Jacquelyn Williamson, Director of the Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology Minor at George Mason University, joins Cheddar Reveals to draw parallels between the SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and Ancient Egypt, and to explore why sex and abortions were destigmatized topics in Ancient Egyptian culture.


Cheddar Reveals

The Women of Ancient Egypt Were Ahead of Their Time

Welcome back to cheddar reveals, brought to you by curiosity stream. The issues of today aren't always exclusive to today. Last week, the Supreme Court struck a blow to women's rights in America. Do these modern trends reflect our deep and ancient past or are they unprecedented? Cheddar zone han Adobe recently sat down with Jacqueline Williamson, director of the Ancient History and Mediterranean archaeology minor at George Mason University to talk more, take a look. Ancient Egyptian queens. It's one of the things that we very frequently uh when we talk about ancient Egypt, we talk about the kings, but the ancient Egyptians wouldn't have understood that way of talking about their society. Uh The ancient Egyptian queen was a goddess, A manifested goddess in the same way that the Egyptian king was a manifested God. And according to Egyptian religion, without the queen, the king could not rule. He could not achieve his divine requirements of office and without the divine queen ship in partnership with divine male kingship. Uh the Egyptian nation itself would be thought to eternally suffer. So the queen was an essential part of the Egyptian society and again, was an embodied living deity and an essential part of their religion as well as their life. Understanding that is so fascinating. How about regular women? What roles did they play in Egyptian society? I beg your pardon? Allergies. Um So one of the exciting things that we see when we really start studying ancient Egypt is that we um start to see women who engaged in all aspects of society. We have women who and had a rank called the God's wife of the moon. The God's wife of the moon was in some time periods richer than the king and more powerful than the king and was actually a bigger and more important power player, not only domestically within Egypt itself, but also internationally as well. So, um, that's pretty exciting. But in addition, we also have women enjoining joining the priesthood and variety of different roles. We have women who also owned properties, started businesses had complete control of their own property. They could choose who inherited their money. They could choose who didn't they often. Um, if you were mean to her in life, she could choose to cut you out of her will. So she had complete control over her own economics. And so Egyptian women were a very active integrated and significant element of Egyptian society. Can you tell us a little bit about the reproductive rights and sexual lives of ancient Egyptian women and the society, the Egyptian society as a whole? Yeah, absolutely. Great questions. So, um, and of course this is especially significant today. Um, one of the things that's the most intriguing about ancient Egypt is the ancient Egyptian language had no word for virgin. Uh, this was not a valid idea to them. Uh, it didn't that a woman's sexual history was not significant in terms of her identity or her worth. Uh, and so much so that again, they didn't even have a word for it. So this in and of itself demonstrates the sort of, there were a very, what we might call sex positive society. Um, and as a result in medical texts, we have clearer evidence that the ancient Egyptian women had uncontested access to abortion and uh, controlled their own medical histories and were able to facilitate and take active role in their own health care as well. And we're not stigmatized for that at all. There is no indication that this was seen as a bad thing or anything else. It was just simply a part of life. I want to go back to what you just said, especially because of the scotus ruling that we're dealing with now. So ancient Egyptian society did not ban abortion back then. Is that what you just said? That's exactly what I just said. In fact, it was such a sort of, it was so okay, they don't talk about it in the same way that, you know, you and I wouldn't talk about, um, oh, I have a headache. I should take Tylenol for it. Uh, you know, it it just wasn't, you know, and of course abortion is so politicized and it's related to identity and all these other things. This was not, I'm not saying that they didn't consider it like having a headache, but you know, it was, it just wasn't an issue, it wasn't an issue our modern sort of interest in matters that is interesting and very different from the world we're living in now any other legal rights that we should know about that were different back then. There were so many and such a great question. Um women. Uh and of course we're one of the things also to remember about ancient Egypt which is one of the things that I find most exciting is that they were living breathing remarkable society who are one of the greatest powers of the ancient world for almost 3000 years. So when we put that in perspective, our modern world are A. D. Or C. E. World um we're just little babies comparison to what they experienced. And so every time period in ancient Egypt is different from the from another. And so we have excellent examples of women having different roles in society at different time periods and for different reasons. We have women for example who uh were war heroes in Egypt. There is a queen in the 17th dynasty who was buried with a variety of war um awards for helping her country through a period of um terrible war. While her husband was killed in battle, she was sort of in charge of the entire country and was given a lot of military valor for her rule. So that's pretty exciting, exciting, interesting. I can't get over everything. I'm learning from you last question, Jacqueline if modern ideas about gender sex roles don't come from Egypt. Where do they come from in this world that we're living in now? It's such a great question. And so we can also look back and say for example, the ancient Near East which was also more progressive, especially actually in terms of trans rights. So the ancient Near East actually had an additional class of individual that were not understood to be male or female. So we actually have not a binary system of gender identification, the Engineer East either. So a lot of what we think of as um normal is actually from my perspective as somebody studies the ancient world abnormal um where we really start to see this kind of marginalization of women, the control of women's lives. All of this frankly starts to happen in Greece and then it progresses through Rome. And uh so a lot of these Greco roman ideas then end up influencing the spread of Christianity, which of course really started to virgin in Rome under Constantine. And those ideas spread outwards so inherently what we're seeing are ideas that from my perspective are quite modern and they're very they're not we haven't held them for very long. These are not ideas that are permanent or right or even necessarily wrong. They are just simply the way that we as today have decided to live. And so if we decide to live this way, we can also decide to live not this way as well. Such a timely discussion, Jacquelyn Williamson, Director of the ancient history and mediterranean archaeology minor at George Mason University.