This series is published with the authorization of Professor Jin Shoufu. This is an AI-assisted contemporary editorial adaptation by Clio Walker based on Jin Shoufu’s Ancient Egyptian Civilization. It is neither a newly written eyewitness travel account by the professor nor a chapter-by-chapter reproduction of his book.

On 15 February 1906, at the foot of the cliffs near the workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina on the west bank at Thebes, the inner door of a tomb was opened.

The men who opened it were the Italian archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli and Arthur Weigall, the Inspector of Antiquities. Behind the door lay a tomb that no robber had touched in more than three thousand years. Numbered TT8, it belonged to the architect Kha and his wife, Merit.

Inside were some five hundred objects: coffins nested one inside another, complete sets of linen clothing, underwear marked with the owners’ monograms, all kinds of food, and two of the earliest known illustrated copies of the Book of the Dead.

Both mummies were still in their wrappings, undisturbed in their coffins. Only later did it become clear that the human-shaped coffin Merit lay in had been made for Kha.

I. “My heart flutters”

Could there have been love, as we understand it, in an age so remote?

Jin Shoufu answers without hesitation: human nature has changed little over thousands of years, and young people’s ideas of beauty and of a good match have hardly changed either. In his play Caesar and Cleopatra, George Bernard Shaw has the Egyptian sun god tell the audience that the people of two thousand years ago were no different from them: they talked and lived as they do, were no better and no worse, no wiser and no more foolish.

About twenty love poems survive from ancient Egypt, and almost all of them were written down in the Ramesside age. Desire is as old as humanity, but putting it in writing for others to read takes a script, and a social setting that allows it.

The poems are all in the first person: the lovers themselves speak of longing, of missing each other, of lovesickness. Since literacy in Egypt was extremely low, most scholars think the poems in a woman’s voice were in fact composed by men.

The American Egyptologist Miriam Lichtheim devoted her life to a three-volume anthology, Ancient Egyptian Literature. In one poem a young woman in love waits for her beloved, afraid of what the neighbours will say, and blames it all on her heart (translated here from Jin’s Chinese):

“Whenever I think of you, my heart pounds; it runs from its proper place and will not let me act with sense: I cannot put on my dress, my scarf is not where it should be; my eyes are not painted, my body is not anointed. … Do not let the neighbours say, ‘Look at that woman, fallen in love!’”

Dress, scarf, eye paint, ointment: the whole cosmetics box from our last story is thrown into disorder.

II. Seven days without her

Another poem comes from a lovesick man who turns “love is a sickness” into a little drama:

“For seven whole days I have not seen my sister, and sickness has crept over me; my limbs are heavy as stone, my body no longer belongs to me. The doctors come and go, their remedies do no good, the magicians shake their heads. … My sister is better than any prescription, my sister is stronger than every medicine.”

The “sister” is not his sibling. In ancient Egypt, especially in the New Kingdom, lovers and even married couples called each other brother and sister.

One form of address caused a misunderstanding that has lasted more than two thousand years. Classical writers took it to mean that brother-sister marriage was common in Egypt. Repeated from writer to writer, “the Egyptians married their siblings” became a well-known “fact.” Egyptologists have argued hard against it, Jin says, with little to show for the effort.

III. Don’t marry the goldsmith’s daughter

In the poems love is pure and fierce. Marriage was another matter.

Men led Egypt’s economic life, so parents weighed their sons’ and daughters’ marriages differently. An instruction text written in the late dynastic period advises:

“You may give your daughter to a goldsmith’s son, but never let your son marry a goldsmith’s daughter.”

The logic is practical. A daughter married to a goldsmith’s son need not worry about a living: even if he does not take up his father’s trade, he will inherit his father’s property, or both. A goldsmith’s daughter, though, knows only how to enjoy things and inherits little, so she may well be a burden her husband cannot carry.

To marry meant that a young man and woman, each bringing some property, moved into a house the man had prepared. So in the Instruction of Hardjedef a father tells his son:

“When you can support yourself, build a house of your own and take a strong wife, so that she may bear you a son.”

The house comes first, then the wife; the son is the point.

IV. A contract in three copies

Herodotus called the Egyptians the most pious people he had met. Yet an Egyptian wedding had almost nothing to do with a temple.

Couples usually signed a marriage contract before an official or other witnesses. The parties were normally the bride’s father and either the groom’s father or the groom himself. The contract was made in three copies: one for each side and one kept by the official, to be checked if a dispute arose. Both parties, along with a good number of witnesses, signed it, clearly to keep either side from backing out.

The instruction literature also tells a young man to keep his distance from his wife’s family after the wedding:

“Do not live in one house with your father-in-law, just as you should not share a field boundary with your superior.”

Only people of the Nile could have coined that comparison. Every year the flood covered the whole valley and washed away every boundary mark. When the water fell, the land had to be measured and divided again. The archives recorded who owned which plot, but when a subordinate and his superior drew a shared boundary, the subordinate was bound to lose out, just as a son-in-law living with his wife’s parents had to swallow his pride.

V. “Pulled up by the roots”

The Instruction of Hardjedef is plain about it: after the wedding, the most urgent and important task is to produce heirs.

Even in the late dynastic period this had not changed. The Egyptians said that a person who died without descendants had been “pulled up by the roots.”

Another instruction text from the same period advises young men, on the grounds that a mother has the greatest influence on her children:

“Do not marry a gloomy woman; if a donkey and a horse are harnessed together, the donkey must keep the horse’s pace. Do not marry an impious woman, lest the children she bears also not believe in the gods.”

The mother’s weight is set very high, and her possible harm is stated bluntly: a bad woman will not only lead her husband astray but bear him a wicked child.

Children brought obligations as well. The eldest son in principle received the largest share, but he had to pay for his parents’ funerals and the offerings that followed, and look after his brothers and sisters. If there was no son, or the son failed in his duty, a daughter or another relative took on the care of the parents and received the matching right to inherit.

Parents could also disinherit their children. In one surviving legal document, an elderly woman divided her property according to how dutiful each child had been. Those who had not cared for her received nothing.

VI. Sixty-eight tombs out of 807

So some ask: if Egyptian women could make contracts, inherit, and disinherit their children, were they not the equals of men?

Many in the West, especially those with feminist leanings, would like to present ancient Egypt as an ancient case of equal status for women. The facts, Jin says, are not what they hope.

One scholar studied 807 Egyptian tombs in detail and found that only 68 belonged to women, all of them members of the royal family. Another finding gives pause: in more than half of the tombs belonging to men there is no trace of the owner’s wife, no image and no text.

The evidence usually cited consists of reliefs and paintings of husband and wife seated side by side, pair statues, and a few prominent royal women such as Hatshepsut and Nefertiti. But nearly all tomb owners were men, and a wife could only play a supporting role in her husband’s project for the afterlife. Over three thousand years, hundreds of rulers held power; that one or two were women is nothing to marvel at.

Language tells the same story. Egyptian nouns had masculine and feminine forms, yet the word for king was masculine only; there was no word for “queen regnant” at all. What Chinese calls a queen and a queen mother, the Egyptians called “king’s wife” and “king’s mother”; princes and princesses were “king’s son” and “king’s daughter.” Everything started from the king, a man.

Even the goddess Isis owed her unique standing entirely to her role in ensuring that kingship passed smoothly from Osiris to Horus. Some scholars say plainly that the makers of the Osiris myth had two motives: to brand the king’s brothers theologically as “usurpers,” and to limit the power of queens and queen mothers. At its core the myth guaranteed that the son succeeds the father.

VII. Back to TT8

Now we can return to the tomb at Deir el-Medina.

Jin describes how the archaeologist and anthropologist Lynn Meskell tallied the grave goods belonging to Kha and to Merit. Each object bore the name of husband or wife, showing that Egyptians began preparing for the afterlife while still alive, and very early.

Kha had been an architect in the king’s service. His tomb “borrowed” some decorative details otherwise found only in royal tombs, and among the grave goods were gifts from the king. In life his status and honours far exceeded his wife’s; in the matter of rebirth after death, too, his place and privileges ranked far above Merit’s. Meskell also concluded that the embalmers had clearly spent more effort and material on Kha’s body.

That last point was later revised.

In 2015 a team of Italian, Swiss and British researchers re-examined both mummies with new-generation X-ray imaging and chemical analysis. Neither body had had its internal organs removed, but both had been treated with costly embalming recipes that included imported resins. The recipe on Merit’s wrappings was an unusual fish oil mixed with plant gum, conifer resin and beeswax, and natron was found in her outer bandages. The researchers concluded that both had received relatively high-quality treatment; the old idea that they were hastily prepared does not hold.

But in the same paper, other details stand unrevised.

Merit died at about twenty-five to thirty, long before Kha, and apparently without warning. Her own coffin was not ready, so she was laid in Kha’s human-shaped coffin. She was much shorter than her husband, and Kha gave some of his own monogrammed linen to fill the empty space. Around Kha’s neck is the “gold of honour” collar awarded by the king, and he wears funerary amulets. Merit wears only jewellery from her life, and not a single funerary amulet.

The young woman in the poem says she could not paint her eyes or anoint her body, her heart was beating too wildly.

More than three thousand years later, researchers found that costly ointment on Merit’s wrappings. Her place in the afterlife was a coffin her husband gave up, packed with linen marked with his monogram.

Sources and editorial boundaries

1. Authorized base text: Jin Shoufu, Ancient Egyptian Civilization, authorized electronic manuscript, Lecture 4, section 4.2, “Love and Marriage,” read in full on 24 October 2026. Human nature then and now, and the sun god’s speech in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (rendered from Jin’s Chinese); about twenty love poems, Ramesside in date, first-person, those in a woman’s voice probably composed by men; Lichtheim’s three-volume Ancient Egyptian Literature; the two poems (translated from Jin’s Chinese, both abridged, with omissions marked); lovers and spouses calling each other brother and sister, and the classical misreading as sibling marriage; the goldsmith’s son and daughter (attributed in the base text to a late-period instruction); the Instruction of Hardjedef on house, wife and son; marriage without temples, the contracting parties, three copies, witnesses; Herodotus on Egyptian piety; the father-in-law and boundary saying and the re-surveying of land after the flood (the base text attributes it to “the author of the instruction mentioned above,” so the text names no title); heirs and “pulled up by the roots”; the donkey and horse and the impious woman; the eldest son’s share and duties, daughters and relatives as carers and heirs, and the elderly woman who divided property by filial duty; 807 tombs, 68 of them women’s and all royal, and more than half of men’s tombs without the wife; the feminist reading and Jin’s rebuttal; masculine-only royal terms and king-centred titles; Isis and the motives of the Osiris myth; and Meskell’s tally of Kha’s and Merit’s grave goods, Kha’s royal-style decoration and royal gifts, and her view that the bodies were treated differently, are all paraphrased from this section. The base text’s remark on genital determinatives in hieroglyphic word formation, the Esau and Jacob example, the Weni example and Meskell’s caveat about her method are omitted for length. The base text spells the name “Lynn Meskkell”; the usual spelling is Lynn Meskell. No page numbers are invented. 2. Additional source: Raffaella Bianucci, Michael E. Habicht, Stephen Buckley, Joann Fletcher et al., “Shedding New Light on the 18th Dynasty Mummies of the Royal Architect Kha and His Spouse Merit,” PLOS ONE 10(7): e0131916 (2015), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0131916, read in full on 24 October 2026. Used for: Schiaparelli and Weigall opening the inner chamber of TT8 on 15 February 1906; about 500 objects including nested coffins, linen clothing and monogrammed underwear, food, and two of the earliest known illustrated Books of the Dead; Merit’s death long before Kha and apparently unexpected, her burial in Kha’s anthropoid coffin padded with his monogrammed linen; her lifetime jewellery and lack of funerary amulets, Kha’s gold of honour collar and amulets; her age at death of about 25–30 (cited there from Martina et al.); the absence of evisceration and the costly embalming recipes with imported resins, Merit’s fish-oil, gum, conifer-resin and beeswax recipe and natron; and the paper’s explicit rejection of the “shoddy treatment” view. The authors’ institutions are in Italy, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. 3. Reference aid: Wikipedia, “Tomb of Kha and Merit” (read 24 October 2026), used only to confirm TT8’s location in the northern cemetery of Deir el-Medina, Kha’s service under Amenhotep II to Amenhotep III (c. 1425–1353 BCE, used only for map time fields) and the discovery date. Coordinates are from GeoNames (Deir el-Medina, 25.7281, 32.6014) and mark the region only. 4. Boundaries and tensions: the base text, following Meskell, says Kha’s body received more treatment; the 2015 chemical analysis finds that both were well embalmed. The text first reports the base text faithfully, then the newer correction, and rests its ending only on the differences the paper states outright: the coffin, the amulets and the jewellery. The brother-sister misreading is touched on only briefly, since it belongs to story 14 of this series (“Endogamy”). No dialogue, psychology, weather or sensory detail has been invented; Merit’s cause of death is unknown and the text says only that she died apparently without warning. The widely repeated anecdote about Schiaparelli’s servant and the key was not checked against a primary source and is not used.