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How ancient Egypt shaped our idea of beauty

(Image credit:

Two 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 simply projecting our own values onto them? Alastair Sooke investigates.

Westward

Walking around Beyond Beauty, the new exhibition organised past charitable foundation the Bulldog Trust in the neo-Gothic mansion of Two Temple Identify 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 Britain's regional museums, consist of what we would call beauty products, of one sort or another.

In that location are dinky combs and handheld mirrors made of copper alloy or, more rarely, silver. There are siltstone palettes, carved to resemble animals, which were used for grinding minerals such as green malachite and kohl for eye makeup.

At that place are also pale calcite jars and vessels of assorted sizes, in which makeup, also every bit unguents and perfumes, could be stored. Then there is a scrap of homo hair 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 column of papyrus (Credit: Courtesy Two Temple Place/Macclesfield Museum)

And, of course, at that place are lots of striking examples of Egyptian jewellery, including a cord of beads, decorated with carnelian pendants in the shape of poppy heads, establish in the grave of a pocket-sized child wrapped in matting.

In curt, ancient Egyptians of both sexes obviously went to keen lengths to touch up their advent.

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

All the same, for modern archaeologists, the ubiquity of beauty products in ancient Egypt offers a puzzler.

On the ane mitt, it is possible that ancient Egyptians were besotted with superficial advent, much as we are today. Indeed, perhaps they even set the template for how we still perceive dazzler.

Simply, on the other, at that place is a chance that we could projection our own narcissistic values onto a fundamentally different civilization. Is it possible that the significance of cosmetic artefacts in ancient Egypt went beyond the frivolous desire simply to look attractive?

Sensibly sexy

This is what many archaeologists now believe. Take the mutual utilise of kohl center makeup in aboriginal Egypt – the inspiration for smoky eye makeup today. Contempo scientific enquiry 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 eye-liner – but make-up for the ancient Egyptians was functional as well every bit aesthetic (Credit: Ii Temple Place/Macclesfield Museum)

In addition, the heavy application of kohl around the eyes would have helped to reduce glare from the sun. In other words, in that location were simple, practical reasons why both men and women in aboriginal Arab republic of egypt wished to wear eye makeup.

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

A fired dirt female effigy, 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 form, in ancient Egypt, tattoos probably had a decorative purpose.

But they may take had a protective function besides. At that place is show 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, equally a precaution against crabs disease.

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

These corrective pots contained kohl, which the ancient Egyptians applied like center-liner, perhaps to screen out the dominicus (Credit: Two Temple Place/Ipswich Museum)

To complicate matters further, there are eye-catching exceptions to the full general rule whereby aristocracy aboriginal Egyptians presented themselves in a stereotypically 'beautiful' manner.

Consider the official portraiture of the Heart Kingdom pharaoh Senwosret 3. Although his naked torso is athletic and youthful – idealised, in line with before royal portraits – his face is careworn and cracked with furrows. Moreover his ears, to modern viewers, appear comically large – inappreciably an attribute, you would recall, of male person beauty.

Even so, in ancient Arab republic of egypt, the effect wouldn't have been funny. "In the Old Kingdom, kings were god-kings," explains Tyldesley, who is a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester. "But by the Eye Kingdom, kings [such as Senwosret] recognised that things could crumble and go incorrect, which is why they look a flake worried."

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

Queen of the Nile

Why, so, exercise nosotros continue to associate ancient Egypt with glamour and beauty? "We still detect aboriginal Egyptian civilisation very seductive," agrees Tyldesley, who believes that this is due to the afterlives of 2 famous Egyptian queens: Cleopatra and Nefertiti.

Ever since antiquity, post-obit the Roman conquest of Egypt, Cleopatra has been known every bit a paragon of beauty. Meanwhile the discovery, in 1912, of the famous painted bosom of Nefertiti, now in Berlin's Egyptian Museum, turned a little-known wife 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, there is irony to the fact that these two Egyptian queens at present resonate as sex activity symbols.

For one affair, explains Tyldesley, "Cleopatra has given united states of america the thought that ancient Egyptian women were all cute, but we don't actually know what she looked similar."

In her coinage, Tyldesley says, "Cleopatra had a large olfactory organ, a protruding chin, and wrinkles – non what most people would call beautiful. You could debate that she appeared on her coins like that on purpose, considering she wanted to expect stern, and non particularly feminine. But even Plutarch, who never met her either, said that her dazzler was in her vivacity and her phonation, and not in her appearance. Yet we have decided that she was beautiful and that she has to expect like Elizabeth Taylor. I remember that the thought 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 Play a trick on)

As for Nefertiti, Tyldesley points out that her bosom is not typical of ancient Egyptian art: "Information technology's an unusual statue in that it's got all the plaster on and it's colourful – a lot of the artwork we have is more stereotyped and less personal-looking than that."

Moreover, the moment when the bust 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 twelvemonth, and Nefertiti's angular, geometric appearance chimed with fashionable sense of taste. "She's very modern-looking, very Art Deco," says Tyldesley. "So everybody seemed to like her. It'southward hard to detect anybody who didn't think that Nefertiti was beautiful."

When this bosom of Nefertiti was discovered in 1912, the queen instantly became a sex activity 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 before, without newspapers or the picture palace, that wouldn't have happened," says Tyldesley. "She would have gone into a museum and nobody would accept made the fuss they did."

She pauses. "I wonder whether the fact that Nefertiti was put on display in Berlin as a major observe really influenced what we saw. After all, dazzler, as we know, is in the middle of the beholder."

Alastair Sooke is Fine art Critic of The Daily Telegraph

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Source: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160204-how-ancient-egypt-shaped-our-idea-of-beauty

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