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The Fayum oasis is separated from the Nile Valley by a relatively thin ridge and contains a large lake, called Birket Karun, around which the life in the area has always rotated. In the 4th Dynasty Medium Pyramid of the Old Kingdom was constructed. During the Middle Kingdom 12th Dynasty, the region had the capital of Egypt at el-Lisht. The vicinity of the depression to the Nile Valley seems to have made possible an artificial regulation of the level of the lake, and large monuments were built around its shore. Lahun and Hawara, on the ridge dividing the Fayum from the Valley, were chosen for the construction of two pyramids of the Middle Kingdom, both of which are now in ruins. Other sites, such as the ancient Crocodopolis which was the cult center of the crocodile god Sobek , or Darb Gerze (the ancient Philadelphia) have revealed important archaeological evidence. The Roman cemetery north of Hawara yielded one of the most important archaeological findings of the area, the so-called Fayum Portraits. During the Ptolemaic and Roman periods the level of the lake was lower than in the past but still higher than today, as the remains of Dimeh reveal. This city, once a busy harbor on the northern shore of the lake, lies a few of kilometers off in the desert. Other interesting archaeological sites are the unusual Middle Kingdom temple at Qasr el-Sagha, the town of Medinet Maadi, with a Middle Kingdom temple later expanded by the Ptolemies, the Late Period town of Dionysius (today called Qasr Karun) and the large Roman Bath at Kom Aushim.
May I walk every day on the banks of the water, may my soul rest on the branches of the trees which I planted, may I refresh myself under the shadow of my sycamore. Egyptian tomb inscription, ca. 1400 BCE
I am the most beautiful tree in the garden And for all times, I shall remain. The beloved and her brother Stroll under my branches, Intoxicated from wines and spirits Steeped in oil and fragrant essences.
Free Egyptian citizens--both male and female--possessed two defining rights: they were free to travel and free to enter into contractual agreements. Although they enjoyed no other rights of modern societies, their right to make contracts permitted members of this group at least to own property and marry. Serfs and slaves were also permitted possessions, but they could not transfer them without a contract--only the free class could acquire and sell animals, property and buildings as they wished. Though most free people eked out a subsistence living, some accumulated wealth and grew into citizens of substance, and a few even earned high positions in government. Whether rich or poor, any free person had the right to the joys of marriage. Marriage was not a religious matter in Egypt--no ceremony involving a priest took place--but simply a social convention that required an agreement, which is to say a contract, negotiated by the suitor and the family of his prospective wife. The agreement involved an exchange of objects of value on both sides. The suitor offered a sum called the "virginity gift," when appropriate, to compensate the bride for what she would lose, indicating that in ancient times virginity was prized in female brides. The gift did not apply in the case of second marriages, of course, but a "gift to the bride" would be made even in that case. In return, the family of the bride-to-be offered a "gift in order to become a wife." In many cases, these two gifts were never delivered since the pair soon merged households. However, in the event of divorce, either party could later sue for the agreed gift. A third sum, called the "alimentation," consisted of a periodic subsidy from the bride's family to compensate for the additional expense of a second person in the household, and it was given with stipulations of how the wife must be treated in return. The remainder of the contract consisted of a kind of ancient prenuptial agreement, specifying what property belonged to the woman and what belonged to the man, as well as stating who would inherit what on the death of either party. In some cases a written contract was executed before witnesses, in others only a verbal agreement took place. Either satisfied the official requirement for marriage, although, human nature being what it is, a party to celebrate the happy event generally followed. The new husband and wife presided at this affair, rather than being the guests of either set of parents. After recovering from the merriment, the couple began married life with the presumption that their union would last until death. Of course life did not always work out so well; even in ancient times divorces, although not common, did occur. Since neither church nor state had joined the pair, no authorization was required for their separation. All that severing involved was living apart. Yet, given marriage's contractual obligations, divorce for most couples involved a legal declaration of the dissolution of the marriage, which freed them to marry again. The original marriage contract also contained stipulations about gifts and other matters. If a husband initiated a divorce, he forfeited the entire gift to the bride, or in some cases an amount double that gift. If the wife instituted a divorce, she returned half of the gift to the bride. Regardless of who began the proceedings, the husband was obliged to continue paying the wife's alimentary money, providing full financial support until she married again. Not without its modern counterparts, this clause certainly held some marriages together that otherwise would have dissolved. Other contracted sums were generally assigned to the children. The status of women in Egypt was incredibly advanced for the time. They held full equality under the law and could enter into contracts, own property and be brought to justice for crimes in exactly the same way as a man. They became second-class citizens in terms of jobs, however. Occupations were strictly gender linked, as they have been in most societies until recently. Men fought, ran the government and managed the farm; women cooked, sewed and managed the house. Little evidence indicates what percentage of the population consisted of free people. Although surely the numbers varied over time, a guess would put the percentage at something less than half of Egypt's people. The lowest rung of society was composed of slaves and serfs whose lives were completely controlled by other people. Slaves differed from serfs in that they could be individually bought and sold; serfs belonged to the land, hence changed masters only as the land changed hands. While neither group could enter into legal marriage, a contractual arrangement that involved inheritance rights on its dissolution, this fact carried more technical than practical significance. Since they owned little that could be assigned to survivors in any case, serfs and slaves could enjoy most aspects of marriage, such as cooperative living and raising children. Since marriage in ancient Egypt was a social rather than religious institution, their unions closely resembled "legal" marriages. As long as they were commanded to perform legal tasks, both serfs and slaves were expected to obey their masters without question or complaint. During every period of Egyptian history serfs far outnumbered slaves. Serfs originally comprised all the people of Egypt except for a tiny percentage of powerful elite that formed a hereditary caste. Since individuals remained serfs unless good changed their situation, only slowly did their high proportion decline. A serf could be elevated through the intervention of a master who, in recognition of a special talent or ability, might assign the person to a managerial position on an estate--serf status was tied to occupation as well as birth. Marriage, too, was a way out of serfdom. Since free persons could not marry serfs, union with a serf required that he or she first be freed. While one can imagine many parents looking askance at their child marrying a serf, others recognized the worth of a young serf as the mate for their child. In the early times of civilian armies, valor in war could also earn a serf his own land and freedom. Through one or another of these means, the percentage of serfs decreased over time, swelling the ranks of the free class until, by the height of the New Kingdom, serfs had probably declined to less than half of the population. Slavery did not exist in the early days of Egyptian civilization. (The pyramids were not built by the slave labor shown in film epics.) Slaves originally consisted only of foreigners captured in war and increased in number during the New Kingdom as Egypt accelerated successful campaigns to foreign lands. Because the caste was hereditary, its population grew as slaves taken in battle gave birth to children in Egypt. Apparently free Egyptians could also descend to this class because of debts or perhaps as legal punishment. Members of the slave class, who could be bought, sold and rented to others, formed the very bottom of the social scale.
Egyptians worked for food and goods rather than for money which was unknown until the Ptolemies introduced it during Egypt's final days. Since for most of Egypt's long history no currency existed for exchanging commodities at set values, essential goods were generally manufactured by the user or members of his immediate family: pots, for example, were produced by women in their homes. Commodities, such as bronze plow blades, which could not be made in the average home, were secured, not by purchase from a store, but by barter, which could be a complex procedure involving intricate negotiations. The man who made the plow blade might have enough food, pots and clothing from other barters, so something he desired would have to be bartered from a third party--a kilt exchanged for a stool, say; then the stool for a plow blade. An ancient record of one such transaction documents the trade of an ox for one fine tunic and two ordinary ones, plus ten sacks of grain and some necklace beads. Needless to say, such acquisitions occurred less frequently than today and only when motivated by strong need. In an attempt to introduce order to exchanges, items were conventionally valued at amounts of copper or, for more precious objects, silver. The main measure was a weight called a deben, which could be divided into ten qites. Exchange values varied over time, but by the Late Period, when ten copper debens equaled one of silver, 95 grams of silver per silver deben had become standard. These standards allowed Egyptians to assign a relative value to commodities. As a rough measure, a bushel of grain equaled one deben of copper. A small farm (perhaps an acre by our measure) could be purchased for two or three debens of silver, which approximated the cost of an ox as well. A slave cost a little more. A pot of honey, an Egyptian treat, was valued at one qite of silver. Because the average Egyptian owned no silver at all and little copper, such valuations served more to indicate which exchanges were fair than to effect a transfer. These standards enabled a farmer to appraise his neighbor's land as being worth about one ox, or from twenty to thirty bushels of grain. Since most work was motivated by a need for sustenance rather than a desire for acquisitions, it followed rhythms radically different from our own. For us each day of the week has a different character. For most Americans, Monday is the first day of work, Friday is the end of a work period and Saturday begins two days of nonwork activity. Most of us sleep later on weekends, dress differently and have more control over our time than during the previous five workdays. Life marches to these seven-step patterns, punctuated by recurring holidays that serve as bonus free days along with special periods of two weeks or more for vacations of our choosing. Nothing similar existed in ancient Egypt. Egyptians had no weekends. Most worked every day, with few exceptions. Special holy days of the year called for all the inhabitants of a given area to lay down their tools and gather at a local temple to watch a procession of idols, after which they feasted on bountiful free food supplied by the temple. The most festive of these holy days were Opet, when the idols of Mut and Khonsu traveled from Karnak Temple to Luxor Temple to celebrate their marriage; the Five Yearly Days, which celebrated the end of one year and hopes for a successful next year; and birthdays for each god of Egypt. For practical reasons, most of these holidays occurred when the Nile was in flood, making farming impossible in any case. During the rest of the year, one day followed another in much the same way. No regular day of rest existed until it was introduced much later by the Jews in Palestine and borrowed by the Christians. Indeed, names for individual days of the week did not exist in the language, nor did that seven-day grouping we call a week. The character of work periods was instead determined by what nature demanded--weeding, repairing canals, plowing or haresting. No calendar told a farmer how to schedule his time when he woke each morning. The year was divided into three seasons, marking nature's rhythms, each consisting of four thirty-day months. "Inundation" began the year around our September, when the Nile overflowed and flooded the farmland. "Emergence," which referred to the reappearance of the land from the receding water, was planting time, and was followed by "harvest." Each season called for work appropriate to environmental circumstances. During inundation, when the waterlogged land could not be worked, the farmer repaired his tools and house. Emergence began with reconstructing the canals that brought essential Nile water to the fields, after which came plowing, planting, then tending the crops as they grew. During harvest, farmers reaped and processed the crops before storage. Of course, three seasons of four thirty-day months added up to only 360 days, which left five days unaccounted for. This yearly five days provided Egyptians with the closest they ever got to a sustained holiday: no one worked during the long new year's celebration. Despite being nameless, each day was marked in calendars as representing specific theological events that occurred on that particular day. Thus, the first day of the second month of emergence was considered the day Ra had lifted up the sky, whereas the twenty-sixth day of the first month of inundation marked the time Sekhmet's ferocious eyes first caught sight of her human prey. These mythical events lent every day a quality, marking it as auspicious, if some fortunate event had occurred, menacing, if the contrary, or neutral. Egyptians took these matters seriously, planning important events to coincide with auspicious days and taking extra care on menacing ones (see, for example, the list of the days of the second month of the season of emergence with their lucky and unlucky characters). As to the intervals of a day, Egyptians invented the hour--the same twenty-four equal day divisions we use today. These intervals were measured either by marks down the side of a candle or by lines on a bowl that showed the water remaining after steady dripping. Although appointments could be set and kept by such devices, the average farmer needed no more indication of time than the position of the sun or the moon, and none of his countrymen understood divisions finer than an hour. The word for minute--let alone the ultra precision of a second-did not even exist in the language. Farmers, the vast majority of the population, repeated the same pattern year after year, but with greater regularity than elsewhere in the world where rainstorms, snow or swings of temperature made agriculture less predictable. Each time the Nile receded, Egyptian farmers returned to the fields to plow after having spent the previous month readying their tools. Plowing was relatively easy in the still-moist ground. If a farmer had cattle, two would pull while he leaned his weight on the plow to ensure deep furrows, while a son guided the team in a straight line; otherwise, he would enlist two men to take the place of the cattle. After the furrows were dug, the farmer followed with a mattock to break up the large clumps of dirt lifted by the plow. Then it was time for the women to scatter the seeds in their wicker baskets, slung by a cord over their shoulders, into the furrows. Later, encouraged by strewn grass or straw, a herd of sheep would be driven onto the land to bury the seed with their hooves, allowing it to germinate hidden from hungry birds and rodents. Next came a season of nurture to ensure bountiful crops. Dirt dikes and canals needed continual repair to assure a constant water flow to every young shoot. Farmers alternated work in their fields with regular stints at the Nile, raising bucket after bucket of river water up the bank to spill into the system of canals used by neighboring farms. The shadoof, a cantilevered pole, made this work easier than walking every bucket up the bank, but no less monotonous. When not participating in his community water chore, a farmer had weeds to clear, rats to fend off and birds to shoo--a reason the family cat often accompanied his master to work. Three months later, as soon as the grain ripened, local officials appeared to measure the field to set taxes. Only then did the whole family arrive to harvest the crop before it spoiled or was eaten by animals. Some cut the grain heads with a short sickle held in one hand while the other hand held the grain steady; others gathered the loose heads into piles, tied them with lengths of straw, then loaded them on donkeys for transport to the local threshing area. The long wheat stems were left standing in the field for later harvesting as straw for the livestock. At the threshing area, the whole community assembled to separate usable seeds from unusable stems and chaff. First oxen were driven round and round to break the seeds free while the men turned the mixture over to ensure every seed received a hoof. Afterward, the same pitchforks carried the straw away, leaving only the finer grain and its hulls (chaff) on the threshing floor. Using wooden scoops, the men lifted this mixture above their heads, letting it spill back to the floor so the wind could blow the lighter chaff away. In the end, only the seeds remained, and these were distributed to each family in proportion to its production. As the year closed, a short new year's hiatus signaled that it was time, once again, to start repairing the tools--and to begin another year just like the one before. Those who worked at jobs less controlled by nature followed rhythms set by their masters or by supply-and-demand principles. Government workers were allowed to rest every tenth day. Craftspeople worked according to demand. The largest group of workers after farmers, scribes included cadres of thousands of bureaucrats, private individuals who handled accounts and correspondence for large estates, and freelancers. Because no public school system existed, the average Egyptian could neither read nor write. The sons of scribes, higher officials and occasional precocious farm children attended local temples for instruction in letters. Except for separate classes convened for royal or otherwise socially prominent girls, all scholars were male. Each set out in the morning carrying a small basket of bread and beer from home and returned again in the late afternoon.
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