“Beloved of God is obedience; disobedience is hated by God.”
The later injunction of Ecclesiastes, ix., 9, is found in the 18th rubric:
“If you are wise take good care of your house; love your wife and cherish her.”[150]
The husband and wife are frequently represented together at this time, and their attitude toward one another is most affectionate. In the group of M’Ayptah we see the Priest of Ptah in what to our modern understanding is a real family group, not unlike those the photographer of the congested districts in large cities is frequently called on to perpetuate. On the left of the Priest is his wife, Ha’tshepest, while on his right is his grown-up daughter. Two smaller figures represent a second daughter and the grandson of M’Ayptah.[151] The prominence of women here in relations so affectionate is unlike anything that we find in other ancient nations, and argues the presence of a spirit different from that of most nations at the same stage of culture.
In the time of the Old Kingdom (from the Third to the Sixth Dynasty), a man had but one wife, who was the mother of his heirs, was in every respect his equal, and shared authority with the father over the children. The natural line of inheritance was through the eldest daughter, and the closest ties were through the mother.[152]
In the Adventures of Sanehat, a story written apparently at the time of Amenemhat I., the founder of the Twelfth Dynasty, Sanehat’s description of his reception in the court of the king, when the royal children were brought forth to join in the general celebration, would also indicate that there was no desire to show any preference to either sex.[153]
That human sacrifice lasted up to the Eleventh Dynasty[154] is the belief of Messrs. King and Hall, who point to the excavations at Thebes, in the precinct of the funerary temple of Nebhapet-Ra-Mentuhetep and about the central pyramid which commemorated his memory. There were buried a number of ladies of his harim, who were without doubt killed and buried at the same time, in order that they might accompany their royal master to his new abiding place. With each of these ladies there was buried a little waxen human figure placed in a little coffin, the image being intended to take the place of the slave of the lady of the harim. As the ladies were not royal, real slaves were not killed for them, which shows that the idea of sacrifice even then had contracted until it was restricted to personages of the highest rank.
According to Porphyry, who quotes a work of Manetheo on Antiquity and Piety,[155] the law permitting or ordering the sacrifice of men was repealed by Amosis. Amosis, it is said, ordered that waxen images be substituted. The excavators have found not only the wax images but those of later days, when wood and glazed faience as well as stone were used, the growing humanity of the age seeking in this way to progress from the primitive indifference to the death of others.[156]
Nowhere is there any evidence that among the Egyptians of the Old, and Middle or New period (that is from the Fourth Dynasty up to the Twentieth, or from about 2800 to 110 B. C.), children were ill-treated or suffered from any of the usual methods of getting rid of surplus progeny. It is true that the monuments are more given to warlike exploits than to revelations of social manners, but the conditions in early Egypt all seem to point to the fact that, living in a land of plenty, they had early passed beyond the stage when the life of the child was the first sacrifice to the god of necessity.
In this connection it must be said that the only direct evidence we have from the ancients is that of Diodorus Siculus, a contemporary of Cæsar, who visited Egypt in the course of his thirty years’ preparation for his historical work. In what he says of the punishment of those who killed their children, he is citing the ancient Egyptians before they came under the influence of the Greeks and Romans: