Divorce in Pharaohs' Era

By Ali Abu Dashish and Salma Yassin

CAIRO, Jan. 12 (SEE)- Divorce means spouses’ separation that may lead to another marriage for both.

In Ancient times, Egyptians had realized that porce was the absolute good decision when living together became impossible. From Paranoiac era till Ptolemaic one, porce were taking place by abandoning wives.

This was followed since the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, also an uncompleted text from the New Kingdom was found to reveal someone’s admission of rashness in porcing his wife.

In ancient Egypt, husbands were either porcing their wives, or giving them the right of getting themselves porced, which is known in Islamic law by “delegation”.

Delegation requires editing a document after marriage, which implies the wife’s right of getting her-self porced. This doesn’t mean any compensation for her husband, except giving half of the dower back to him besides waiving her rights in her husband’s possessions, and that was stated by one of hieroglyphic sentences.

If porce took place by husbands, they had to give their wives a porce documentation, as a proof of ending the relationship, and the oldest documentation found was written in demotic handwriting and belongs to king Ahmose II time.

This excerpt belongs to the Ptolemaic era from a husband to his wife and is signed by 4 people also states, “If I porce you someday, or you want to get out of my house by your own desire, I will give you the assets mentioned above”. These documents indicate laws of porce, its consequences, and how ancient laws were taking into account women rights.

Another crucial thing came out was that; women in the past owned the right of lodging judicial complaints for their husbands’ abuse, by which they were distinguished from all women around the world.