In Egyptian culture, however, this separation of gender roles was not merely a social custom, but had a theological and cosmological basis. As Erik Hornung has pointed out, the Egyptians believed that before the creation of their world, the universe was a single uniform substance that filled all space, with no internal distinctions or separate parts (1982b: 172-85). Four basic characteristics of this single substance were personified by eight gods, four male-female pairs in which both sexes served the same function. Clearly there were no gender distinctions in this substance; it was wholly androgynous, since even its characteristics were both male and female. Moreover, religious statements about the nature of things before creation included the explicit statement that the creator god had no mother and no father.
The initial creation was asexual. At the moment of creation, the creator god, who was an indistinguishable part of this undifferentiated substance, brought into existence two gods, one male and one female. Sometimes this was said to have been done through spitting or sneezing, but perhaps most often it is described as having been done through masturbation. Since the creator god himself was part of the undifferentiated nonexistence, he was sexually androgynous. He recounted that he ‘‘acted as husband with my fist, I copulated with my hand’’ (Allen 1988: 28). Since the word ‘‘hand’’ is feminine in Egyptian, this was essentially a sexual union with himself, emphasizing the androgynous character of the nonexistence of which he was an indistinguishable part.
The gods created by this act were distinguished from each other in other ways (as dry air and moisture, or as light and heat) in different versions of the story, just as the creator god who was credited with their creation varied, but the separation of their sexes was essential to the definition of existence itself. Existence was defined by such contrasts rather than by mere physical presence; nothing could exist unless it could be contrasted with something else. For men to have existed, women must have been in existence from the very same moment; the two sexes were therefore regarded as of equal antiquity and equally essential to the existence and functioning of the created universe. The maintenance of the boundaries between the two sexes and their contrasting expression in the gender roles of the population were thus essential to the existence of any people at all. It is significant that the Egyptian word for people, sometimes mistranslated as ‘‘men,’’ normally has both male and female determinatives (Fischer 2000: 46).
For this reason, any blurring of the boundaries between the gender roles that represented this sexual differentiation was seen as endangering existence. Maintaining the opposition of gender roles prevented the world from reverting to the uniform substance of pre-creation chaos - what was seen as nonexistence. This maintenance of opposing dualities was expressed in many aspects of ancient Egyptian life, the divisions between east and west, Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, the valley and the desert, active historical kingship and ancestral kingship, or cyclical and linear time. But the division of the male from the female was a fundamental contrast.
In art, this contrast was expressed by contrasting skin colors. Women were conventionally represented with yellow or gold skin, while men were represented with skin of dark red or red-brown. This coloration may originally have been an exaggeration of the skin color difference created by men’s outdoor work and women’s work inside the house; in some cases peasant women could be represented with darker skin, while sedentary older men were shown in yellow. But as a general rule, the difference denoted a difference in gender.
In addition to their skin color, women, particularly elite women, were often shown in a passive pose, standing with their feet close together, and their hands embracing their husbands, or at their sides, or on their opposite shoulder, or holding lotuses to their noses. Men’s poses were more active and outgoing. One foot was conventionally shown striding forward, and one hand reached out to hold a staff or an offering, while the other held an emblem of official power. This association of physical stance with gender was particularly clear in the rare cases in which a man’s tomb chapel had been converted for a woman’s use: the pose had to be altered along with the shape of the body to indicate the gender difference (Roth 2002).
A final difference in the representations of men and women is that of scale. When a husband and wife were shown together, the wife was often, though not always, depicted at a smaller scale. Since this hierarchy of scale was also used to differentiate between kings and officials and between landlords and peasants, it is clear that women, despite their equal status mythologically, were viewed as socially inferior to men.
World History
