It has been said a thousand times that the best measure of a nation’s civilization is its treatment of women.  It would be more accurate to say that kind, courteous treatment of women is the last and highest product of civilization.  The Greeks and Hindoos had reached a high level of culture in many respects, yet, judged by their treatment of women, the Greeks were barbarians and the Hindoos incarnate fiends.  Scholars are sometimes surprisingly reckless in their assumptions.  Thus Hommel (1., 417) declares that woman must have held an honored position in Babylonia,[32] because in the ancient texts that have come down to us the words mother and wife always precede the words father and husband.  Yet, as Dubois mentions incidentally, the Brahmin texts also place the feminine word before the masculine, and the Brahmins treat women more cruelly than the lowest savages treat them.

EGYPTIAN LOVE

I have not been able to find evidence of a gallant, chivalrous, magnanimous attitude toward women in the records of any ancient nation, and as romantic love is inconceivable without such an attitude, and a constant interchange of kindnesses, we may infer from this alone that these nations were strangers to such love.  Professor Ebers makes a special plea for the Egyptians.  Noting the statements of Herodotus and Diodorus regarding the greater degree of liberty enjoyed by their women as compared with the Greek, he bases thereon the inference that in their treatment of women the Egyptians were superior to all other nations of antiquity.  Perhaps they were; it is not claiming much.  But Professor Kendrick notes (I., 46) that although it may be true that the Egyptian women went to market and carried on trades while the men remained at home working at the loom, this is capable of receiving quite a different interpretation from that given by Ebers.  The Egyptians regarded work at the loom more as a matter of skill than the Greeks did; and if they allowed the women to do the marketing, that may have been because they preferred to have them carry the heavy burdens and do the harder work, after the fashion of savages and barbarians.

If the Egyptians ever did show any respect for women they have carefully wiped out all traces of it in modern life.  To-day,

“among the lower classes and in rural districts the wife is her husband’s servant.  She works while he smokes and gossips.  But among the higher classes, too, the woman actually stands far below the man.  He never chats with her, never communicates to her his affairs and cares.  Even after death she does not rest by his side, but is separated from him by a wall.” (Ploss, II., 450.)

Polygamy prevails, as in ancient times, and polygamy everywhere indicates a low position of woman.  Ebers comments on the circumspection shown by the ancient Egyptians in drawing up their marriage contracts, adding that “in many cases there were even trial