Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

The traveller is struck with the various ways in which the relation of the sexes, that obtains throughout the East, has modified the manners, and customs, and the whole life, of the people. Female society is impossible. Women are not seen in the Mosks at times of prayer; and, we are told, are seldom known to pray at home, never having been taught the ceremonies requisite for prayer. One may walk through a crowded street and not see a woman among the passers by. A woman cannot, in the regular order of things, see the man who is to be her husband, or hold any converse with him, till the marriage contract is executed, and she has entered his house. Nor after marriage can she, with the exception of her father and brothers, have any social intercourse with men. One cannot but ask what it is that has given rise to manners, and customs, so opposite to all we deem wise and desirable in this matter. We see at a glance that they are the offspring of distrust and jealousy, and of a distrust and jealousy, which, though unfelt by ourselves, exist in a high degree among Orientals. What, then, is it that gives rise in them to these unpleasant feelings? It must be some fact which not only has the power of producing all this distrust and jealousy, drawing after them consequences of sufficient reach to determine the whole character of the relations of the sexes to each other, but it must also be something that is peculiarly their own. Now, all these conditions are fulfilled by polygamy, and by nothing else.

The fact that a man may possess a plurality of wives, and as many odalisques as he can afford, and may wish to have in his establishment, is the one element in oriental life to which everything else must accommodate itself. Reverse the case, and, setting aside exceptional instances, consider what, on the ordinary principles of human conduct, would be the general working of the reverse of the practice. What would be the state of things, and the customs and manners, which would naturally arise, if the wife had to retain the affection of a plurality of husbands? Would not, in that case, each woman, supposing they had the power of establishing, and enforcing, what regulations they pleased, take very good care that their husbands should have as little as possible to do with other women? Would the singular wife allow the plural husbands to see, or converse with, any woman but herself? Would she not confine them in the men’s apartments? Would she allow them to go abroad unveiled? The distrust and jealousy the women, under such arrangements, would feel, have, under existing arrangements, been felt by the men. They have acted on these feelings, and hence have been derived the manners and customs of the East in this matter.

There is nothing in the objection that all do not practise polygamy. All may practise it, and that is the condition to which the general manners and customs must adjust themselves. What all recognize as right and proper, and what all may act upon, is what has to be provided for.

But we have not yet got to the bottom of the matter. Certain manners and customs may be seen clearly to be the consequences of a certain practice: the subject, however, is not fully understood till we have gone one step further, and discovered what gave rise to the practice. The attempt is often made to dispose of this question offhand, by an assumption that passion burns with a fiercer flame in the East than in the West. This is what a man means when you hear him talking of the cold European, and of the fiery Arab; the supposed excessive warmth of the constitution of the latter being credited to the fervour of the Eastern sun. There is, however, no evidence of this in the facts of the case, nor does it account for them. If this is the true explanation, we ought to find polyandry practised as well as polygamy. But there is no evidence that this flame burns with a fiercer heat in Asia than in Europe. The probability is that it is what may be called a constant quantity.

In investigating this, just as any other matter, what we have to do is to ascertain the facts of the case, and then to see what can be fairly inferred from them. Now, undoubtedly, the main fact here is that there is a certain polygamic area. It is sufficiently well defined. It embraces North Africa, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Persia. I do not mean that polygamy has never been practised elsewhere. Like all other customs it may have been carried beyond its proper boundaries: we know that it has been. What I mean is that the area indicated is, and ever has been, its true and natural home. The monogamic area of Europe is equally distinct. Asia Minor is an intermediate, indeterminate region, which, though it is an outlying peninsula of Asia by situation, approximates more closely to Europe in its general features.

Now this polygamic area has one pervading, predominant, physical characteristic: it is a region of dry sandy deserts; or, rather, it is one vast sandy desert, interspersed with habitable districts. This renders its climate not only exceptionally dry, but also, from its comparative cloudlessness, exceptionally bright, which is not an immaterial point, and, too, exceptionally scorching. An excess, then, of aridity, light, and heat, is its distinguishing peculiarity. These influences are all at their maximum in Arabia, which is in every way its true heart and centre; and, in particular, the seed-bed and nursery of the race best adapted to the region, and which, at last, flooded the whole of it with its blood, its customs, and its laws. These are all thoroughly indigenous, and racy of the soil—as much its own proper product and fruit as the date is of the palm, or the palm itself of the region in which it is found.

But of the woman of this region. It is an obvious result of the aridity of the air, its almost constant heat, and of the floods of light with which everything living is ceaselessly bathed, and stimulated, that she is, in comparison with the woman of Europe, forced into precocious development, and maturity, and consequently, which is the main point, and, indeed, the governing element in the matter, into premature decline and decay. To signalize one particular that is external and visible, this climate appears to expand, to dry, to wither, to wrinkle the skin with a rapidity, and to a degree, unknown in our more humid and temperate regions. A woman, under these trying influences, is soon old. Between nine and ten is the age of womanhood. Marriage even often takes place at this age, or soon after. She is quite at her best at fifteen; decay is visible at twenty; there are signs of age at twenty-five.