Many of us who love history have a peeping Tom desire to peek into the
figurative windows of people of the past. When the pyramid builders laid down
their tools at dusk, the farmers left their fields for home or the pharaoh took
off his crown, their lives shifted from the public spheres of work and politics
to the private sphere within village and household.

Anthropology Professor Lynn Meskell makes it clear up front in her book
Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt that the spheres of public and private life
are intertwined and fluid, and as categories are largely modern constructs that
tell more about Western culture than Egyptian. Yet the private zone, as Meskell
writes, “is where the family thrives, the realm of domesticity; it is also a
realm of secrecy and passions. This private sphere contains our most precious
possessions, where we belong only to ourselves.” (p.3)

Meskell reveals this most private sphere of ancient Egyptians by examining
contemporary letters, tomb decorations, archaeological digs and other materials
as wide- ranging as census data and love poetry. The New Kingdom, from 1539 BCE
to 1075 BCE, yields an unusually rich range of sources, and Egyptologists, as
Meskell says, may know more about this period than any other in pharaonic
history. It is in the New Kingdom that she focuses her analysis, and her book
gives vivid and surprising details about family dynamics and kinship, the make
up of the household, social customs, sexual experience, emotional life and
attitudes of the more than 4 million people in the ancient Nile Valley.

Meskell’s study of private life is not only specific to the New Kingdom;
it hones in on several excavated locations – Amarna, Deir el Medina, Tell ed
Daba, Gurob and Memphis — that together give a broader view of social life in
Egypt. The New Kingdom period included the turbulent interlude of the Pharaoh
Akhenaten, who overturned the Egyptian pantheon and set up a single god, Aten.
Amarna, the capital that Akhenaten built on the Eastern bank of the Nile in
Middle Egypt, was abandoned after the pharaoh’s death. The deserts preserved
the city so well that Meskell calls it an ideal place to study Egyptian
urbanism.

But the majority of New Kingdom Egyptians lived not in cities but in
villages, though little survives of the more rural settlements. Instead,
Meskell takes as her prime example Deir el Medina, a village of scribes and
builders who worked on the tombs at the nearby Valley of the Kings. The town
offered two rich veins for the study of private life: its residential districts
are the best preserved of any town in the New Kingdom, and the highly literate
population left behind a wealth of writings about daily life.

Ancient Egyptians were preoccupied with cycles – day and night, life and
death, the ebb and flood of the Nile – and Meskell makes use of this Egyptian
worldview by structuring her book based on the cycle of birth to burial. On the
way, she gives insights into how Egyptians lived, thought and related to one
another. They ate largely bread and beer, their houses were of sun-dried brick
where roofs jutted out over the cramped alleys below, the largest room was the
divan room, a place for men. Generations lived together under one roof with unmarried
or widowed kin, servants or slaves. They saw the body and soul as permanently
intertwined in life and after death, and they expressed their passions in
erotic poetry: “I shall let you see my beauty in a tunic of the finest royal
linen, soaked with cinnamon oil.”(p. 131)

One of Meskell’s goals was to strip readers of our preoccupations and
misconceptions about the ancient Egyptians, and in this, she succeeds. In her
book, the Pharaohs and elites play a lesser role than they do in most studies
of ancient Egypt. Wars, the construction of the great monuments and the
treasures of pyramids and tombs also were pushed into the background. Egypt was
not examined as a monolithic empire, with generalizations that cut across its
5,000-year history. Instead, Meskell turned a focused eye onto everyday New
Kingdom Egyptians, and left us a vivid portrait of their lives.

© 2002 Anika Scott

Anika Scott is a U.S. journalist and author
living in Germany. A former Chicago Tribune staff writer, she now freelances
travel and lifestyle articles for publications and web sites in the U.S. and
Europe. She is also working on a nonfiction book about a famous music
manuscript that disappeared during World War II.

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