Sex and civilization / by Paul Bousfield.

  • Bousfield, Paul, 1880-
Date:
1925
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Sex and civilization / by Paul Bousfield. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    27/312 page 15
    We read, moreover, in a marriage contract of about 117 B.C., that the children are to have everything that belongs to me, and everything that I earn in conjunction with you.' Again : Diodorus tells us in so many words that the women of Egypt ruled their husbands, for the husband had to give a pledge of obedience when they married. This passage from Diodorus is a very sore point with our Men's State investigators, for there is no ambiguity about its impli- cation that wives were absolutely supreme. In many German works on ancient Egypt the passage is completely ignored, as in the writings of Duncker, Wiedemann, Ebers, and Reitzenstein, and in the first edition of Meyer's book. In other works as in Max Miiller's, for instance, the text is referred to as quite incredible, though no reasons are offered for such an assumption. Yet other authori- ties interpret the passage solely by the standards of modern life. Wilckens' writings furnish an illustration of the last method. He says * In this connection historiographers have been wrongly supposed to have declared that among the Egyptians the husband promised to obey his wife, and have been censured for giving currency to so incompre- hensible a view. But Diodorus must not be necessarily understood as having meant that the husband was to obey the wife in everything/ In the end Wilckens comes to the conclusion that Diodorus must have written ' emphatically ', in order to bring the subject into relation with an earlier passage in which he wrote of Isis and Osiris. Even the discovery of the Libbey papyrus, which in conjunction with the so-called Berlin papyrus com- pletely confirms Diodorus' statement, has not induced all the Egyptologists to change their tactics. It is most characteristic that modern authors should
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