These Women Who Created Egypt

AN ODE TO ANCIENT EGYPT AND TO WOMEN

In These Women Who Created Egypt Christian Jacq shows us the fundamental role that women, famous or not, played throughout the history of Pharaonic Egypt. Women were pharaohs, guided diplomacy and one of them even commanded a liberation army.

From the first dynasty on, equality between men and women was an essential value. The first Greek voyagers who visited Egypt were deeply shocked by this astonishing scene: women walking around by themselves, without a husband or a guardian, selling various products at the market, with the right to divorce, seeming to enjoy thousands of rights that, according to them, these “inferior creatures” shouldn’t have.

In Pharaonic Egypt there were no women cloistered in the back of the house, no forced marriages, no bans on the freedom of movement, no compulsory clothing, no religious prohibition, no submission to male authority.

Christian Jacq thus asks himself: “Given the current situation in a great number of countries, shouldn’t this example of Egyptian women serve as a model?” From Hatshepsut, the Queen of Gold, to Cleopatra and including many illustrious, unknowns, servants, hairdressers, musicians, this series of portraits is passionate. And the book is more than ever in line with the times.

A RESOLUTELY CONTEMPORARY HISTORICAL ESSAY

“One can appreciate the degree of civilization of a people in terms of the more or less bearable state of women in the social order.”
Jean-François Champollion, Father of Egyptology