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Wednesday, Apr il 26th, 2006
8:00 pm

GENDER ROLES IN ANCIENT EGYPT:

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fo* ttyth, Llternture nnd, socte$

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Rm. I49, 5 Bancroft Ave.

Basement of Earth Sciences Complex

ADMISSION FREE: ALL ItrELCOME

GENDER ROLES tN ANCIENT EGYPT:

PERSPECTIVES FROM MYTH, LITEMTURE AND SOCIETY*
Edmund S. Meltzer

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to what I hope will be a lively exploration of aspects of gender

in
ancient Egypt First, I woutd like to thank you for thiC gracious invitation
and

homecoming. ln this tatk, l'll be focusing'on multilayered, subfle, often

paradoxical aspects of gender identity and roles in that civilization,
rather than
dwelling on the more "mundane" traditionalfamily roles readily visible in
Egyptian

art' The

highlights I've chosen will range over the realm of myth, the treasures
of

ancient Egyptian literature, and intriguing aspects of society involving

both royalty
and the common people. I shall have achieved my aim if this presentation
is the

beginning, not the end, of discussion of many of these issues.

COSMOS AND CREATION

our exploration will begin with the pre-creation cosmos. According

to the
tradition of the city of Hermopolis in Middle Egypt, pre-creation *chaos,,
cornprised four male-female pairs of cosmic elements refened
to as the

'ogdoad": Heh and Hehet (male and female boundlessness),

Keku and Keket

(male and female darkness), Nun and Naunet (male and female watery abyss),
and Amun and Amunet (male and female hiddenness).

Along with this differentiated "chaos," Egyptian religion features creator-gods who
are self-created or self-generated, such as Atum of Heliopolis. The creator-god
creates the first male-female pair of deities, by sneezing or spitting or by

masturbation or some form of self-fertilization. The creator-god,s hand is

identified as a goddess (hand , djeret, is a feminine word in Egyptian). Thus

the j

Egyptians have the concept of an inclusive creator who encompasses male and

female and has an androgynous aspect, although he's a "god" and predominanly
seen as male.^His offspring, the first godgoddess pair, produce another pair and
so on, by sexual intercourse.

Unlike many other traditions, the Egyptians have a male earth and a female sky.

(The major words for sky are all feminine.) The sky-goddess Nut, whom we can
think of as "Mother Sky," gives birth to the sun every morning and also helps to
bring about the rebirth of the dead, a theme to which we shall return. She is

often represented on the inner lid of coffins, arching over the body of the dead in
an erotically-charged image. She can also be iderttified with the queen (of which
more below).

OTHER DEITIES

A number of Egyptian gods and goddesses feature interesting interplays of male

and female roles and ambivalences of gender identity.

ln many cultures, the "trickster" figure is sexually aggressive and a crosser of

gender boundaries. This is certainly the case in Egypt. The major trickster is Set
or Seth, the murderer of Osiris, the god of the forces of disorder. paradoxically,
he is also the defender of order against the serpent Apopis and stands in the
boat of the sun-god Re, the lord of order. ln one myth, surviving most completely
in a New Kingdom story we call "The Contendings of Horus and Set," Set comes
on to the god Horus and invites him on a "date."

but Horus, who also has

elements of trickster behavior, retaliates, with the help of lsis, and Set ultimately
becomes pregnant after eating lettuce spread with Horus,semen.
-The New
Kingdom story is part of a tradition of a sexual encounter betweei riorus and Set

that goes back to the Pyramid Texts; a spirited discussion has surrounded the
question of the extent to which the encounter represents rape or dominance on
the part of Set, or whether a mutual erotic relationship is involved in any of the
exemplars

Horus' mother lsis is a prominent example of the type of tricky, scheming woman
who occurs frequently in Late Egyptian riterature. Her schemes frequentty
backfire on her in the "Contendings" story, but she's more successful in the .Myth

of Re and lsis," where she forces Re to reveal his secret name to her. (other
scheming, duplicitous women in literature are mentioned below.)

Anubis, best known as the god of mummification, also has a trickster aspect and
androgynous associations and is sometim'es associated with Set. ln his
publication of The Tomb of Tut.Ankh.Amen, Howard Carter (who of course found

the magnificent blackAnubis there) wrote that the Anubis animalwas a

mythological or otherworldly creature, especially drawing attention to the lack of

genitalia. Female Anubis (Anupet or Anpet) was the chief deity of the Cynopolite
nome or province, and is attested early in Egyptian history, for example in one of

the famous sculptured triads of Menkaure (4th Dynasty).

Hathor, goddess of love and violence, who is also a sky goddess and is often
identified with lsis, is ftequently depicted with darker skin pigmentation than is
normally found with women in Egyptian

art. (The violent side of Hathor is

portrayed graphically in the myth of the "Destruction of Mankind" or the "Book of

the Heavenly Cow.")

Hathor and Anubis are both psychopomps

- guides of the dead into the next

world. Thus the Egyptian concept of the psychopomp has a predominantly

female and a predominantly male aspect. The powerfulgoddess Neith, who
presided over the Delta city of Sais, and who is a creator-deity with royal
attributes, also shares the psychopompic title "Opener of the Ways" with the

jackal or wild canid deity of Asyut, Wepwawet, who is similar to or perhaps an

alter ego of Anubis.

A striking example of androgyny among the Egyptian deities is the goddess Mut,
the wife of Amun, whose name means "mother.r' rn the Hibis temple, she is
represented with a penis. According to te Velde, her male aspect is associated

with her aggressive behavior in repelling malign entities. She also wears the
Double Crown.

Osiris, the king of the world of the dead and god of resurrection, also has an
androgynous aspect. He is described as producing milk (which is also

sometimes identified with semen). It is also possible (though debated) that he is

described as pregnant with his son Horus. The Pyramid Texts, retigious texts of
the Old Kingdom, refer to Hr imy t4lsir, which can be translated "Horus who is in

Osiris"! The androgyny of Osiris has ramifications in divine interrelationships as

well as afterlife beliefs; in both of these closely interrelated contexts, the key
issue in which gender interactions play out is that of regeneration and rebirth.

The nightly union between Re and Osiris, which results in the resurrection of
both, is a major theme of ancient Egyptian religious texts, reaching its apex in the
Undenalorld Books, and is possibly alluded to in the name of Osiris himself, if the

etymology wq(t)-ir(O "seat of the Eye," long favored by some Egyptorogists, is

valid. Terence DuQuesne, who has written extensively on the Re-osiris

conjunction, describes it as a "chemicalwedding" (alluding to the alchemical

classic Die chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosenkrcuk by Johann Valentin

Andreae). Among other texts, he discusses

cr g4, in which the deceased

identifies himself with Re, the Ba of Osiris, who is required to have carnal union

with Osiris (or possibly "by means of Osiris" with the polyvalence of the
preposition m). The androgynous aspect of Osiris makes him a multivalent

figure. A graphic sexual understanding of the Re-Osiris conjunction also seems

to underlie the Middle Egyptian story of the Petitioner of Memphis, or King
Neferkare and General Sisenet, as has been suggested by van Dijk. ln a recent

study, Heather McCarthy refers to two apparently complementary unions, that of

Re and Osiris and also that of Re and his daughter, or rather his daughter,

consort and mother all in one. McCarthy also illuminates the phenomenon of the
whiu?" rnor< l+ter
"absent husband" as required by the regeneration strategies of the queen,
4
focusing on the tomb of Nefertari:

- ,{

"The main thesis of this study is that Nefertari's postmortem regeneration

required her to attain a temporary state of gender fluidity in which she becomes

both male and female. The attainment of this state necessitated the absence of
Ramesses ll from her tomb. Once the queen adopted a masculine aspect and
achieved a state of gender fluidity, she could then assimilate with both Osiris and

thesolardeity. . . ." (JARCE 39 [2002]: 176).

So-called "Nile Gods" or "Fecundity Figures" are common in Egyptian art and
often represent the abundance of each nome or province of Egypt as well as "' '
Hapy, the Inundation. They have rolls of fat, paunches, and pendulous breasts.
At first their breasts are apparently just fat, but eventually they are shown

producing liquid, pouring out the Nile floodwaters in late iconography.

The sun-disk or "the Aten," the deity elevated in the religious upheaval of king
Akhenaten (of whom more below), is described in hymns as the "father and

mothe/'or "mother and father" of all creation, but is addressed with masculine
pronouns. lt is debated whether the sun-disk and its rays ending in hands
involves any actual androgynous symbolism, as Lana Troy thinks, or whether

Akhenaten tried to eliminate sexual imagery and myth, as Donald Redford and
Vincent Tobin have maintained.

KINGSHIP AND QUEENSHIP

The king or Pharaoh was a god

- at least in his mythical and ritual roles. (He

was not normally worshipped in his own lifetime; the limitations of the king's
divinity have been explored by many Egyptologists starting in the 1960s.)
Kingship was a predominantly male institution

- thus queen Hatshepsut

as a king

is often represented as a man, and her inscriptions use feminine titles somewhat

inconsistently

but there were female kings at a number of periods, as well as

goddesses with kingly characteristics such as the crowns they wear (Mut wears

the Double Crown, Neith wears the Red Crown). Lana Troy has explored the
female aspects of kingship and developed the idea that kingship is androgynous

- that female kingship can appeal to potent mythological

)

goddess Maat, the universal order, daughter of Re.

models such as the

Troy and other scholars such as C. J. Bleeker have also iltuminated the divinity of
the queen as royal consort, not only the female king. ln the old Kingdom,

queens had pyramids and, late in that period, Pyramid Texts as well. As already
noted, the queen could be identified with the regenerative sky-goddess Nu1 She
could also be identified with Hathor, an association which is often suggested by
her headdresses, and which is reinforced by a complex of ritual.

The status of some historicalqueens as ruling monarchs is debated

in the early

period, notably Merneit in the 1"t Dynasty and Khentkawes at the end of the

Dynasty. The aftermath of Akhenaten's reign in the late

4th

18th Dynasty has been a

focus of controversy regarding reigning queens. A number of recent scholars

have regarded Nefertiti as a reigning monarch after the death of Akhenaten,

while some have favored their daughter Merytaten in that role. Regardless of
Nefertiti's possible independent royal status, during Akhenaten's lifetime she was
an unusually prominent queen with enhanced regal as well as divine status. Her
'mother-in-law Tiye, the famous queen of Amenhotpe lll, also
utilized an
enhanced royal imagery and wielded autonomous power, as shown inter alia by
the Amarna archive. lt is possible that some of the iconography of the period

was drawn on by the much later Ptolemaic queen cleopatra vll.

The best-known female monarch of the Pharaonic period is queen Hatshepsut,

whom we have already mentioned. The interesting suggestion has been made

that she was

tryins;il"ftfr:ffi"ffiory
4

as it were, and start a true

matriarchy, and that she was grooming her daughter, princess Nefrure, as her

successor. Nefrure was being tutored by Hatshepsut's favorite official, Senmut.

The princess died young. Moreover, Hatshepsut's co-ruter Thutmose lll and
powerful officials loyalto him were aligned against her. lndeed, Redford has
suggested that there was a matriarchaltendency in the 18th Dynasty royalfamily,
especially in the early generations, in the Ahmosid tine culminating with queen
Hatshepsut, and again surfacing much later with queen Tiye and her successors
-- culminating again in the daring and unsuccessful bid of the widowed queen

Ankhesenamun (most probably) to invite a Hittite prince to marry her and

become Pharaoh.

Turning to king Akhenaten himself, the religious fanatic and so-called reformer,
scholars have had varying interpretations of the peculiar anatomical
characteristics in his artistic depictions. One suggestion is that he is depicting
himself as an androgynous creator-deity.

The white and Red crowns, combined into the pharaoh,s Double crown, have
been connected with male and female symbolism by some scholars, including an
Egyptian psychiatrist, Dr. M. l. Hussein. This has paradoxical and multivalent

aspects as well. Both the Red and White Crowns are feminine words ih Egyptian
and they are addressed as goddesses. Dr. Hussein regards the White Crown
not only as phallic but also as the breast of the mother-goddess. The White

Crown is normally described as the crown of Upper Egypt and the Red Crown as

the crown of Lower Egypt, and that is their primary association in historicaltimes.
They are both, however, of prehistoric origin and both are associated with areas

of Upper Egypt in their earliest known appearances.

MORE FROM LITERATURE

ln addition to lsis, already described above, tricky and duplicitous women in

Egyptian (mainly Late Egyptian) literature include the wife of Bata in the story of
"The Two Brothers" and the wife of rruth in "Truth and Falsehood.,

The '\rvicked stepmothef'so familiar to us from Western folklore makes her first
known appearance in a Late Egyptian story, the "Doomed prince," the Egyptian

"Rapunzel." The Egyptian prince, who has run off to the kingdom of Naharin in
northern Mesopotamia, is incognito and tells people that he's running away from
t"
his stepmother, who hates him.

Another Late Egyptian story, the 'voyage of wenamun"

consider a factual report of a traveling official

- which some scholars

- contains what I consider

a crude

erotic insult, "The shadow of Pharaoh your lord has fallen upon you.,, The
"shadow" was considered a sexually aggressive or even rapacious mahifestalon.
Hence an understanding such as "Boy, has pharaoh screwed you!,, My
colleague Howard Jackson has not found this interpretation convincing.

10

some scholars, including Du Quesne and Robyn Gillam, have raised the
possibility that some of the beautiful Egyptian love songs (often compared w1h

the song of Songs in the Bible) are addressed from men to other men. An
admirer of the charismatic .Prince Mehy" in one love song is apparenfly a male

soldier., One of the cruxes in determining the gender of the speaker is that, in

the

hieratic (cursive) Egyptian script of that period, a dot changes the first person
singular suffix-pronoun from masculine to feminine. Terence DuQuesne goes a
step further, considering that the presence or absenee of the dot creates

deliberate ambiguity, making the love poems gender non-specific. Gillam notes
other orthographic ambiguitles as welt, but does not explicifly regard the
ambiguity as deliberate. Deborah Sweeney, in a major analysis of the rhetoric of

gender in the love poems, doubts that most of them refer to same-sex couples
and is skeptical of the gender ambiguity argument, though she admits the
possibility that there are references to same-sex desire.

Another suggestion regarding the Love Songs is that they are wedding songs
and make possible the recovery of the elusive ancient Egyptian wedding
ceremony touched on below, as has been argued by Nicole Hansen in a paper
presented at the 2005 ARCE meeting in Boston, in which she proposes a
number of comparisons with modern Egyptian wedding songs and'cLrstoms.

A somewhat earlier story depicts the 6th Dynasty king Pepy ll as having nocturnal
liaisons with General Sisenet. At first glance, the story seems to treat this as tow

11

'\.

comedy, ridiculing a king who was possibly perceived as weak in a period of

declining monarchy. A different light may be cast on it, however, by van Dijk's
proposal that it alludes to the nocturnal union between Re and Osiris which we

discussed earlier. Indeed, the possible presence of allusions to mortuary and

netherworld literature in ostensibly (more-or-less) "popular" stories is a facet of
Egyptian literature investigated by a number of recent studies, including my own

work on Papyrus Westcar.

The sage Ptahhotpe's admonition "Do not have sex with a woman-boy" has been
suggested to be understood as a condemnation of exploitive relationships rather

than same-sex relationships in general. lt has been suggested that the terms
nekek and hem are derogatory references to men who engage in commercial
sex.

Heterosexual behavior as wellwas a subject of humor and satirical treatment, in

literature as well as drawings, as for instance the famous Turin Erotic Papyrus as

well as what have been regarded as "political cartoons" showing figures that
could be Hatshepsut and Senmut.

SOGIETY

Over the past couple of decades the consensus (if we can use that word of a

developing and very volatile field) has been that women in ancient Egypt were

t2

not "equal" but did have considerable autonomy and were not a downtrodden

class' They had property, inheritance and marital/divorce rights and apparenly
had equal access to the courts. Terence DuQuesne has drawn attention to
patterns of tomb ownership indicating that as early as the old Kingdom,
independent women were a well-established phenomenon, and his analysis of

the Salakhana Stelae also indicates a considerable role for women's autonomy in
the provincial New Kingdom. Ann Macy Roth's analysis of tomb iconography
regards at least some of these cases as the result of patterns of artistic taboos
excluding a spouse, rather than of the woman's autonomy (an analysis which
interfaces with Heather McCarthy's study of Nefertari's tomb discussed earlier)

an argument which is rejected by Dueuesne. The "flip side" of this picture, the

vulnerability of women and the disadvantages they faced in apparenfly frequenly

volatile relationship situations, is emphasized by Lynn Meskell (zooz, pp. gg110), who suggests that theoretically or legally equal status was not a safeguard

against exploitation

- a sobering

parallel to the modern world. Meskell writes (p.

101):

"Numerous texts recording the breakdown of marital relations demonstrate

that these ruptures were chiefly to the detriment of women. . . . Economically
and socially, the exclusion of women from their familial home meant a life of
insecurity and poverty. Divorce sealed their fate, and, unless their own children
provided for them or they remarried, the rest of their lives was guaranteed to be
difficult."

13

She proceeds to note some options that they had for supporting themselves,
such as cloth production and trade in vegetable and dairy products (p. 10g).

td Coprtu S-h,r;4 t'- P^pT* s

It has likewise been the prevailing impression that women were not prominent in

official positions

- except for the remarkable

position of the "God's Wives of

Amun" c. 1100-525 BCE, powerful women based in Thebes in Upper Egypt

Also uncharacteristically for Egypt, they were celibate and adopted their
successors. The limits of their power are indicated by the fact that the
successors were often princesses of a new royal dynasty consolidating its power.
Still and all, the God's Wives had very high status and controlled their own
bureaucracy of officials. Their title "Hand of the God" shows that they were
identified with the deified hand of the Creator-God mentioned earlier. These

certainly powerful women are easy to regard as the "exception that proves the

rule." But, concentrating on the Old Kingdom, Hedda KUllmer argues that women
were not "excluded from administrative positions within the Egyptian society,"
and that the impression (or assumption) that they were is the result of inadequate
methods of analysis. Analogously, Rosalind Janssen has investigated women at
Deir el-Medina, concluding that "Being a woman and old [i.e., over 30

ESM] at

New Kingdom Deir el-Medina therefore implied considerable rights, freedom, and
even an authoritative status." Meskell, who paints a generally less rosy'picture,
acknowledges that there were "marked discrepancies of women's experience"
(2002, p. 109).

t4

There are many unanswered or highly debated questions about women in

ancient Egyptian society, including fundamentalquestions about marriage. Was
there a ceremony? Sparse evidence suggests this possibility, at least a dinner
and quite possibly an oath. As mentioned earlier, the attempt has been made to

identiff the wedding as the setting of the Love Songs.

one significant development in Egyptology has been a reassessment of

"harems" before the New Kingdom (starting with an article by Del Nord c. 1970).

A consensus has arisen that the word commonly translated "harem" should be
understood as "private/inner apartments," and other associated words have also
been reinterpreted. tn the earlier periods, multiple royalas well as common

wives are overwhelmingly regarded as successive, although probable examples

of polygamy have been noted and there was a word (hbsr,rrf) apparently meaning
"additional wife." For commoners, monogamy predominated in later periods as

well. ln the later New Kingdom there are attestations of children borne by female
servants (as in the Bible). ln the case of kings, multiple concurrent wives with
numerous female attendants, something like the familiar "harem" idea, begin in

the New Kingdom with the age of internationaldiplomatic marriages to cement

political alliances. The Egyptians did not castrate captives or functionaries to
serve as eunuchs during the Pharaonic period! The women of the royat

household performed music and dances for the worship of Hathor, as did other
women with priestly functions honoring that goddess. some of these

performances certainly had erotic significance. Women frequently have the title

15

"singe/'or "chantress" of a deity, about which Toronto's own suzanne onstine

has published a new book.

Another question not yet conclusively answered is that of the place of women in
education: Was scribal education open to girls and women? To what extent?
How comparatively widespread was female Iiteracy? Betsy Bryan's identification

of bags under the chairs of some women as scribat kits belonging to those
women has been challenged, though it seems reasonable to me. The fact that
there was a goddess of writing, Seshat, suggests that a literate female was not
an outlandish idea to Egyptians, even very early in their history. (There was also
a god of writing, of course, namely Thoth.)

An aspect of Egyptian society about which we would like to know a great deal
more is same-sex relationships. From the

Sth

Dynasty, we have the tomb at

sakkara of two men with somewhat parallel names, Nyankhkhnum and

Khnumhotpe, who are depicted in art much like a man-woman couple. while

some scholars see them as a same-sex conjugal pair, John Baines suggests that
they could have been twins. David o'connor has now suggested that
Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotpe were conioined twins. The debate about this

tomb has been quite spirited. Nicole Hansen of Glyphdoctors.com (who

connects the love songs with a wedding ceremony) has dismissed the same-sex

relationship idea as a perception that could be expecled of Americans (evoking

an indignant response from Greg Reeder, author of the major article showing the

I6

correspondences between the depiction of the two men and a conjugal pair),
while Egyptian SCA spokespersons have emphasized that outside the EuroAmerican and WesUNorth European cultural sphere, casual physical closeness
among male friends is commonplace. This response seems a bit disingenuous,
as the pertinent question remains, Yes, but how often is it depicted in Egyptian

art?" (Perhaps it is in literature, in the Doomed Prince, where, when the Egyptian
prince anives among his fellow princes in Naharin, they embrace him and kiss
him al! over his body.) ln a paper presented, like O'Connor's, at the Swansea

conference on Sex and Gender in Ancient Egypt, Terence DuQuesne notes that
it is also a possible inference, but no more, that two military men named Ramose
and Wepimose or Wepwawetmose who dedicated Salakhana Stela CM004 might
have been a couple. Steve Shubert, of our own Toronto Egyptological

community, has in a way turned the tables on the "twins" approach by suggesting
(in the Redford Festschiff) that Suty and Hor of the famous stela, often regarded
as a locus classicus of twins, could have been a male couple, with a suggestive
use of the term sn "brother," as is found in the Love Songs. Much later, at

Sheikh Fadl, there is a tomb dating to the

6th

or

Sth

Century BCE with an Aramaic

inscription apparently written by one member of a male couple to another, in

which (according to the transcription and translation of Aime-Giron) the speaker

says "l cannot abandon him, I shall rest with him; I love Lekhi (persondlhame?)

very much." The assessment of this burial is complicated by the overwhelming

likelihood that at least one of the two men was of foreign origin. R. B. Parkinson,

seconded by Deborah Sweeney, thinks that same-sex couples were not well

t7

accepted in ancient Egypt, but that nevertheless people were not identified or
stigmatized by sexual orientation. Altogether, as Lyn Green and others have
suggested, the surviving Egyptian sources bearing clearly on this question are
rather sparse and seem to convey an ambivalent or complex attitude, an attitude

that perhaps fluctuated over time (though that too is not really clear). To me, this
is in keeping with the complexity of Egyptian thought itself and its encompassing

of paradox and what we narrowly perceive as contradictions.

CONCLUSION

ln the male-female complementarity, as well as other apparent polarities,

Egyptian cutture often shows us what DuQuesne calls by the alchemicalterm,
"the conjunction of opposites." For the ancient Egyptians, stereotypes to the
contrary notwithstanding, things were not static or black and white but complex,
paradoxical and full of potential for transformation. This can also be said of the
Egyptological puzzles that continue to fascinate us and draw us, hopefully,

further into the heart of that civilization. At the Boston ARCE meeting, Dr. Lyn
Green, to whom I am so indebted for being instrumental in bringing about this
deeply appreciated invitation, presented a paper on "Third and Fourth Genders in

Ancient Egypt." Ancient Egypt entices and dares us, in Shakespeare-S words, to
"pluck out the heart from (its) mystery." I hope that I have succeeded in sharing
some of this fascination with you today. Thank you.

18

SELECT REFERENCES

Aim6-Giron, N. "Note sur une tombe d6couverte prds de cheikh-Fadl par

Monsieur Flinders Petrie et contenant des inscriptions aram6ennes,"

Ancient Egypt 1923: 38-43.

Ayad, M. "Some Thoughts on the Disappearance of the Office of the God's Wife
of Amun," JSSEA 28 (2001) = Schulman MemorialVolume: 1-14.

Baines,

J.

Fecundity Figures. Warminster: Aris & phillips, 1gg5.

ldem. "Egyptian Twins," Or. NS S (1g85): 465470.

Bianchi, R.

s.

"cleopatra Vll." ln Redford, D. 8., ed., oxford Encyctopedia of

Ancient Egypt (New York: OUP, 2001), Vol. 1 , pp.2T3f

van Dijk,

J.

"The Nocturnal wanderings of King Neferkare," in Hommages

Leclant (Cairo: IFAO, 1gg4), v.4, pp. 387-393.

DuQuesne

,T.

Jackal at the shaman's Gate: A study of Anubis, tord of Ro-

Setawe. Thame Oxon: Darengo, 1991.

ldem. Black and Gold God: colour symbolism of the god Anubis. London:
Da'th/Darengo, 1990.

ldem.

"Milk of the Jackal: some reflexions on Hezat, Anubis and the imyvvt,,,
CCE 1 (2000): 53-60.

ldem. Review of B. H. stricker, Zijn en worden. DE 41(1ggg): g1f.

ldem. Review of Mathieu , B. La poesie amoreuse de l'Egypte ancienne. DE 42
(1998):135-140.

ldem. Proofs of Heaven London: prebendat, 2001.

T9

ldem. "seth and the Jackals." ln Egyptian Religion: The last thousand years,
Gs. Quaegebeur (Louvain, 1998), vol. l, pp. 6'13-628.

ldem. "Ancient Egyptian Religion and lts Relevance in Today's World," lecture
presented at the Egyptian Embassy in London. Unpublished/20O3. [l
thank the author for sending me a copy via Email and for his always
helpful and generous input.l

ldem. "The Osiris-Re Conjunction in the Book of the Dead," lecture presented
Bonn in Sept. 2005. Unpublished/2O05.

again thank

the

in

author for

sending me this paper.l

ldem. "Power on Their Own: Gender and Social Role in Provincial New Kingdom
Egypt," paper presented at conference on "Sex and Gender in

Ancient Egypt," Swansea, Dec. 2005. [Thanks again to the author.]

ldem. Personal communication,

Fox, M.

V.

5124103.

The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs. Madison:

University of Wisconsin, 1985.

Ganley, A.
Gee,

J.

H. "Equity

in Antiquity," DE 54 (2002):71-80.

"Notes on Egyptian Marriage: P. BM 10416 Reconsidered." BES 15

(2001):17-25.
Green, L. "'The Hand of the God': Sacred and Profane Sex in Ancient Egypt,"
KMT 1214 (Winter 2001-02): 54-59.
Gillam, R. "The Mehy Papers: Text and Lifestyle in Translation," cdETs (2000):
207-216.

20

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" This is a revised form of a lecture first presented at Lawrence University in

Appleton, wisconsin, May 24,2003, with revisions to August 21,200s. The text
as presented in 2003 has been published in Spanish as "El rol de los sexos en el
antiguo Egipto: Perspectivas desde el Mito, la Literatura y la Sociedad," Reyisfa
de Egiptologia /srs#16 (Oct. 2003):

3642. lthank Dr. Terence DuQuesne for his

always insigh'tful input and for his generous sharing of publications, and Prof.
Jorge Roberto Ogdon for publishing the Spanish text.

24