But the latter can be read as requiring his son not to get involved with the dangerous cult of Astarte, which could lose him his testicles.
Sodomy is depicted in paintings as something which occasionally happens at feasts and in the fields. So is ordinary sex. I am not even talking about the Turin Erotic Papyrus, where the ‘raise high the roofbeams’ massive phallus of the bald man would have qualified him for a great future in porn movies, out-doing Long Dong Silver of recent fame.
Before they married, Egyptians seem to have been able to mate as they liked, and this is borne out by shocked comments from all the ancient visitors. They were already shocked by the way the Egyptian women could go where they liked and lie with whoever they fancied. There is a considerable body of erotic verse by women, and I cannot dismiss all of it (as one writer has done) by assuming it was written by wishful-thinking men. It has a strong female feel to it; unlike, say, The Wife’s Lament in Anglo Saxon which was almost certainly written by a man. It is more like the verses of the troubarits in Provencal.
The only absolute duty one had in ancient Egypt was to marry and beget. After marriage both parties were supposed to be faithful to each other. No one has found a marriage ceremony, which in most cultures is a transference of property from father to husband; but the woman seems to have left her own home to live in her husband’s house.
Commonly she would have had a pre-nuptial agreement on which she could sue if the marriage broke down. Egyptian women had rights to two thirds of their property, a right to divorce, a right to own and run her own business and to will her property to whomever she pleased. She did not belong either to her husband or her father, but to herself; and what else can one require of a sensible system? No other ancient woman, except perhaps in Troy, had such freedom.
Burial Customs
One of the multitudinous problems which confronted me when considering the reign of Akhnaten was, if we have a king who believes in the ‘unknowable immortal’ Aten—who denies the worship of, and actively suppresses the worship of all other gods—what are we to make of the fact that all the royal personages buried during his reign, even at Amarna, were mummified in the usual way and laid in painted tombs with their furniture to await the afterlife?
The worship of the Aten precludes any other gods and also precludes an afterlife, because all that the spirit can hope for is union with godhead after a brief flirtation with reincarnation. That means no judgment, no weighing of the heart, no confession, no magic, and indeed, no Osiris, no Isis, and no Field of Reeds.
There are no intact royal burials from Akhnaten’s time, but we have the mummy of his brother Smenkhare who was certainly embalmed in the proper way. The burials of his father, his mother, his daughter and the officials from this time—though sacked by Horemheb and relocated and robbed—appear to have been done in the time-honoured fashion. Akhnaten may have modified the ritual and omitted portraits of the gods, but the bodies were still preserved as usual.
My friend Mark Deasey mentioned that in the North of England people who have been converted to Methodism for four generations still bury their dead by Quaker rites; and in Afro-American ritual, traces can be found of the African customs, remembered from the time before slavery. I suggest that burial is the most traditional of all rites, the one where most old religion and superstition attaches, because doing it wrongly may mean that the dead come back and tell you about it.
That means, logically, that the temples of Isis and Osiris must have remained and that the large funeral industry must have continued during the time of Akhnaten.
Watchers
I have translated these as Watchers, rather than Guardians, and they were the world’s first police force. They were responsible for the maintenance of public order; for the care of the vital dykes, walls and canals; and for any other duties, like guarding tombs and settling domestic disputes. They reported to the Mayor or Headman of the village, who in turn reported to a District Court, which reported to the Nomarch and thence, if it was a really hairy issue, to the Pharaoh’s judges.
In this it is remarkably similar to the Chinese system of District