Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt

Uroš Matić

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000364040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt shifts the focus of gender studies in Egyptology to social phenomena rarely addressed through the lens of gender – war and violence, exploring the complex intersections of violence and gender in ancient Egypt.

Building on current discussions in philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, and on analysis of relevant historic texts, iconography, and archaeological remains by looking at possible gender patterns behind evidence of trauma, the book bridges the gap between modern understandings of gendered violence and its functioning in ancient Egypt. Areas explored include the following: differences in gendered aggression and violent acts between people and deities; sexual violence; the taking of men, women, and children as prisoners of war; and feminization of enemies. By examining ancient Egyptian texts and images with evidence for violence from different periods and contexts – private tombs, divine temples, royal stelae, papyri, and ostraca, ranging over 3, 000 years of cultural history – Violence and Gender in Ancient Egypt highlights the complex intersection between gender and violence in ancient Egyptian culture.

The book will appeal to scholars and students working in Egyptology, archaeology, history, anthropology, sociology, and gender studies.

1

Introduction

1.1 Violence and gender revealed

“Nefertiti revealed” (2003) is a Discovery Channel docu-drama that offers a reconstruction of the life and supposed tragic death of queen Nefertiti, wife of king Akhenaten, the 18th dynasty ruler who resided in Tell el-Amarna (Akhetaten in ancient Egyptian). As with all such popular documentaries, this one also combines narration, reenactments based on interpretations of ancient texts and material culture, and interview-like comments from scholars. Without going into the details of this docu-drama, I will concentrate on one scene that particularly caught my attention at the time, and which effectively reveals the complex intersection of violence and gender.

It is a scene in which Nefertiti is executing a kneeling man using a sickle-shaped sword. This scene is followed by scholars’ comments; they state that artisans often depicted Nefertiti smiting enemies in state representations. However, the enemies Nefertiti is represented smiting in the original iconography are not the same as those in the documentary. The enemies she is depicted smiting are women, whereas in the documentary, they are men. Such a small difference might seem irrelevant. Yet, this small detail demonstrates both the subtle frame of gender in ancient Egyptian representations of violence and its neglect in popular reconstructions.

Why is this detail so important? The obvious answer is that it is inaccurate. In fact, no Egyptian woman is thus far known to have been depicted by artisans smiting male enemies. The female king Hatshepsut of the 18th dynasty, for instance, is depicted as the king in the form of a male sphinx trampling male enemies (Chapter 4). All other queens known from trampling or smiting scenes, such as Tiye, wife of Amenhotep III (Akhenaten’s father), and Nefertiti, are shown trampling or smiting female enemies. Therefore, we are clearly dealing with a gendered structure behind such images.¹ Egyptian kings are depicted trampling or smiting men and Egyptian queens are conversely shown trampling or smiting women. I will expand upon the background of this structure in Chapter 4, but for now, it is important to stress that historical reenactments based on an erroneous interpretation of the data can produce equally erroneous ideas about specific queens like Nefertiti, as well as the gendered aspects of ancient Egyptian kingship and violence more generally.

Studies of war and violence in the past often risk reproducing the fallacies as exemplified by the docu-drama “Nefertiti revealed”. There is an assumption that acts of violence are inherently interesting in and of themselves, with no need for an understanding of their social context.² This modern reenactment is only one in a series of elements that add up to an orientalist image of queen Nefertiti as a vicious female ruler. Such images are found both in scholarly writings and popular culture,³ and orientalist ideas of the ferocity of female rule are also echoed in popular fantasy.⁴ This example demonstrates the necessity of taking the intersection of gender and violence and its complexity in ancient Egypt seriously.

1.2 Violence and gender in theory

The complexity of violence–gender intersection cannot be properly grasped without first discussing these very concepts. There is a vast list of studies devoted specifically to each of these concepts and summarizing them fully and properly would be a task in and of itself. In this section, I will present influential writings, highlighting the theories and methods I found most useful while conducting research for this book. References to specific topics, such as rape, or feminization of enemies, are explored more fully in this book’s chapters. I am well aware that the choice of my theoretical and methodological approach determines not only the data I choose to analyze but also the way I analyze and interpret them. In my opinion, there is no way out of this. Data and theory are hopelessly entangled. I will let others disentangle them after reading this book, if they are so inclined.

Violence is often understood in everyday language as the use of physical force to damage, injure, abuse, or destroy completely. From a sociological point of view, violence encompasses much more than mere physical force. Some indeed restrict the understanding of violence to physical moment of violence. Others would consider wounding acts of speech, but also economic and legal structures which act upon bodies, to be violent.⁵ While most scholars acknowledge some evolutionary basis for violent behavior in humans, violence cannot be isolated from its social context. Torture and killing are as cultural as nursing the sick and burying the dead. Violence is not senseless, there is always a cultural logic behind it.⁶ It is always interpreted.⁷ Violence is not only physical.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defined symbolic violence as “gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims, exerted for the most part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition (more precisely, misrecognition), recognition, or even feeling”.⁸ It is sometimes assumed that emphasizing symbolic violence means minimizing the role of physical violence, as though symbolic violence does not have a real effect.⁹ According to Bourdieu, gender is one form of symbolic violence.¹⁰ Yet, contrary to the definition of Bourdieu, those oppressed on account of their gender are not entirely unaware of their oppression and they don’t become aware of it only after they experience physical violence. A simple example from our own patriarchal heteronormative society can serve to illustrate this. A woman does not become aware of her oppression only when she becomes the victim of domestic violence or when she is not given employment because of an employer’s fear of her potential pregnancy. A gay man or a lesbian woman does not only suffer from outbursts of homophobia when they are beaten up for looking, acting, or speaking “differently”. Women can also be oppressed through “mansplaining” – a condescending or patronizing manner of explanation by a man, straight or gay. Some of them notice this, others not. Queer people are often reminded that they are not “normal”. Gay men are also much more likely to have body image issues than straight men.¹¹ Some are aware of this, others not.

The effects of such symbolic violence are therefore psychological and ultimately physical. It seems that what Bourdieu understands as symbolic violence is much more subtle, in the sense that it makes people unable to recognize the finest facets of oppression, hierarchy, injustice, and difference. This is close to the notion of “unknown knowns”, things we do not know that we know, the horizon of meaning of which we are unaware, but which is always-already here, structuring our reality.¹² Where gender is concerned, Bourdieu argued that its understanding as symbolic violence can be exemplified by the dominated’s assumption that the categories of the dominant are natural. This leads to self-deprecation and self-denigration, as, for example, when the women in Kabyle society of north Algeria studied by Bourdieu view their genitals as deficient and ugly, or when women or men in our society suffer from pursuit of ideals of beauty.¹³ The same case applies to women laughing along with men over sexist jokes.¹⁴ Also, for some women today, or better said for majority of women in traditional patriarchal societies, reproduction and unpaid domestic work are natural although there is nothing natural about such work division and reproduction is governed and controlled.¹⁵ Another example is lesbians and gays in Western society who seek equality by referencing the heteronormative power structures which led to their inequality in the first place.¹⁶ One example might be same-sex marriages as assimilation of heterosexual values (i.e., homonormativity).¹⁷ This is a proper Foucauldian reverse discourse. French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault used this term to describe the phenomenon in which groups constructed by a set of discources start speaking for themselves using the same categories through which they were disqualified in the first place. His examples are homosexuals demanding that their naturality is acknowledged,¹⁸ as if heterosexuals are somehow more natural.

The distinction between physical and symbolic violence, as explained by Bourdieu, is discussed somewhat differently by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who distinguished between subjective and objective violence. According to him, physical violence is a form of subjective violence, where the subject acting violently is easily recognizable (e.g., a criminal, drunken husband, child molester, rapist, and so on). Most people and indeed most archaeologists understand violence like this. This subjective violence is, however, only the tip of the iceberg. In the background is objective violence, which Žižek divides into symbolic and structural. Symbolic violence is embodied in language that imposes a certain universe of meaning, whereas structural violence is the consequence of the smooth function of political and economic systems. According to Žižek, these forms of violence are in complex interaction and should be analyzed as such.¹⁹ This is why in this book I often work from evidence for gendered physical violence to build up arguments for the ancient Egyptian sex/gender system as historically defined by symbolic violence.

We have seen that for Bourdieu gender is a form of symbolic violence. However, gender is more often than not defined as the socio-cultural understanding or interpretation of sexual difference. These socio-culturally interpreted differences determine the conditions of maleness and femaleness. People often use them to make statements about various areas of social life, some of which are related to the behavior of men and women, and some are only indirectly related to them.²⁰ The sex/gender system is, according to the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, a set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality (sex) into products of human activity (gender), and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.²¹ Therefore, gender is not only an identity or a role but also a system of social practices, which allocate people into different gender categories and organize inequal social relations based on that difference. Gender systems rely on hegemonic cultural beliefs and expectations that are often defined by a narrow set of features.²²

If we understand that being any gender in any possible way is not simply having one sex or the other, but dressing, talking, walking, and acting in a certain way, then no one is born a man or woman, but rather becomes a man or a woman, as argued by French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in her seminal work The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949).²³ This implies that there are different ways of being a man or a woman in a given society.²⁴ The difference is dependent on many other factors and additional facets of identity, a notion known as intersectionality.²⁵ Gender can be cross-cut by race (understood as a social construct and not a biological given), ethnicity, age, status, and so on. What is appropriate for different men and women in one society does not have to be appropriate for others, both within this and in other societies. This also implies that the positions of men and women and their relations in one society do not have to be the same as in another. Understood like this, gender is violent, because it implies an unequal relat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Chronological Table of Periods and Kings Mentioned in the Text
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Gender of aggression: violent men, women, and deities in ancient Egypt
• 3 Masculine domination: evidence of sexual violence
• 4 Objects of desire: men, women, and children as spoils of war
• 5 “He is looking at bowmen like women”: gender as a frame of war
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index