Archaeologies of Gender and Violence by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Archaeology
ISBN: 9781785706899
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2017-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Violence against women in Graeco-Roman Egypt: the contribution of Demotic documents

Christine Hue-Arcé

Introduction

Among the prejudices about ancient Egypt in the collective psyche, one is to see Egyptians as a violent people, mainly because of Juvenal, who depicted scenes of cannibalism in his fifteenth Satire (Juv., Satires XV, 75–92) (on the idea of a violent Egypt as an ideological construct of the Roman Empire relayed by Roman authors, see Bryen 2013, 26–50). Yet, when Egyptian women are addressed, people tend to see them as enjoying idyllic living conditions, almost as great as those of modern Western women: this idea mainly stems from the reversal of the behaviours traditionally attributed to men and women, presented in the second book of Herodotus’ Histories (Her., Histories II, 35–36). Egyptian written, archaeological and iconographical source material provides evidence quite different from these two contradictory visions of ancient Egypt. Violence was present in the Nile Valley, but not to the extent that Juvenal seemed to imply. However, women of Egypt had to deal with it during the whole Egyptian history, as the source material shows. From the Old Kingdom (see for example the servant beaten by her mistress in the final part of P. Westcar, written during the Middle Kingdom, but situated during the reign of the Old Kingdom king Cheops; see Bagnato 2006, 80–83, and Parra Ortiz 2009, 142) to Late Antiquity (see e.g. Wilfong 2002, 42–43), one can see Egyptian women dealing with violence, in the texts as well as in the iconography. Thus, the life of women in the Nile Valley was not as idyllic as some rare and high status cases may leave us believing (Broze 1999).

In this chapter, I will focus on interpersonal violence: that is, violence occurring in the setting of social interactions, in daily life (Riess 2012, 3–4). It excludes sorts of violence seen as legitimate, as military or punitive violence. Violence will be understood in its restricted meaning of “the deliberate exercise of physical force against a person” (OED Online 2014).

The question I want to address here is whether the sort of violence that was directed against women was different from that directed against men. This phenomenon is particularly interesting to study during the Graeco-Roman period, when Egypt was first under the rule of the Graeco-Macedonian dynasty of the Ptolemies, and then became a province of the Roman Empire (c. 4th century BC–3rd century AD).

For this epoch, there is great material diversity, including a few Demotic documents and a considerable body of Greek texts. From the Ptolemaic period onwards, administrative documents were written in Greek. However, a certain amount of non-literary texts (legal documents, letters, oaths) from the 3rd and 2nd century BC, as well as literary texts from the 5th century BC to the 2nd century AD, were written in the cursive writing of the Egyptian vernacular language, the Demotic.

During the last twenty-five years, the evidence from Greek documents for violence in Graeco-Roman Egypt has been well studied by papyrologists; some researchers have focused on either Ptolemaic

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