and rôle of woman in Egypt do not seem to me to warrant the importance that is attached to them.
In barbarous, as in civilised societies, there are three great means of influence—religion, military power, and money. In ancient Egypt, Diodorus tells us, woman was judged unworthy of the priesthood, and therefore inferior from a religious point of view. She did not possess any warlike power. Neither monuments, nor writings, nor traditions make any mention of female warriors, analogous either to the Amazons of fable or those of the king of Dahomey. There remains the influence of money, doubtless an enormous influence in all societies where it can accumulate in the hands of certain individuals to the detriment of others. Now, everything proves that if in ancient Egypt women have more or less enjoyed great independence, and have even abused it so as to subject their husbands, they obtained it simply by the power of money.
Evidently the organisation of property and the laws of succession in Egypt permitted women to be rich or to become so, and in consequence to domineer over husbands less favoured in this respect. We shall see that in ancient Greece and Rome the same causes produced the same effects. Is it even necessary to go to ancient times to seek examples of feminine emancipation, even very insolent emancipation, based only on the dowry or fortune? We also have an abundance of plutocratic Amazons. But these facts are not incompatible with the legal subjection of women. If they seem to have been very common in ancient Egypt, it is because legislation did not meddle with marriage; and it must also be remembered that the demotic documents only mention, as is natural, the contracts of the upper or middle classes, the propertied classes, which, of course, are a minority.
So little was gynecocracy inscribed in the laws and customs of Egypt that a simple royal decree depriving women of the disposition of their property sufficed to cast them into the subordinate rank which they have occupied until the present time in all human societies, but which, perhaps, they will not always occupy.
Nevertheless, it is a noteworthy fact that in a society so rigid as the Egyptian, a minority of women should have
