When we turn to the second great civilisation, whose history we can trace to nearly 5,000 years before Christ, we find that neither was the rise so high, nor the fall so low. Somewhere before 4500 B.C. we get our first glimpse of the pioneers of civilisation on the Babylonian plain. A strange people, with language and ways more akin to Chinese or Turks than to the surrounding Semites, descends into the valley, and founds the cities that went before Babylon and Nineveh. It is useless to inquire into the position of woman among these Sumerians or Akkadians. By 4500 B.C. the Semites from the Syrian highlands (some say from Arabia) mingle with them, and a mixed civilisation rises. Many authorities think the older race had the maternal type of family, and that the Semites modified the woman’s position.
However that may be, woman enjoyed an independence in ancient Assyria only second to that of the Egyptian and Ethiopian women. The wife of the worker had the same busy round of labour, the same freedom to roam the streets unveiled for her purchases of fish and vegetables. In the law-courts men and women were, as in Egypt, on a perfectly equal footing. The recently discovered Hammurabi Code (dating back to more than 2000 B.C.) contains many remarkable provisions, in the most striking moral contrast to the Hebrew code. There are whole pages regulating the relations of men and women with a general sense of justice that has no parallel in legislation until the most recent times—if even now.
There was not, however, the perfect social equality of Egypt, and as we pass to the higher classes we get indications of male domination. The woman of the lower-middle class had an excellent position. While her few slaves attended to the work in the rooms that opened on the central court, she chatted from the flat roof with her neighbour on the adjoining roof, and she moved freely about in the heavy embroidered garments that the Assyrians wore. She had brought a dowry to her husband, and kept control of it or increased it, with perfect freedom to trade. In the imperishable clay tablets that still recall the business-world of Babylon and Nineveh we find married women very commonly interested in trade or industry. The wealthier women, with large dowries, should, on the face of the matter, have great independence, but it seems that some restraint was imposed on them. They spent most of their time in the elaborate luxury of their houses, and, if they ventured out, it was only with the accompaniment of a troop of slaves and eunuchs. Ladies of higher rank were even more restricted, and the queens never went out.
We find, then, in ancient Mesopotamia that woman generally had no sex disabilities. In some clauses relating to divorce and unfaithfulness we find the inevitable advantage of the male, but in practice the woman had little to complain of. As in Egypt, the political system was a sacred and absolute monarchy, so that neither men nor women had any control, or any idea of aspiring to it. Queens could occupy the throne. Semiramis is probably a mythic personage; but a Babylonian princess, Sammuramat, ruled at Nineveh (whose king she had married) about 800 B.C. with great success. Once more, however, this was exceptional and vicarious. Political power was in the hands of men—the king and his council of nobles; and over all the community again were the castes of warriors and priests, though the latter body could be penetrated by women to some extent, owing to the immense popularity of the goddess Ishtar.[4]
To sum up, therefore, in regard to Egypt and Assyria, we must say that they were civilisations in which no one can with propriety talk of the “subordination of women”; yet they were two of the most powerful, and certainly two of the most enduring, empires the world has ever seen. We may take Maspéro’s statement that in Assyria “woman was equal, or nearly equal, to man”; in Egypt she was even nearer to perfect equality. There was no struggle of the sexes in Assyria; and the remarkably good legal position, commercial activity, and general independence of the women “in no way affected the womanly character of their duties,” as Dr. Reich is forced to admit. Assyria did not mount to greatness by the subordination of woman, nor did it lose its greatness by, or during, any revolt of its women. Egypt, also, grew to greatness without any shade of subordination of woman; and, although in this case the curtain falls on a discontented and embittered womankind, it was because the men positively robbed them of their 5,000-year-old rights. If there were any logic in the fallacy of the anti-feminist historians, we should have to say in this case that the equality of woman was the price of Egypt’s empire, and the destruction of that equality the cause of its downfall; but we may leave fallacies to those with a poorer case.
Egypt and Assyria were exceptional in that they did not live long enough to hear and consider the cry of democracy. The power remained to the end in the hands of a heaven-sent king. They fall into line with my general statement that in all early civilisations the power is in the hands of men. But as they never passed the stage of absolute monarchy, and no struggle in the least resembling the modern contest ever set in, we must go on to later empires for the second phase of woman’s political evolution.
CHAPTER IV.
WOMAN IN ANCIENT GREECE
It is not necessary, and it would be much more difficult, to make a minute inquiry into the other civilisations that sprang up, before the Christian era, in that remarkable tract of Asia that lies between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Their lesser power and shorter life have left them in the shade of the greatness of Egypt and Assyria. One only of them was destined, in an indirect way, to have a momentous influence on woman’s position in civilisation; but it will be convenient to notice the Jews when their ideas are embodied in Christianity and begin to mould Europe. There was a striking lack of uniformity in the various tribes that were struggling upward in that western offshoot of Asia. The Phenicians are (somewhat precariously) linked with the Egyptians, but do not seem to have granted their women anything like the same independence. The Sumerians (or oldest Babylonians) are connected with the Mongols, yet gave woman an excellent position. The Jews were Semites, like the later Babylonians, yet began an ominous tradition of contempt for woman.
Only one of these West-Asiatic civilisations is known to us with any fulness; but this also was monarchical, and neither men nor women (save the privileged few) had any political power. Ancient Persia was the fourth world-power to issue from the chaos of tribes and build on the ruins of its predecessors. If we trust the Greek writers, the position of woman in Persia varied very considerably. It is suggested that she was oppressed in the western parts, where the religion of Zoroaster had less influence, and respected in the eastern. The poorer women had the liberty that their poverty generally entails, but the women of the wealthier had enclosed chambers and guarding eunuchs. The monarchs and princes had large harems, and their women at times won the irregular and blood-stained power that the system often gives them. The Persian sacred book, the Avesta, contains the best feeling of the country. A man must have the woman’s consent to marriage, must respect her after marriage, and must only in an exceptional case take a second wife; but her duty is to obey, and she is treated with the usual unfairness in regard to divorce and misconduct.
The short sway of Persia, however, soon fell before invaders from Europe, who bring us to the interesting story of woman’s position in Greece. Here we at once enter an atmosphere much nearer to our own than that of the older civilisations, and the tendency to see parallels and to draw morals becomes very strong. With the general statement that woman was emphatically subordinated to man in the chief centre of Greek civilisation, at Athens, and that there arose in time a contest of feminists and anti-feminists to which we may liken our familiar struggle, all are now familiar. But we must trace the evolution of woman’s position with some care, if we are to understand it aright.