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Ultimate equality -1
WHERE QUEEN WAS KING
Just once in all recorded history have women and men lived as genuine equal partners, sharing public leadership and duties as well as their private chores and responsibilities.
In that long ago, relatively brief era, it appears, there was no fear of physical domination, and the joint pursuit of happiness was profound.
It happened 3 000 years ago, at a level beyond the imagination of even sophisticated societies of the 21st century of the Christian era. The status of women in Thebes is only one of a thousand aspects of the Nile which can fascinate you if you turn from the beaten tourist track to find the real Ancient Egypt.
Women leaders as well as the men of Ancient Egypt believed death was something to anticipate with pleasure. They believed that aging was a privilege; and that life had to be lived with style. But it was a style that demanded equipoise, discipline, and living within the balanced laws of their universe. Maat was the thing to live by.
Is that why their remarkable, peaceful civilisation lasted longer than all the civilisations, all the empires and all the philosophies and religions which have succeeded them?
After nearly two centuries of digging for answers, there is at last a new and wide appreciation of the fact that there remains as much to learn about life, as well as death, from the Ancient Egyptians as there is from any single modern source.
From Cleopatra’s palace beneath the waves of the Mediterranean, to Ramses II’s gigantic edifice already raised from the waters of Lake Nasser in ancient Nubia, new insights, new knowledge, new perspectives are being still being uncovered. The number of discoveries is such that they are no longer news. The latest approaches to antiquity and the improved techniques allow Egyptologists to explore ancient views on everything from religion to eroticism; from politics to house design; from philosophy to art, or - to describe the range in strictly Ancient Egyptian terms - from Ay (Vizier to the most enlightened Court the world has known) to Zed (or Djed - a pillar representing Osiris’s backbone, symbol of stability).
Womenhood is among those subjects, and the extraordinarily enlightened approach of one era of Ancient Egyptians to gender issues deserve far more attention than has been given in the past two centuries. Women in Ancient Egypt may have practised a way of life which appeared more enlightened than most practised today.
According to recent findings, and still debatable theories, the People of the Nile regarded women and men as equal partners, contributing different things to a partnership which made life work
(There is dispute because theories on social structures of Ancient Egypt depends on who interprets the evidence. Until the 1980s it was assumed that women were ‘respected’ but not equal. Twenty-five years later there is a view that life above the servants quarters at Thebes was not only highly sophisticated, but provided a sense of genuine equality between family partners. It is this version described here. What cannot be disputed is the major historical role of women leaders over a thousand and more years.)
At first, however, Ancient Egyptian was not in partnerships but in monotheism, according to Egyptologist Alberto Carlo Carpiceci. The citizens of the longest and most confident civilisation on Earth originally believed in a single Being (as distinct from the Absolute Spirit, Ra). The Being was no mere male. She was the Mother Goddess, the generating force of all things including gods and man. However, the men believed that natural logic demanded there should be partners for the purposes of procreation. Indeed, all creation, including the creation of the world, had to be based on partnerships, they thought.
I shall come back to the cosmology of Heliopolis and its coupling of the gods and goddesses when we discuss Ancient Egyptian sex. The fact was, however, that the Ancient Egyptians could not contemplate truly equal partnerships until their society was truly civilised, and until they could eradicate from the equation the presence of unequal physical power - or rather brute force. It seems that not before that era on the Nile, or since, has the wit of women or the logic of science succeeded in achieving that fine balance on a large scale.
One example of gender equality in enlightened antiquity was the reign of Amenhetop III and Queen Tiye. Her qualities must rank with those of the greatest women of the ages. Her husband and her son ruled jointly and both must have been considerably under her influence as they moved to break the power of the priests and bring sweeping reform. The dowager Queen was still much in evidence after her husband’s death when her son Amenhetop IV reigned with the beautiful Queen Nefertiti as his co-ruler.
During this reign monotheism was re-instated (in the form of a new sun-god, Aten) and the Pharaoh took the now famous name Akhenaten. In this exciting period, art was liberated and full democracy was mooted for every citizen. Also, a serious political statement was made when the pharaoh’s daughters were depicted, like him, in all formal paintings and carvings. Women it seems, were recognised as absolutely equal. The move toward noble gender equality was initiated in Akhenaten’s father’s reign if not before. Indeed it appears that many of the theological and social reforms which Akhenaken began to enforce had been carefully prepared in advance by his father and his mother, Queen Tiye.
But, it seems, things started to get out of hand at some stage after the elder Pharaoh’s death. Akhenaken appears to have started to destroy or endanger, with his radical excesses, the great civilised reforms which had been planned. Finally his behaviour must have driven Queen Nerfititi to leave him and live independently in a separate palace with their daughters.
His ideas then swiftly moved more than 4,000 years ahead of their time, and became too advanced for the majority of society - even today. One version of events is that he took the concept of One-God- in-Two-Partners to its ultimate logical conclusion by declaring himself to be the son - and daughter - of God. He had himself carved in stone with an emaciated, compellingly aesthetic male face, and a grotesquely exaggerated female figure.
In the end he may have been murdered.
His death occurred in the same year as the death of the youth he had taken as his co-ruler when Nefertiti left him. The annointed successor toAkhenaten and his male consort was Tutankhamun. The famed “King Tut” went to his tomb aged only about 18. Tutankhamun’s young widow set out to find and marry another successor who would be as far as possible from the influence - and threat - of the Egyptian court, but was foiled when her choice, the son of the King of the Assyrians no less, was murdered on his journey to meet her.
So mystery piled on intrigue. We shall examine the clues in a moment, but whatever the facts, it has to be remembered that the drama of the period remains just one small episode in an immense theatre in which countless kings, queens and generations of millions of people played a part in trying to keep civilisation balanced through 30 dynasties. Hatshepsut was one of those queens - and, half a millennium before Queen Tiye formally enforced total gender equality - declared herself king of all Egypt.
As the daughter of Tuthmose I, she protected the royal blood by marrying her half-brother Tuthmosis II, but when he died early, she served as regent for her young nephew, Thutmosis III. She ruled as pharaoh with him until she was finally accepted by the priesthood as the representative of the gods. She was one of the few recognised female pharaoh-gods in history and - taking no chances - she wore a king’s garments and the customary ceremonial false beard.
She ordered an expedition to the mysterious Land of Punt. She began a revival of art, and she built a magnificent funerary temple like no other. Her temple Djeser Djesru (the Splendour of Splendours) was filled with perfumed gardens, fountains and trees of myrrh. The multi-pillared, multi-storeyed monument proved to be a forerunner of the best architecture of Greece and Rome which came a thousand and more years later. Hatshepsut’s temple has been renovated recently -nearly 3,500 years on - as one of the show-pieces of Ancient Egypt.
Such were the talents - and the powers - of the leading women of the ancient world. There were many of them. Two examples:
Nefetari (wife of Ramses the Great who built a vast momument to her beside his own in Abu Simbel), and 1,500 years later,
Cleopatra, who seduced two Roman Emperors in the cause of her own empire.
Next: The clues to one of the great mystery stories of all time, |
