From the unification of the Two Lands around 3100 B.C. to the death of Cleopatra in 30 B.C., more than three thousand 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. When Herodotus traveled in Egypt in the middle of the 5th century B.C., he came from a world in which respectable women stayed indoors, did not transact business, and were represented in law by a male guardian, so what he found along the Nile struck him as a near-total inversion of the natural order. Egyptian women, he reported, went out to the markets and carried on trade while their husbands sat at home and wove, and they carried loads on their shoulders while men carried them on their heads. The reversal was so complete, in his telling, that it became one of the organizing themes of his entire account of Egypt.
Herodotus was not a careful witness in every respect, and some of what he wrote about Egypt was wrong or exaggerated. The reversal of the sexes was as much a literary device as an observation, a way of telling his Greek readers that Egypt was an unusual land at the edge of the world. But the device worked because it rested on something real, because Egyptian women did go to market, did own and trade property, and did appear in their own names in legal documents, without a male guardian standing between them and the law. A Greek woman of the same period could do almost none of this.
