Women in the Ancient World: The History of the Lives and Social Roles of Women in Antiquity

From the unification of the Two Lands around 3100 B.C. to the death of Cleopatra in 30 B.C., more than 3,000 years elapsed, and across that immense span the Egyptians wrote, painted, carved, and buried more about themselves than any other early people. A great deal of what they left behind concerns women. Wives appear beside their husbands on tomb walls. Mothers receive offerings from their sons. Daughters inherit estates. Queens rule. Widows go to court. Goddesses preside over the dead. The Egyptian woman is, by the standards of the ancient world, unusually visible, and the modern reader who looks for her finds a great deal to see. What that record shows has surprised observers for thousands of years, including some of the ancient writers themselves.  That a woman should stand at the very beginning of written literature is one of the more striking facts about ancient Mesopotamia, because the same civilization that produced the first named author also produced, more than 1,000 years later, a body of law that required respectable women to veil their faces in the street and ordered a slave woman’s ears cut off if she dared to do the same. Between Enheduanna and the veil lies the whole difficult history of women in Mesopotamia, a history not of steady freedom or steady oppression but of long, uneven change. Roman wives appeared wholly dependent on the surface. They lived in their husbands’ houses, bore children, and the tombstones erected for them usually praised their chastity, piety, and skill at spinning wool. However, Roman women were also public figures in ways the wives of other ancient Mediterranean cultures were not. They walked the streets of her city without a veil, went to the dinner parties hosted by the men, and could own property in their own name. Roman women could divorce their husbands as easily as they could divorce their wives, and at some points in Rome’s vast history, women ran estates worth more than the GDP of some small modern countries.