signifi cant factor in the survival and resilience of most an-
cient craft s.
Aristocratic families had slaves as members. In most
cases, these slaves were bought and integrated into the fam-
ily for the purpose of agricultural production. Th eoretically,
slave owners had the power to kill or sacrifi ce them to the
gods. A female slave could be made a wife of her master, mak-
ing the slave and her off spring free.
EGYPT
BY KELLY-ANNE DIAMOND REED
Ancient Egyptian society was structured around the family
unit. Th e purpose of marriage was procreation and maintain-
ing the family. Egyptian wisdom literature, or texts that con-
tain instructions or philosophical dialogue, regularly speaks
of a man prospering, establishing a house, fi nding a wife, and
having children as ideal. In the Pharaonic Period marriage
is sparsely documented, with no mention of any formal cer-
emony that recognized marriage. It is clear, though, that the
idea of a household permeated society and that the woman
entered into the household of the man. From this point on,
the man and woman lived together. Very few texts testify to
the idea of “giving a wife” in marriage, so a man may have
found a wife in a variety of ways.
Among royalty diplomatic marriages took place. Th is ar-
rangement either created an alliance between two separate
kingdoms or indicated submission on the part of the ruler
who provided the daughter. Likewise, father-daughter and
brother-sister marriages were common within the royal fam-
ily as a way of preserving the bloodline and maintaining po-
litical power.
Evidence is more common for divorce than it is for mar-
riage. Marriage contracts, which concentrated on the prop-
erty rights of each partner but did not, despite their name,
comment on the ceremony of marriage, specifi ed grounds for
divorce. Th ese grounds included the wife’s infi delity or infer-
tility, the man’s dislike of the wife, or his desire to marry an-
other woman. It is known that around 500 b.c.e. a wife could
initiate a divorce, possibly on the grounds of her husband’s
infi delity. It is not known whether the Egyptians knew the
diff erence between impotence and infertility in men. Regard-
less, women were always blamed for the inability to conceive
a child. Both men and women were able to remarry aft er a
divorce.
Men belonging to the elite class, including royalty, could
take more than one wife if they could aff ord to do so and if
the wives could contribute to the household. Because most
women could, by working either in the fi elds or with textiles,
it may have been more profi table to have more than one wife.Papyrus marriage contract between the priest Pagosh and Teteimhotep, from Assiut, Egypt, Ptolemaic Period, 172 b.c.e. (© Th e Trustees of the
British Museum)
family: Egypt 449