e me are very great. Again, it is not in any
scarcity of evidence, but in its superabundance that the trouble
rests. It is hard to condense the social habits of peoples into a few
dozen pages. Nothing would be easier than from the mass of material
available to pile up facts in furnishing a picture of the high status
of woman that would unnerve any upholders of female subordination. It
is just possible, on the other hand, to interpret these facts from a
fixed point of thought, and then to argue that, in spite of her power,
woman was still regarded as the inferior of man.[199] I wish to do
neither. It is my purpose to outline the domestic relationships and
the family law and customs as they existed in Egypt and in Babylon, in
Greece and in Rome; to touch the features of social life only in so
far as they illustrate this, and so to discover to what extent the
mother was still regarded as the natural transmitter of property and
head of the household. The subject is an immensely complicated and
seductive one, so that I must keep strictly to the path set by this
inquiry.

Let us turn first to Egypt.

We have so rich a collection of the remains of the ancient Egyptian
civilisation, and so careful and industrious a scholarship has been
given to interpret them, that we can with confidence reconstruct in
outline the legal status and proprietary rights enjoyed by women,
which gave them a position more free and more honoured than they have
in any country of the world to-day. This is not an overestimate of the
facts. The security of her proprietary rights made the Egyptian woman
the legal head of the household, she inherited equally with her
brothers, and had full control of her own property. She was
juridically the equal of man, having the same rights, with the same
freedom of action, and being honoured in the same way.

The position of woman in Egypt is, indeed, full of surprises to the
modern believer in woman's subjection. Herodotus, who was a keen
observer, was the first to record his astonishment. He writes--

"They have established laws and customs opposite for the most
part to those of the rest of mankind. With them the women go to
market and traffic; the men stay at home and weave.... The men
carry burdens on their heads, the women on their shoulders....
The boys are never forced to maintain their parents unless they
wish to do so, the girls are obliged to, even if they do not
wish it."[200]