most ancient nation was kind to children—economic pressure brought no special cruelty—picture of the proletariat—abjurations of the oldest book in the world—egyptians as seen by diodorus siculus—degenerating effect of greek supremacy.
pleistocene man wandered from the indo-malaysia region into the northern part of africa, and there, in the nile valley, the egyptian hamites, as a truly autochthonous race, were evolved.
in a climate particularly favourable, great progress was made by these aboriginal people, especially in the new stone age, which was of unusually long duration, as can be seen from the beautiful flint knives plated with gold on which are carved animal figures.145 that the actual beginnings of egyptian culture are twice as long as the historic period is the statement of keane, and oppert claims that there are indications of a thoroughly established social and political organization as far back as 11,500 years b. c.
isis in the papyrus swamps, suckling horus
(reproduced from “the gods of the egyptians, or studies in egyptian mythology”)
it is therefore not surprising that we find among 107the egyptians, just as we find among the sumerians and the akkadians, who were contemporaneous in civilization about four and five thousand years before christ, that the attitude toward children is settled, and apparently in the child’s favour; for aside from occasional sacrificial offerings in which the child is on a par at least with the slave or the servant about to be sacrificed, there is no evidence of the endeavour to do away with the children on the scale that we find in ancient greece and rome and later in india and china.
had there been, however, less positive division of castes in egypt, the infants of the higher class would not have been as well treated. the lives of the military and priestly castes were almost sacred146; it was on them that the king relied for support, and the rest of the population, whether nominally free or slave, were foreordained to a life of incessant toil. maspero quotes from the sellier papyrus, a satiric poem, which goes to show the conditions in the earliest time among these workmen whose lives of hardship were only varied by the irregular visits of the tax-gatherers. these visits, though dreaded, were never prepared for and were always the occasions of several days of protestations, threats, beating, cries of pain from the tax-payers, lamentations from the women and children, the gathering up of the tax, the departure of the tax-collectors and then the calm with the resumption of labour until the next visit of the collectors.
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“i have never seen a blacksmith on an embassy,” so runs the complaint of the proletariat 3000 years before christ,—“nor a smelter sent on a mission—but what i have seen is the metal worker at his toil,—at the mouth of the furnace of his forge,—his fingers as rugged as the crocodile, and stinking more than fish-spawn. the artisan of any kind who handles the chisel, does not employ so much movement as he who handles the hoe; but for him his fields are the timber, his business is the metal, and at night when the other is free,—he, he works with his hands over and above what he has already done, for at night, he works at home by the lamp. the stone-cutter who seeks his living by working in all kinds of durable stone, when at last he has earned something, and his two arms are worn out, he stops; but if at sunrise he remain sitting, his legs are tied to his back. the barber who shaves until the evening, when he falls to and eats, it is without sitting down—while running from street to street to seek custom; if he is constant (at work) his two arms fill his belly, as the bee eats in proportion to its toil. shall i tell thee of the mason—how he endures misery? exposed to all the winds—while he builds without any garment but a belt—and while the bunch of lotus-flowers (which is fixed) on the (completed) houses—is still far out of his reach—his two arms are worn out with work; his provisions are placed higgledy piggledy amongst his refuse, he consumes himself, for he has no other bread than his fingers,109 and he becomes wearied all at once. he is much and dreadfully exhausted—for there is (always) a block (to be dragged) in this or that building, a block of ten cubits by six,—there is (always) a block (to be dragged) in this or that month (as far as the) scaffolding poles (to which is fixed) the bunch of lotus-flowers on the (completed) houses. when the work is quite finished, if he has bread, he returns home, and his children have been beaten unmercifully (during his absence). the weaver within doors is worse off there than a woman; squatting, his knees against his chest,—he does not breathe. if during the day he slackens weaving, he is bound fast to the lotuses of the lake; and it is by giving bread to the doorkeeper, that the latter permits him to see the light. the dyer, his fingers reeking—and their smell is that of fish-spawn;—his two eyes are oppressed with fatigue, his hand does not stop,—and, as he spends his time in cutting out rags—he has a hatred of garments. the shoemaker is very unfortunate; he moans ceaselessly, his health is the health of the spawning fish, and he gnaws the leather. the baker makes dough, subjects the loaves to the fire; while his head is inside the oven, his son holds him by the legs; if he slips from the hands of his son, he falls there into the flames.”147
the matriarchal tendencies of the egyptian government also account for the fact that children,110 as a rule, were not only allowed to live but were better treated than they were among other peoples. even the first egyptians, although semi-savages like those inhabiting africa and america, were different in their attitude toward women to such an extent that the greeks were led into believing that in egypt the woman was supreme. the husband entered the house of the wife instead of the wife entering his148 and this led to the children recognizing the parental relation through the mother alone.
to this matriarchal tendency may also be attributed the activity of maskonit, the god who appeared at the child’s cradle at the very moment of its birth, and raninit, who gave him his name and saw that he was properly nursed. with two such deities in the list of gods, obviously the creations of women and hardly those of semi-savage men, it was evident that the women were using their best supernatural means to protect childhood. significant, too, may be the fact that these protecting deities were goddesses, for, as may be seen from the story of the ill-fated prince,149—there was always a chance that either the crocodile, the serpent, or the dog, might get the infant. in the possibility of death by either of the three, there was the memory of days when mothers were either less careful or had not much authority.
group of m’ayptah, the priest of ptah, with his family
(reproduced from “life in ancient egypt”)
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such knowledge as we have of the kings of the fifth dynasty indicates that they were builders, but it was during this dynasty, in the reign of tetka-ra (about 3366 b. c.), that what has been described as the oldest book in the world, the precepts of ptah-hotep, was written. in this remarkable document the first care of the author after a stirring picture of old age, for it is evident that ptah-hotep wrote in his old age, is to enjoin those who read, that by following in the ways of the fathers, the children will prosper. all through there are, as m. chabas pointed out, evidences that it furnished the basis for many of the later injunctions of the hebrews in regard to filial obedience:
“bring up your son in obedience.”
“the son who receives the word of his father will live to be old because of it.”
“beloved of god is obedience; disobedience is hated by god.”
the later injunction of ecclesiastes, ix., 9, is found in the 18th rubric:
“if you are wise take good care of your house; love your wife and cherish her.”150
the husband and wife are frequently represented together at this time, and their attitude toward one another is most affectionate. in the group of m’ayptah we see the priest of ptah in what to our modern understanding is a real family group, not unlike those the photographer of the congested112 districts in large cities is frequently called on to perpetuate. on the left of the priest is his wife, ha’tshepest, while on his right is his grown-up daughter. two smaller figures represent a second daughter and the grandson of m’ayptah.151 the prominence of women here in relations so affectionate is unlike anything that we find in other ancient nations, and argues the presence of a spirit different from that of most nations at the same stage of culture.
in the time of the old kingdom (from the third to the sixth dynasty), a man had but one wife, who was the mother of his heirs, was in every respect his equal, and shared authority with the father over the children. the natural line of inheritance was through the eldest daughter, and the closest ties were through the mother.152
in the adventures of sanehat, a story written apparently at the time of amenemhat i., the founder of the twelfth dynasty, sanehat’s description of his reception in the court of the king, when the royal children were brought forth to join in the general celebration, would also indicate that there was no desire to show any preference to either sex.153
that human sacrifice lasted up to the eleventh dynasty154 is the belief of messrs. king and hall,113 who point to the excavations at thebes, in the precinct of the funerary temple of nebhapet-ra-mentuhetep and about the central pyramid which commemorated his memory. there were buried a number of ladies of his harim, who were without doubt killed and buried at the same time, in order that they might accompany their royal master to his new abiding place. with each of these ladies there was buried a little waxen human figure placed in a little coffin, the image being intended to take the place of the slave of the lady of the harim. as the ladies were not royal, real slaves were not killed for them, which shows that the idea of sacrifice even then had contracted until it was restricted to personages of the highest rank.
according to porphyry, who quotes a work of manetheo on antiquity and piety,155 the law permitting or ordering the sacrifice of men was repealed by amosis. amosis, it is said, ordered that waxen images be substituted. the excavators have found not only the wax images but those of later days, when wood and glazed faience as well as stone were used, the growing humanity of the age seeking in this way to progress from the primitive indifference to the death of others.156
nowhere is there any evidence that among the egyptians of the old, and middle or new period (that is from the fourth dynasty up to the114 twentieth, or from about 2800 to 110 b. c.), children were ill-treated or suffered from any of the usual methods of getting rid of surplus progeny. it is true that the monuments are more given to warlike exploits than to revelations of social manners, but the conditions in early egypt all seem to point to the fact that, living in a land of plenty, they had early passed beyond the stage when the life of the child was the first sacrifice to the god of necessity.
in this connection it must be said that the only direct evidence we have from the ancients is that of diodorus siculus, a contemporary of c?sar, who visited egypt in the course of his thirty years’ preparation for his historical work. in what he says of the punishment of those who killed their children, he is citing the ancient egyptians before they came under the influence of the greeks and romans:
“parents that killed their children, were not to die, but were forced for three days and nights together to hug them continually in their arms, and had a guard all the while over them, to see they did it; for they thought it not fit that they should die, who gave life to their children; but rather that men should be deterred from such attempts by a punishment that seemed attended with sorrow and repentance.”157
in another section of his work, diodorus is115 evidently speaking of the egyptians of his own day:
“the egyptian priests only marry one wife, but all others may have as many wives as they please; and all are bound to bring up as many children as they can, for the further increase of the inhabitants, which tends much to the well-being either of a city or country. none of the sons are ever reputed bastards, though they be begotten of a bond maid, for they conceive that the father only begets the child, and that the mother contributes nothing but place and nourishment. and they call trees that bear fruit, males, and those that bear none, females; contrary to what the grecians name them. they bring up their children with very little cost and are sparing, upon that account, to admiration: for they provide them broth, made of any mean and poor stuff that may be easily had; and feed those that are of strength able to eat it, with the pith of bulrushes, roasted in the embers, and with roots and herbs got in the fens; sometimes raw, and sometimes boiled; and at other times fried and boiled. most of their children go barefooted and naked, the climate is so warm and temperate. it costs not the parent to bring up a child to man’s estate, above twenty drachmas; which is the chief reason why egypt is so populous, and excels all other places in magnificent structures. the priests instruct the youth in two sorts of learning; that which they call sacred, and other, which is more116 common and ordinary. in arithmetic and geometry, they keep them a long time: for in this regard, as the river every year changes the face of the soil, the neighbouring inhabitants are at great difference among themselves concerning the boundaries of their land, which cannot be easily known but by the help of geometry.”158
strabo also speaks of the egyptians as exceptions, when he refers to the parents’ power of life and death over children: and others assert that while they were cruel toward the new-born of the hebrews, they were kind toward their own.159
the early development of the belief in a hereafter, as it showed itself in the unusual care of the body of the deceased, also affected, without doubt, the attitude of the egyptians toward their own progeny, if it did not affect it toward that of others; in dealing with the primitive and early peoples we must always realize that we can understand them only by the way in which they dealt with their own. their kindness to their own, argued an advanced civilization—to test their degree of civilization by the attitude they took to the children of slaves or the children of servants, is to ask more of them than we can ask of our contemporaries.
in the desire to look after the future life, the egyptians were exceptional, as their embalming showed. they lived in a salubrious country, they boasted that they were “the healthiest of mor117tals,”160 and so great was their horror that any one should mutilate the human form, that the paraschistes παρασχιστ?? who made the necessary incisions in the dead when a body was to be embalmed, became an object of execration as soon as his job was over. according to diodorus siculus, he was always assaulted by his own assistants, stones being thrown at him with such violence that he had to take to his heels in order to escape with his life.161
perhaps it is a far cry, but it seems as though a people who made such preparations as the egyptians did for the dead, would have been chary of causing the death of those who had sprung from their own loins. for the care of the dead was not confined to the noble and the wealthy alone—the lower classes were also affected by the desire for a proper kind of funeral, to the extent that enterprising people procured an old empty tomb, enlarged it, and let places out in it. hither then, came the fisherman, the peasant, and the dancing girl—in death they were the equal of the king, for they were buried with ceremony, their bodies were placed where the tomb equipment might be by them—and thus with the king, the noble, and the wealthy, they waited the time that was to be.162
among such a people it is hard to think that the death of even a child was treated lightly.163
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of the egyptians after the conquest of alexander we must write as of the greeks; and in the matter of children it is important to note that a recently discovered papyrus, written in greek in the year 1 b. c., shows how completely the foreign point of view had been absorbed in a land in which four thousand years yielded up not a single evidence of the assassination of children.
the papyrus is a letter from illarion, whose home is at oxyrhynchus, and who evidently has gone to alexandria with other workmen. he has apparently not sent his wife many messages of affection despite the fact that she is about to have a child. when the other workmen are going to return home, he plans to stay in alexandria, but he promises to send home some of his wages. the part of the letter that is most interesting to us is his injunction that if the child that is expected should turn out to be a female, it should be cast out. in the salutation, illarion refers to his wife as his sister, marriages between brother and sister having been common in egypt, and the term being one of endearment. the letter follows:
“illarion to alis his sister, many greetings, and to mother berous and apollonarion. know that i am still even now at alexandria. i urge and entreat you to be careful of the child, and if i receive wages soon i will send it to you. when you bear offspring, if it is a male let it be, if a female expose it.
letter of illarion, an egyptian labourer, to alis, his wife. papyrus written at alexandria, 17 june, 1 b. c.
(reproduced from “light from the ancient east”)
“you told aphrodisisa, ‘do not forget me.’
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how can i forget you? i urge you therefore not to worry.
“twenty-ninth year of c?sar, paune 23 (addressed). ‘deliver from illarion to alis.’”
