Predecessors of Cleopatra

by Leigh North

After passing through the servants’ offices one came to the store-rooms, the great dining hall, the sleeping rooms, and the kitchens, and at the further end of a piece of ground two buildings, turned back to back, and separated by small gardens, were the women’s apartments, which often had shutters closed with valves to keep out the heat.

The lady is spoken of as “Mistress of the House,” or “Lady of the House,” and seemed to have full rule over it—there is even a story that her husband himself was bound to obey her indoors, but this is hardly likely.

They had low stools for tables, flat baskets for dinner plates, and pretty Syrian maidens were favorite slaves. Couches, chairs, stools and tables were of wood, bronze and silver, the feet were often of lions’ claws, and the top of the tables were upheld by figures of captives and slaves. The furniture was carved with serpents, lotus flowers and other designs, and the back of a couch or chair was sometimes a hawk with outspread wings, and the ends of the couch terminated in the head of a lion or other beast. Sometimes the couches were used for beds and made ornamental in the day time. The Egyptians had alabaster or wooden head rests, like the Japanese, though the manner of hair dressing did not seem to require it to the same extent. The ladies’ dressing tables were covered with boxes for ointment, bottles for cosmetics, perfumes, and oils, and they used small metal mirrors, often with the figure of the god Bes as a handle.

The costumes, adapted to the climate, were light, especially in the earlier times, and the chief part was of fine linen. Later there seems to have been more elaboration and heavier and richer materials used. Wigs protected the head of both male and female from the sun, as did the turbans and veils of other countries. The vulture, with outspread wings, emblem of the goddess Mut, formed part of the queen’s head-dress, as did the royal asp, raised in act to strike.

Thoth was the god of learning, called “the baboon with shining hair and amiable face,” the “letter writer for the gods.” Children and youth were expected to study and exhorted, even as far back as the time of King Pepys, “Give thy heart to learning and love her like a mother.” And there is also a touch of kinship with more modern times in the statement that the boy scholar be not allowed to oversleep and that children left school “shouting for joy.” Severity was sometimes used, as we read, “The youth has a back, he attends when it is beaten.” And again, “The ears of the young are placed in the back, and he hears when he is flogged.” Copy books of 1700 B. C. have been found, and we possess the school exercises of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties. Such examples in mental arithmetic as “There were seven men, each had seven cats, each cat had eaten seven mice, each mouse had eaten seven grains of barley. How much barley had been lost in this way?” etc., etc.

But neither were the pleasures and amusements of the little ones overlooked, and there have been preserved little wooden soldiers, in the dress of ancient times, dolls, balls and many other things that still delight the child of to-day; such as tops, boats, etc.

An olive branch was hung at the door on the birth of a boy and a strip of woolen cloth at that of a girl. If a new born babe cried “Ny!” it would live, but if it cried “Nibe!” it would die. Mothers nursed their children for three years, and upon daughters more than upon sons was laid the obligation of looking after their parents in old age. The royal children had also, when they were old enough, quarters of their own, where they were under the charge of a tutor who was called a nurse. Those of the higher orders, dressed like grown people, as in the present day the children of Holland are often the amusing reproductions, in miniature, of their parents. The children of the lower orders dispensed in great part, or entirely, with any sort of covering.

Women were mistresses in their own house, came and went freely and so much so that we have an amusing story that among the lower classes the husbands sometimes hid their wives’ shoes to keep them at home, and this before the days of female clubs! But in spite of her privileges child bearing and work soon aged this class of women.

Among the moral precepts of the Egyptians in a papyrus now in the Louvre is one that says, “Ill treat not thy wife, whose strength is less than thine. Be thou her protector,” showing that it was no slavish relation that was expected to exist between man and wife. And again in another place we have a father who exhorts his son to have regard for his mother. “It is God Himself who gave her to thee, and now that thou art grown up and hast a wife and house in thy turn, remember always thine helpless infancy and the care thy mother lavished upon thee, so that she may never have occasion to reproach thee, nor to raise her hands to heaven against thee, for God would fulfill her curse.”