, adorned their very temples with pictures and bas-reliefs of startling anatomical candor, and supplied their dead with obscene literature to amuse them in the grave.110 Blood ran warm along the Nile: girls were nubile at ten, and premarital morals were free and easy; one courtesan, in Ptolemaic days, was reputed to have built a pyramid with her savings; even sodomy had its clientele.111 Dancing-girls, in the manner of Japan, were accepted into the best male society as providers of entertainment and physical edification; they dressed in diaphanous robes, or contented themselves with anklets, bracelets and rings.112 Evidences occur of religious prostitution on a small scale; as late as the Roman occupation the most beautiful girl among the noble families of Thebes was chosen to be consecrated to Amon. When she was too old to satisfy the god she received an honorable discharge, married, and moved in the highest circles.113 It was a civilization with different prejudices from our own.

  5. Manners

  Character—Games—Appearance—Cosmetics—Costume—Jewelry

  If we try to visualize the Egyptian character we find it difficult to distinguish between the ethics of the literature and the actual practices of life. Very frequently noble sentiments occur; a poet, for example, counsels his countrymen:

  Give bread to him who has no field,

  And create for thyself a good name for ever more;114

  and some of the elders give very laudable advice to their children. A papyrus in the British Museum, known to scholars as “The Wisdom of Amenemope” (ca. 950 B.C.), prepares a student for public office with admonitions that probably influenced the author or authors of the “Proverbs of Solomon.”

  Be not greedy for a cubit of land,

  And trespass not on the boundary of the widow. . . .

  Plough the fields that thou mayest find thy needs,

  And receive thy bread from thine own threshing floor.

  Better is a bushel which God giveth to thee

  Than five thousand gained by transgression. . . .

  Better is poverty in the hand of God

  Than riches in the storehouse;

  And better are loaves when the heart is joyous

  Than riches in unhappiness. . . .115

  Such pious literature did not prevent the normal operation of human greed. Plato described the Athenians as loving knowledge, the Egyptians as loving wealth; perhaps he was too patriotic. In general the Egyptians were the Americans of antiquity: enamored of size, given to gigantic engineering and majestic building, industrious and accumulative, practical even in the midst of many ultramundane superstitions. They were the arch-conservatives of history; the more they changed, the more they remained the same; through forty centuries their artists copied the old conventions religiously. They appear to us, from their monuments, to have been a matter-of-fact people, not given to non-theological nonsense. They had no sentimental regard for human life, and killed with the clear conscience of nature; Egyptian soldiers cut off the right hand, or the phallus, of a slain enemy, and brought it to the proper scribe that it might be put into the record to their credit.116 In the later dynasties the people, long accustomed to internal peace and to none but distant wars, lost all military habits and qualities, until at last a few Roman soldiers sufficed to master all Egypt.117

  The accident that we know them chiefly from the remains in their tombs or the inscriptions on their temples has misled us into exaggerating their solemnity. We perceive from some of their sculptures and reliefs, and from their burlesque stories of the gods,118 that they had a jolly turn for humor. They played many public and private games, such as checkers and dice;119 they gave many modern toys to their children, like marbles, bouncing balls, tenpins and tops; they enjoyed wrestling contests, boxing matches and bull-fights.120 At feasts and recreations they were anointed by attendants, were wreathed with flowers, feted with wines, and presented with gifts.

  From the painting and the statuary we picture them as a physically vigorous people, muscular, broad-shouldered, thin-waisted, full-lipped, and flat-footed from going unshod. The upper classes are represented as fashionably slender, imperiously tall, with oval face, sloping forehead, regular features, a long, straight nose, and magnificent eyes. Their skin was white at birth (indicating an Asiatic rather than an African origin), but rapidly darkened under the Egyptian sun;121 their artists idealized them in painting the men red, the women yellow; perhaps these colors were merely cosmetic styles. The man of the people, however, is pictured as short and squat, like the “Sheik-el-Beled,” formed by heavy toil and an unbalanced ration; his features are rough, his nose blunt and wide; he is intelligent but coarse. Perhaps, as in so many other instances, the people and their rulers were of different races: the rulers of Asiatic, the people of African, derivation. The hair was dark, sometimes curly, but never woolly. Women bobbed their hair in the most modern mode; men shaved lips and chin, but consoled themselves with magnificent wigs. Often, in order to wear these more comfortably, they shaved the head; even the queen consort (e.g., Ikhnaton’s mother Tiy) cut off all her hair to wear more easily the royal wig and crown. It was a matter of rigid etiquette that the king should have the biggest wig.122

  According to their means they repaired the handiwork of nature with subtle cosmetic art. Faces were rouged, lips were painted, nails were colored, hair and limbs were oiled; even in the sculptures the Egyptian women have painted eyes. Those who could afford it had seven creams and two kinds of rouge put into their tombs when they died. The remains abound in toilet sets, mirrors, razors, hair-curlers, hair-pins, combs, cosmetic boxes, dishes and spoons—made of wood, ivory, alabaster or bronze, and designed in delightful and appropriate forms. Eye-paint still survives in some of the tubes. The kohl that women use today for painting the eyebrows and the face is a lineal descendant of the oil used by the Egyptians; it has come down to us through the Arabs, whose word for it, al-kohl, has given us our word alcohol. Perfumes of all sorts were used on the body and the clothes, and homes were made fragrant with incense and myrrh.123

  Their clothing ran through every gradation from primitive nudity to the gorgeous dress of Empire days. Children of both sexes went about, till their teens, naked except for ear-rings and necklaces; the girls, however, showed a beseeming modesty by wearing a string of beads around the middle.124 Servants and peasants limited their everyday wardrobe to a loin-cloth. Under the Old Kingdom free men and women went naked to the navel, and covered
themselves from waist to knees with a short, tight skirt of white linen.125 Since shame is a child of custom rather than of nature, these simple garments contented the conscience as completely as Victorian petticoats and corsets, or the evening dress of the contemporary American male; “our virtues lie in the interpretation of the time.” Even the priests, in the first dynasties, wore nothing but loin-cloths, as we see from the statue of Ranofer.126 When wealth increased, clothing increased; the Middle Kingdom added a second and larger skirt over the first, and the Empire added a covering for the breast, with now and then a cape. Coachmen and grooms took on formidable costumes, and ran through the streets in full livery to clear a way for the chariots of their masters. Women, in the prosperous dynasties, abandoned the tight skirt for a loose robe that passed over the shoulder and was joined in a clasp under the right breast. Flounces, embroideries and a thousand frills appeared, and fashion entered like a serpent to disturb the paradise of primitive nudity.127

  Both sexes loved ornament, and covered neck, breast, arms, wrists and ankles with jewelry. As the nation fattened on the tribute of Asia and the commerce of the Mediterranean world, jewelry ceased to be restricted to the aristocracy, and became a passion with all classes. Every scribe and merchant had his seal of silver or gold; every man had a ring, every woman had an ornamental chain. These chains, as we see them in the museums today, are of infinite variety: some of them two to three inches, some of them five feet, in length; some thick and heavy, some “as slight and flexible as the finest Venetian lace.”128 About the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty ear-rings became de rigueur; every one had to have the ears pierced for them, not only girls and women, but boys and men.129 Men as well as women decorated their persons with bracelets and rings, pendants and beads of costly stone. The women of ancient Egypt could learn very little from us in the matter of cosmetics and jewelry if they were reincarnated among us today.