What Fashion Trends Uses Minerals as the Egyptians

How aboriginal Egypt shaped our idea of beauty

(Image credit:

Ii Temple Place/Macclesfield Museum

)

Pop culture is steeped in images of smoky-eyed pharaohs and their queens. Were the ancient Egyptians insufferably vain – or are we just projecting our own values onto them? Alastair Sooke investigates.

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Walking around Across Beauty, the new exhibition organised by charitable foundation the Bulldog Trust in the neo-Gothic mansion of Two Temple Place in central London, you would be forgiven for thinking that the ancient Egyptians were insufferably vain.

Many of the 350 exhibits, drawn from the overlooked collections of Uk's regional museums, consist of what nosotros would call beauty products, of one sort or some other.

At that place are dinky combs and handheld mirrors made of copper blend or, more than rarely, silver. There are siltstone palettes, carved to resemble animals, which were used for grinding minerals such as greenish malachite and kohl for eye makeup.

In that location are also stake calcite jars and vessels of contrasted sizes, in which makeup, as well as unguents and perfumes, could be stored. Then there is a bit of man pilus that suggests the ancient Egyptians commonly wore hair extensions and wigs.

This copper alloy mirror from the second Millennium BC has a handle made out of stone that looks like a cavalcade of papyrus (Credit: Courtesy Ii Temple Place/Macclesfield Museum)

And, of class, there are lots of striking examples of Egyptian jewellery, including a string of beads, decorated with carnelian pendants in the shape of poppy heads, found in the grave of a small child wrapped in matting.

In short, ancient Egyptians of both sexes manifestly went to smashing lengths to impact up their appearance.

Moreover, this was just as truthful in death as it was in life: witness the smooth, serene faces, with regular features and prominent eyes emphasised by dramatic blackness outlines, typically painted onto cartonnage mummy masks and wooden coffins.

Yet, for modernistic archaeologists, the ubiquity of beauty products in aboriginal Egypt offers a conundrum.

On the one hand, information technology is possible that ancient Egyptians were besotted with superficial appearance, much as we are today. Indeed, perhaps they even gear up the template for how we still perceive beauty.

But, on the other, there is a risk that we could project our ain narcissistic values onto a fundamentally different culture. Is information technology possible that the significance of corrective artefacts in ancient Arab republic of egypt went beyond the frivolous desire simply to look attractive?

Sensibly sexy

This is what many archaeologists now believe. Take the common use of kohl eye makeup in ancient Egypt – the inspiration for smoky eye makeup today. Contempo scientific research suggests that the toxic, lead-based mineral that formed its base would have had anti-bacterial properties when mixed with moisture from the eyes.

Elaborate sarcophagi depict faces with heavy centre-liner – but make-up for the ancient Egyptians was functional as well equally aesthetic (Credit: Two Temple Identify/Macclesfield Museum)

In addition, the heavy application of kohl effectually the optics would have helped to reduce glare from the sun. In other words, there were simple, practical reasons why both men and women in aboriginal Egypt wished to wearable eye makeup.

It's the same with other aboriginal Egyptian 'beauty products'. Wigs helped to reduce the run a risk of lice. Jewellery had powerful symbolic and religious significance.

A fired clay female person figure, depicting an erotic dancer, excavated at Abydos in Upper Egypt and now in the exhibition at Two Temple Place, is embellished with indentations that were meant to represent tattoos. Of class, in ancient Arab republic of egypt, tattoos probably had a decorative purpose.

But they may have had a protective function besides. There is evidence that, during the New Kingdom, dancing girls and prostitutes used to tattoo their thighs with images of the dwarf deity Bes, who warded off evil, as a precaution against crabs disease.

"The more I try to understand what the Egyptians themselves understood as 'beautiful'", says Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley, "the more confusing it becomes, because everything seems to have a double purpose. When it comes to ancient Egypt, I don't know if 'beauty' is the right discussion to use."

These cosmetic pots independent kohl, which the ancient Egyptians practical like eye-liner, possibly to screen out the sun (Credit: Two Temple Place/Ipswich Museum)

To complicate matters farther, there are heart-catching exceptions to the general rule whereby aristocracy ancient Egyptians presented themselves in a stereotypically 'beautiful' fashion.

Consider the official portraiture of the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Senwosret Iii. Although his naked torso is athletic and youthful – idealised, in line with earlier royal portraits – his face is careworn and croaky with furrows. Moreover his ears, to modern viewers, announced comically large – hardly an attribute, you would recall, of male person beauty.

Yet, in ancient Egypt, the effect wouldn't have been funny. "In the Former Kingdom, kings were god-kings," explains Tyldesley, who is a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester. "But by the Centre Kingdom, kings [such as Senwosret] recognised that things could crumble and go wrong, which is why they look a scrap worried."

"The big ears are telling us that this king will listen to the people," she adds. "It would be wrong to have his portrait literally and say he looked like this."

Queen of the Nile

Why, then, exercise we continue to acquaintance ancient Arab republic of egypt with glamour and beauty? "We still discover aboriginal Egyptian civilisation very seductive," agrees Tyldesley, who believes that this is due to the afterlives of ii famous Egyptian queens: Cleopatra and Nefertiti.

Always since antiquity, post-obit the Roman conquest of Arab republic of egypt, Cleopatra has been known equally a paragon of beauty. Meanwhile the discovery, in 1912, of the famous painted bust of Nefertiti, now in Berlin's Egyptian Museum, turned a piddling-known married woman of the pharaoh Akhenaten into a pivot-up of the ancient world.

Yet, says Tyldesley, who has written a biography of Cleopatra and is researching a book on Nefertiti, in that location is irony to the fact that these two Egyptian queens now resonate every bit sex symbols.

For ane thing, explains Tyldesley, "Cleopatra has given the states the thought that aboriginal Egyptian women were all beautiful, but nosotros don't actually know what she looked like."

In her coinage, Tyldesley says, "Cleopatra had a big nose, a protruding chin, and wrinkles – not what virtually people would call beautiful. You could argue that she appeared on her coins like that on purpose, because she wanted to look stern, and non particularly feminine. Only even Plutarch, who never met her either, said that her beauty was in her vivacity and her vocalisation, and non in her advent. Yet we have decided that she was beautiful and that she has to expect like Elizabeth Taylor. I retrieve that the idea of Cleopatra, rather than Cleopatra herself, has influenced us."

The notion of ancient Egyptians as glamorous comes largely from Cleopatra, whose wiles ensnared Caesar – Elizabeth Taylor did not discredit that idea (Credit: 20th Century Fob)

As for Nefertiti, Tyldesley points out that her bust is non typical of ancient Egyptian fine art: "It's an unusual statue in that it's got all the plaster on and it'due south colourful – a lot of the artwork we have is more stereotyped and less personal-looking than that."

Moreover, the moment when the bosom was unveiled in Berlin – in 1923 – was crucial to its reception. 'Egyptomania' was in the air, following the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun the previous yr, and Nefertiti's angular, geometric appearance chimed with stylish taste. "She's very modern-looking, very Fine art Deco," says Tyldesley. "And so everybody seemed to similar her. Information technology's hard to observe anybody who didn't remember that Nefertiti was beautiful."

When this bust of Nefertiti was discovered in 1912, the queen instantly became a sexual practice symbol of the ancient world (Credit: Philip Pikart/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 3.0)

During the '20s, the bust of Nefertiti also benefited from the power of the mass media to turn her into a star. "A hundred years earlier, without newspapers or the picture palace, that wouldn't have happened," says Tyldesley. "She would take gone into a museum and nobody would have made the fuss they did."

She pauses. "I wonder whether the fact that Nefertiti was put on display in Berlin as a major detect actually influenced what we saw. After all, beauty, every bit we know, is in the eye of the beholder."

Alastair Sooke is Art Critic of The Daily Telegraph

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