Tsenhor was born about 550 BCE in the city of Thebes (Karnak). She died
some sixty years later, having lived through the reigns of Amasis II,
Psamtik III, Cambyses II, Darius I and perhaps even Psamtik IV. By
carefully retracing the events of her life as they are recorded in
papyri now kept in museums in London, Paris, Turin, and Vienna, the
author creates the image of a proud and independent businesswoman who
made her own decisions in life.
If Tsenhor were alive today she would be wearing jeans, drive a pick-up,
and enjoy a beer with the boys. She clearly was her own boss, and one
assumes that this happened with the full support of her second husband
Psenese, who fathered two of her children. She married him when she was
in her mid-thirties.
Tsenhor--who was probably named after her father's most important
client--was a working wife. Like her father and husband, she could be
hired to bring offerings to the dead in the necropolis on the west bank
of the Nile. For a fee of course, and that is how her family acquired
high-quality farm land on more than one occasion. But Tsenhor also did
other business on her own, such as buying a slave and co-financing the
reconstruction of a house that she owned together with Psenese.
When Tsenhor decided to divide her inheritance, her son and daughter
each received an equal share. Even the papyri proving her children's
rights to her inheritance were cut to equal size, as if to underline
that in her household boys and girls had exactly the same rights.
Tsenhor seems in many ways to have been a liberated woman, some 2,500
years before the concept was invented.
Embedded in the history of the first Persian occupation of Egypt, and
using many sources dealing with ordinary women from the Old Kingdom up
to and including the Coptic era, this book aims to for ever change the
general view on women in ancient Egypt, that is far too often based on
the lives of Nefertiti, Hatshepsut, and Cleopatra.
