“THE PERCEPTION

BEAUTY”
Egyptian

PANCHALI LIYANAWADUGE
 There 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.

There are also pale calcite jars and vessels of assorted sizes, in which
makeup, as well as unguents and perfumes, could be stored. Then
there is a scrap of human hair that suggests the ancient Egyptians
commonly wore hair extensions and wigs.

This copper alloy mirror from the 2nd 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, 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 apparently went to great
lengths to touch up their appearance.
Moreover, this was just as true in death as it 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.
Yet, for modern archaeologists, the ubiquity of beauty products in
ancient Egypt offers a conundrum.
On the one hand, it is possible that ancient Egyptians were besotted
with superficial appearance, much as we are today. Indeed, perhaps
they even set the template for how we still perceive beauty.
But, on the other, there is a risk that we could project our own
narcissistic values onto a fundamentally different culture. Is it possible
that the significance of cosmetic artefacts in ancient Egypt went beyond
the frivolous desire simply to look attractive?
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. Recent 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 eye-liner – but make-up for the ancient Egyptians
was functional as well as aesthetic (Credit: Two 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, there were simple,
practical reasons why both men and women in ancient Egypt wished to
wear eye makeup.
It’s the same with other ancient Egyptian ‘beauty products’. Wigs
helped to reduce the risk of lice. Jewelry had powerful symbolic and
religious significance.
A fired clay female 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 course, in ancient Egypt, tattoos probably had a decorative purpose.
But they may have had a protective function too. 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 venereal disease.
Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley says, “The more confusing it becomes,
because everything seems to have a double purpose.
 To complicate matters further, there are eye-catching exceptions to
the general rule whereby elite 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
cracked with furrows. Moreover his ears, to modern viewers, appear
comically large – hardly an attribute, you would think, of male beauty.
Yet, in ancient 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 Middle Kingdom,
kings [such as Senwosret] recognised that things could crumble and go
wrong, which is why they look a bit worried.”
“The big 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.”
Why, then, do we continue to associate ancient Egypt with glamour and
beauty? “We still find ancient Egyptian civilisation very seductive,”
agrees Tyldesley, who believes that this is due to the afterlives of two
famous Egyptian queens: Cleopatra and Nefertiti.
Ever since antiquity, following the Roman conquest of Egypt, Cleopatra
has been known as a paragon of beauty. Meanwhile the discovery, in
1912, of the famous painted bust of Nefertiti, now in Berlin’s Egyptian
Museum, turned a little-known wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten into a
pin-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 now resonate as sex symbols.
For one thing, explains Tyldesley, “Cleopatra has given us the idea that
ancient Egyptian women were all beautiful, but we don’t actually know
what she looked like.”

The notion of ancient Egyptians as glamorous comes largely from Cleopatra, whose wiles
ensnared Caesar 

As for Nefertiti, Tyldesley points out that her bust is not typical of
ancient Egyptian art: “It’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 year, and
Nefertiti’s angular, geometric appearance chimed with fashionable
taste. “She’s very modern-looking, very Art Deco,” says Tyldesley. “So
everybody seemed to like her. It’s hard to find anybody who didn’t
think that Nefertiti was beautiful.”
[When this bust of Nefertiti was discovered in 1912, the queen instantly became a sex symbol
of the ancient world]

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 cinema, that wouldn’t have happened,”
says Tyldesley. “She would have 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 find actually influenced what we saw. After
all, beauty, as we know, is in the eye of the beholder.”

Egyptian Make Up
• Egyptian Make Up and Cosmetics
The Ancient Egyptians, both men and women, wore distinct eye
makeup, rouge and perfumed oils that softened the skin and
prevented burning in the sun and damage from the sandy winds.
Not only did the men and women of Egypt wear makeup but also
 the statues of their gods and goddesses were adorned with all
these different types of cosmetics. The higher the status of the
person the more clothes and make-up they wore.
• Egyptian Eye Make up
The Ancient Egyptian eye makeup was extremely elaborate and
created the almond eye look which has become synonymous with
the Ancient Egyptians. Eye make-up had a long history in Ancient
Egypt and both men and women were using eye make as early as
4000BC. The eye make they used concentrated in providing color
to their eye lashes, eye lids and eye brows. The favorite eye
makeup colors were black and green. The powders used to create
the eye makeup were ground on a palette then mixed with water
to form a paste.
 Egyptian Black Eye Make Up - Kohl
the black coloring of Ancient Egyptian eye makeup, favored in the
Period of the New Kingdom, was achieved by the use of Kohl.
 The eye makeup Kohl was obtained from galena
 Galena is a blue-grey natural mineral form of lead sulfide
 Galena deposits were found and mined in the eastern dessert at
Gebel el-Zeit
 One of the earliest uses of galena was as kohl
 Kohl is a mixture of soot and galena. The Egyptian eye make kohl
was stored in richly decorated containers called kohl pots.
Ancient Egyptian sex bombs were typically slender with narrow
shoulders and a high waist. The Egyptians also valued symmetrical
faces.

 
Egyptian fashion was created to keep cool while in the hot desert.
Thank you