The Child in Human Progress

by George Henry Payne

“Parents that killed their children, were not to die, but were forced for three days and nights together to hug them continually in their arms, and had a guard all the while over them, to see they did it; for they thought it not fit that they should die, who gave life to their children; but rather that men should be deterred from such attempts by a punishment that seemed attended with sorrow and repentance.”[157]

In another section of his work, Diodorus is evidently speaking of the Egyptians of his own day:

“The Egyptian priests only marry one wife, but all others may have as many wives as they please; and all are bound to bring up as many children as they can, for the further increase of the inhabitants, which tends much to the well-being either of a city or country. None of the sons are ever reputed bastards, though they be begotten of a bond maid, for they conceive that the father only begets the child, and that the mother contributes nothing but place and nourishment. And they call trees that bear fruit, males, and those that bear none, females; contrary to what the Grecians name them. They bring up their children with very little cost and are sparing, upon that account, to admiration: for they provide them broth, made of any mean and poor stuff that may be easily had; and feed those that are of strength able to eat it, with the pith of bulrushes, roasted in the embers, and with roots and herbs got in the fens; sometimes raw, and sometimes boiled; and at other times fried and boiled. Most of their children go barefooted and naked, the climate is so warm and temperate. It costs not the parent to bring up a child to man’s estate, above twenty drachmas; which is the chief reason why Egypt is so populous, and excels all other places in magnificent structures. The priests instruct the youth in two sorts of learning; that which they call sacred, and other, which is more common and ordinary. In arithmetic and geometry, they keep them a long time: for in this regard, as the river every year changes the face of the soil, the neighbouring inhabitants are at great difference among themselves concerning the boundaries of their land, which cannot be easily known but by the help of geometry.”[158]

Strabo also speaks of the Egyptians as exceptions, when he refers to the parents’ power of life and death over children: and others assert that while they were cruel toward the new-born of the Hebrews, they were kind toward their own.[159]

The early development of the belief in a hereafter, as it showed itself in the unusual care of the body of the deceased, also affected, without doubt, the attitude of the Egyptians toward their own progeny, if it did not affect it toward that of others; in dealing with the primitive and early peoples we must always realize that we can understand them only by the way in which they dealt with their own. Their kindness to their own, argued an advanced civilization—to test their degree of civilization by the attitude they took to the children of slaves or the children of servants, is to ask more of them than we can ask of our contemporaries.

In the desire to look after the future life, the Egyptians were exceptional, as their embalming showed. They lived in a salubrious country, they boasted that they were “the healthiest of mortals,”[160] and so great was their horror that any one should mutilate the human form, that the paraschistes παρασχιστἡς who made the necessary incisions in the dead when a body was to be embalmed, became an object of execration as soon as his job was over. According to Diodorus Siculus, he was always assaulted by his own assistants, stones being thrown at him with such violence that he had to take to his heels in order to escape with his life.[161]

Perhaps it is a far cry, but it seems as though a people who made such preparations as the Egyptians did for the dead, would have been chary of causing the death of those who had sprung from their own loins. For the care of the dead was not confined to the noble and the wealthy alone—the lower classes were also affected by the desire for a proper kind of funeral, to the extent that enterprising people procured an old empty tomb, enlarged it, and let places out in it. Hither then, came the fisherman, the peasant, and the dancing girl—in death they were the equal of the king, for they were buried with ceremony, their bodies were placed where the tomb equipment might be by them—and thus with the king, the noble, and the wealthy, they waited the time that was to be.[162]

Among such a people it is hard to think that the death of even a child was treated lightly.[163]

Of the Egyptians after the conquest of Alexander we must write as of the Greeks; and in the matter of children it is important to note that a recently discovered papyrus, written in Greek in the year 1 B. C., shows how completely the foreign point of view had been absorbed in a land in which four thousand years yielded up not a single evidence of the assassination of children.