Ancient Egyptian Women Had Some Prenups!

One big eight-foot "prenuptial contract" shows what Egyptian wives asked for. They wanted to ensure that they could still keep money and food even after their marriages ended, according to rt.

This one is 2,480 years old! Written in demotic script, which is a kind of shorthand for hieroglyphs, the scroll is firm that the wife who is responsible for the contract would receive "1.2 pieces of silver and 36 bags of grain every year for the rest of her life."

However, one snag was that she had to pay her to-be-husband 30 pieces of silver before the prenup!

At present, the contract is being exhibited at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

Such contracts, says Professor Janet H. Johnson at the University of Chicago, "were extremely advantageous to the wife." They were totally economic, promising "not eternal faithfulness or mutual responsibility but cold, hard cash," according to jezebel.

One more prenup is even more interesting. The husband lists the property that she brought into the marriage, and promises her that he would give her everything she brought after divorce.

"One may assume that the woman and her family exerted as much pressure as they could to ensure that the husband made such a contract," Professor Janet H. Johnson wrote in an article for the University of Chicago Library, adding that such agreements "were extremely advantageous to the wife."

It is not surprising that the Egyptian women seemed so assertive, according to Dr. Emily Teeter, an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute. They enjoyed rights that seem unexpected.

Being given the right to file for divorce at any time, the women had to appear in court, and either party could break the contract if they wanted to.

"Most people have no idea that women in ancient Egypt had the same legal rights as men," Teeter said, as quoted by Atlas Obscura.

Interestingly, they drew up the prenups just like a contract of modern times, with a scribe and some witnesses nearby.

After divorce, the women could sign contracts, sue and be sued, and join juries or act as witnesses, or they could get as well as own property.

Still, women were largely dependent on men in social and political fields.