A Day of her Life

Once upon a time, in the great land of the Nile in a time where Kings ruled the earth as Gods.

In the early dawn, the giggles of an exicted woman were filling the fresh air. Everyone in town knew where the sound was coming from. It was the wife of Imhotep. Her husban is coming back tomorrow from an important mission for the king. If i was her, I too would be happy...

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I am the wife of Imhotep the greatest architect in the world, very proud that my husband is going to be the builder of the first structure resembling the Ben-Ben stone known to Egypt. He has previously told me of his amazing idea of changing the short mastaba tomb into a tomb much known to Re the holy sun god. One pointing directly at the sky, he said:

“This is going to be a revolutionary move in tomb architecture, instead of having a simple mastaba representing the first mound of earth, the Pharaoh Zoser shall have a series of mastabas, on top of each other decreasing in size the higher they get. This will be the tallest structure built by man in Egypt. The structure will be composed of six or seven huge mastabas. I cannot wait to show you once we are done”

My husband is favoured and trusted by Pharaoh Zoser. The pharaoh has been allocating my beloved husband many responsibilities this makes him spend majority of his time in service for the greatness of Egypt and away from me and our children. I am glad of this because it means that our family will be in a good place in field of reeds, with different divinities. While my husband is away I miss him a lot, but I have my life to go on with. I am the one in charge of the house hold and allocating different shares to different family members. Not to forget that I care a lot for my children.

I have become highly regarded by my society after bearing my first child, for mothers are looked up to in Egypt. Caring for my children is the most important role for a woman in our society regardless of her social status occupation or responsibilities. But at least as one of the elite women I do not have to do the exhausting tasks of raising young infants, I have milk nurses to feed them when they are young, a chef to feed our family, servant ladies to clean the house and make sure everything is resting in the right location, and finally our farming labour to grow, tend, gather and securely locate our grain it its granaries. I am in charge of the household and everyone in it. I make sure that everyone is doing their job efficiently as I am Imhotep ’s first and most important wife.

Imhotep has been away for the entire inundation season, it is the first time for him to stay away from home for so long. Even though he said everything was great in his last letter and that they have finished the completion stage of the first mastaba and are moving onto the next, I am still extremely worried about him. I have been lighting incense at the temple everyday praying for his safe return.

In accordance to his letter he will be arriving home tomorrow. I am extremely excited and busy for I have to prepare a small celebration in our household for his arrival. I woke up today at dawn and made sure every servant was up and cleaning. I wanted all the linen sheets, carpets, reed mats and my husband’s clothing washed in no more than three hours, so that they can enjoy the hot sun and dry before the evening. After checking that the washing has begun, I headed to the kitchen and made sure all the meat, groceries and spices needed for tomorrow were available. When all was in place, I ran the children’s quarters and I was glad to see that they were already up, had eaten breakfast and also began working on their scribing work from the eduba. I care a lot for sending my children to eduba for they must learn how to become scribes and inherit their father’s profession. I greeted both of them both and embraced them. Since their father was set to arrive, I had agreed with their tutor that they will not go to eduba today in order to prepare themselves.  The tutor will in turn give them extra work and check their performance later in the day. He agreed considering that their father is Imhotep, a man beloved of Pharaoh Zoser.