Customer Reviews

Dancing for Hathor: Women in Ancient Egypt

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This is a valuable book for many reasons - it summarizes many areas of scholarship and interest that touches upon women in Ancient Egypt and their place in Egyptian society. Although a theocratic society dominated by a male pharaoh (with few exceptions), it was also a society that gave a great place to women, both publicly and in the private sphere. Religiously, women were vital - as dancers, as priestesses (full time or part-time) and as seers. In Egyptian cosmology, it is the feminine that empowers and energises the masculine, which gives life its form. The goddess Hwt-Hwr (Hathor in Greek) is the epitome of that approach to the feminine in Egyptian thought - her role in empowering the Pharaoh and in bringing life to the Kingdom through her erotic and nurturing power cannot be underestimated. Her priestesses were at the same time dancers and embodiments of the goddess, and indeed, we know of a number of royal wives who were priestesses of Hathor.

Unlike the previous reviewer, who seems to bear a grudge against feminism that quite blinds him to the book's qualities, I don't see this as a feminist tract so much as a needed light cast on Ancient Egypt. Its conclusion draws a contrast - unflattering for the latter - with the overwhelmingly anti-women habits of most large Christian denomination, even to this day (the Coptic and Orthodox Churches are among the most patriarchal institutions in the world), but this contrast does not dominate the book, it is merely an interesting and instructive way to compare our world with theirs. We have documents and art to depend upon to form a view of how women lived and were considered in Ancient Egypt. Much remains unknown about the land of Kemet, and as the author writes herself, we are offered tantalizing glimpses across the centuries of what life was like. But the strong importance of women and eroticism cannot be overstated, nor their equality with me in several areas of life and their central role in Egyptian cosmology and religious thinking. Egypt appears to have been a land of joy - a land where one of the highest expressions of religion was dancing for the goddess of love. At the same time, the anger and passion of the goddess - and through her, of women - was understood.

Any scholarship that might be here is subsumed under an avalanche of feminist ideology. The book is disappointing since, because of that, it is difficult to believe the author's conclusion.