“My milk being good from both breasts”

Jennifer Cromwell

In a Coptic letter from the 7^th century CE, a wet nurse Maria expresses her grief and condolences over the death of a young girl (P.Amh. II 188 desc.; edition by Alain Delattre et al., 2018).

“My heart grieved when I heard about my daughter, that she had died.”

Maria then goes on to wish a long life to another girl, Anastasia. Rather than reading the text literally, the girl who died is most likely the daughter of the recipients of the letter, not Maria. What seems to be the clinching detail in understanding the relationships in this letter is that Maria identifies herself as a wet nurse in the letter’s address:

“Give it to my sister Talau, from the wet nurse Maria.”

The letter is short and its contents incredibly sad. But – and here is where some scholarly distance comes in to play – one of the most notable features is the identification of Maria as a wet nurse. There are almost no Coptic documents that involve a wet nurse (the Coptic word is moone) – the title occurs in a list on a papyrus in the Austrian National Library in Vienna (CPR XII 5; inv. K. 4494), but we know nothing about the individual mentioned there. Why are wet nurses almost never mentioned, then, in Coptic texts?

In Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt (ca 3^rd century BCE to 4^th century CE) there isn’t the same absence. Wet nurse contracts are known from this period in which a woman is hired to nurse an infant. The earliest contract that we know of comes from the site Tebtunis in the Fayum and dates to 7 May 231 BCE. The bulk of the document is written in Demotic (P.Cairo dem. 30604), with Greek lines noting its place and date of registration (P.Tebt. II 297). In this case, the woman Sponnesis daughter of Horus and Taues is contracted by the man Phanesis son of Nechtyris to nurse his son Petesouchos for three years: “I am for you the wet nurse, my milk being good from both breasts.” She promises to care for, nurture, and protect the boy. (For more about this text and other early wet nurse contracts, see Parca 2017, noted below.)

In earlier periods of Egyptian history, breastfeeding is not an uncommon topic in art. One of my favourite statues (shown above) dates to Egypt’s Old Kingdom and is today on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A woman kneels down with a child on her knee and she holds out her breast for the child to suckle, while another child takes matters into his own hand and pulls her other breast under her other arm in order to feed as well. Dating over a thousand years later, a sketch on a limestone ostracon from the village Deir el-Medina (on the west bank of the Nile opposite Karnak/Luxor) in the British Museum’s collection shows a woman sitting and breastfeeding (shown below).

And so why are wet nurses – or breastfeeding itself – so rare in Coptic documents? In Coptic literature concerning the holy family, passages state that Mary was breastfed until she was three years old, while she in turn breastfed the infant Jesus until he was the same age. At the same time, paintings of Mary suckling Jesus adorned churches across the Mediterranean world. There was no censor of the idea or the image.

This brings us to a wee problem in using written sources for the study of the ancient world. There is so much about which we may want to know that simply is never mentioned. Why would somebody need to write to somebody else about their breastfeeding plans? If they ever had to discuss the matter, they’d do so in person. For many periods and places, using a wet nurse may have been such a common event that it did not need to be written down in a formal contract. The Coptic letter from Maria reminds us, in case we were in any doubt, that wet nurses existed, even if we rarely read about them.

Technical Details (Papyrus)
Provenance: Unknown. 
Date: 7th century? CE 
Language: Coptic; Sahidic dialect. 
Collection: Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (purchased 1912 from the Amherst collection). 
Designation: P.Amh. II 188 descr. (note: ‘descr.’ indicates that no edition was published, just a description; for the papyrological sigla, see the Checklist of Editions).
Bibliography: Alain Delattre, Perrine Pilette and Naïm Vanthieghem (2018) “Papyrus coptes de la Pierpont Morgan Library II: Lettre de condoléances d’une nourrice,” Journal of Coptic Studies 20: 1–10 (available online here). 

Technical Details (Object #1)
Provenance: probably tomb of Nikauinpu, Giza, Egypt
Date: Dynasty 5, Old Kingdom (ca. 2420–2389 BCE). 
Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art: 26.7.1405 – on display in Gallery 103. 

Technical Details (Object #2)
Provenance: Deir el-Medina, Egypt 
Date: Dynasty 19 or 20, New Kingdom (1295–1069 BCE). 
Collection: British Museum, Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan: EA8506. 

Some bibliography
Burt Kasparian (2007) “La condition des nourrices sous le Moyen Empire,” Bulletin de l’Institut français d’archéologie Orientale 107: 109–126 (available online here – open access). 
Maryline Parca (2017) “The Wet Nurses of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt,” Illinois Classical Studies 42: 203–226 (available online here – if you have JStor access).