Things I wish that were true: they had equal rights for men and women
We don’t even have equal rights now.
But the Ancient Egyptians were much better at equality than many of their contemporaries. Women in Ancient Egypt could have jobs outside the home, they could own land and property, they had the ability to decide who their stuff went to after they died, and they could run their own businesses. They’re not responsible for all domestic tasks (in fact it was the responsibility of men to do the laundry) and in some cases not responsible for them at all because they were the main breadwinner (quite literally in Egypt’s economic system) especially in the cases of women who ran entire farms while their husbands were priests. They’re even doctors! The Western world didn’t catch up to the Egyptians on believing women could be physicians for another 5000 years!
Women in Ancient Egypt were equal under the law to Egyptian men. They had the same rights and faced the same penalties. Thus, they could own land, manage their own property and represent themselves in court cases. They could sit on juries and testify in trials. At the same time, they were also subject to the same legal penalties as men. She could divorce, initiate a lawsuit to recover the assets of the household and win the case, which did not prevent her from remarrying, as found in the Elephantine papyri. The Will of Naunakhte is one of the more famous examples of a woman taking charge of what would happen to her possessions after her death. In it she describes that several of her children have been kind to her in her old age and they will be the ones, along with her second husband as the first was long deceased, to receive her belongings upon her death. The other children are to receive nothing as they have not helped her at all in her old age. This is the interesting part of this document as Naunakhte only disowns those children from receiving her own belongings and property, namely a shed which she received from her own father, but does not exclude them from what they may receive from their father. It is interesting to note that the legal position of women in the 20th dynasty of Egypt regarding property ownership was equal to that of men. Though women tended to inherit little from their families, what they did own was theirs to do with as they pleased regardless of whether they married.
Egyptian women may not have been 100% equal, but dammit they were at least 85% there compared to literally any other contemporary civilisation.
snowghoul
2087
vaporwave
