الفهرس 
Chapter one: Service OccupationsOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Our study about Female occupations in Egypt during the Greek and Roman periods is divided into five categories in chapters in each category there are upper-class occupations and lower-class occupations.
In the first chapter, The Service occupations in which Women were able to manage their households. Household management, involved matters as diverse as sowing fields, dealing with tenants, purchasing land, selling animals, paying workers, cleaning the home, and of course the more traditionally recognized activities of weaving, child care, and food production.
- The Nursing occupations in Greek and Roman Egypt were for lower class women usually slaves or freed women who were in need for money.
A wet nurse is a woman who breast-feeds somebody else’s baby, either for money or because she is a slave, possibly a household slave who happened to have a child at that time.
from the only One surviving contract for a wet-nurse, from the Ptolemaic period, shows that this employment was looked on as a highly formal arrangement. The woman was to serve as a wet nurse for a boy for three years, her compensation will be paid monthly, in kind (wheat, oil, laundry) and a decent salary in money 250 drachma salary (for her ”subsistence” and clothes).
The dearth of Ptolemaic examples suggests that such agreements were routinely made verbally and that, Greeks too, entrusted their children to nurses.
In the wet-nursing contract from the Ptolemaic period, we notice that the father engaged a nurse for his own son. The mother had perhaps died in childbirth or had trouble nursing her baby. In contrast, from Roman Egypt, There are contracts in which people engage the wet nurse to nurse, not a freeborn infant, but a slave, either born in the house of its master or ”picked up in the dung-heap”,the employment of wet-nurses seems often to have stemmed from the acquisition of baby slaves who were still in need of nursing. The high prices of slaves attested for this period show that the investment made in paying a wet nurse would bring a profit to the child’s owner. There are few letters, refer to the nursing of freeborn babies. The nurse might live with the family if she is suckling a non-slave child.
The child usually goes to live with the nurse. Whether the wet-nurse herself was slave or free seems to have been a matter of genuine indifference. Expediency was the guiding consideration, with the result that we encounter not only (as we might expect) slave women nursing freeborn infants, but also free women nursing slave children.
The wet-nursing was not a desirable means of earning an income, on the other hand, the high prices paid for slaves point to the prosperity of some segments of the Population.
Contracts with wet-nurses in Greek and Demotic usually specify a two or three -year suckling period, but two years was probably the normal practice. The contracts for such service follow a fairly standard pattern, with relatively few individual variations.
The nurse takes the infant to her own place of abode, promising to feed it, clothe it, and do everything necessary to provide it with proper nurture. If the nursling dies within the stated time, she is obligated to take another child and nurse it, without additional pay, for the full term of the original contract.
The wet nurse’s wages, the equivalent of those of an unskilled laborers, were usually paid partly in cash ( a sizeable fraction in advance) and the rest in monthly installments of money and olive oil (the latter no doubt to protect the infant’s skin against chafing and rash).
The contracts impose sexual restrictions indiscriminately on free and slave nurses. Sometimes there is stratification that during the term of the contract, ”in order not to spoil her milk”, the nurse will not have intercourse with a man, or become pregnant, or suckle another child.
Traditional practices, however, strongly suggest that Greek families used slave nurses while Egyptians hired free women.
- Old Nurses are notoriously poor chaperones, since they are most interested in the happiness of their young charges, and being slaves, they have no power to oppose them. For example, Simaetha, in Theocritus’ Idyll 2, lived in her own house and was lest with an old nurse as a chaperone.
- There is only a single mention of midwife in Greek and Roman Egypt in all the thousands of papyri published so far, that mention serves to remind us that the Egyptian peasantry, like rural populations in all times and places, largely ministered to its own health needs. With the prime medical facilities concentrated in the cities and towns, villagers relied of ordinary ailments on their own local pharmacopoeias of simples and nostrums, developed through trial and error over the centuries.
The role of the midwife and the rituals which characteristically surround birth are particularly difficult to locate, since they took place in a female sphere where information about them would have only been transmitted orally.
There are some letters mentioned women traveled both to give birth and to help with the childbirth of others.
The main task of The Domestic service occupations is The Housework. The vast majority of female slaves in Egypt were domestics, doing the Domestic services.They lived in households boasting four or five slaves, at most, and performed work traditional to women.
Slaves were expected to keep the house clean, look after the baby and the dog, spin, and wool, help their mistress wash and dress, and accompany her on expeditions
Slaves were used more in the earlier years of Greek occupation, for Greeks like Zenon. As the Greek population became more acclimatized, they employed fewer slaves.
There was high percentage of slaves in the population at Alexandria. The city was Greek, and many inhabitants enjoyed luxurious way of life. The only occupation of slaves attested in Alexandria was domestic service, there also must have been a number of slaves in other Greek cities, but few in the Egyptian countryside.
The expansion of slavery in late Ptolemaic Egypt should be attributed to an increased employment of slaves in relatively modest households. It became natural to have a slave girl perform the daily chores.
Among these tedious chores, one of the most burdensome was the provision of water for the house. Water was used not only for cooking, cleaning and sponge baths, as had been the case in the older Greek settlements, but also for immersion baths.
Also Concubines must have performed domestic work in addition to providing sexual services.
from the papyri, we discovered that not only female slaves were engaged in the housework for others, but also sometimes women would provide a service in lieu of interest on a loan or by contracting to provide a service for a wage.
There is a kind of Contract to provide a domestic service called (paramone), in such a contract, a village woman binds herself to provide general services for a resident of the metropolis for a sum of money.
The Agricultural Service Occupations are divided into two sections, women working in the fields, and women as landowners and their management of agricultural land.