On the Various Methods of Representing Hair in the Wall-Paintings of the Theban Tombs Pp. 113-116

Egypt Exploration Society

On the Various Methods of Representing Hair in the Wall-Paintings of the Theban Tombs Author(s): Ernest Mackay Source: The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Apr., 1918), pp. 113-116 Published by: Egypt Exploration Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3853729 Accessed: 11/01/2010 07:57 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ees. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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113

ON THE VARIOUS METHODS OF REPRESENTING HAIR IN THE WALL-PAINTINGS OF THE THEBAN TOMBS BY ERNEST MACKAY IN the wall-paintings of the Egyptian tombs the head of the human figure is always represented as either completely bare or covered with a wig. In the period of the Eighteenth Dynasty it is usually the less important figures that are represented with bare or shaven heads, though occasionally an important personage is portrayed without a wig. In the latter case, however, he is always shown acting in a priestly capacity or performing a religious rite. During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties even the most important male figures are often drawn with bare and shaven heads, as is to be seen in many Ramesside tombs, the reason being that in this period such people were nearly always represented as acting in a sacerdotal capacity. The shaven portion of the head was either painted the same colour as the body or a lighter tint. The latter was the more usual method in the earlier period, the colour commonly employed being either a brownish-red or brick-red which contrasted well with the dark red used for the rest of the body. In Ramesside times, however, this distinction of colour between the shaven part of the head and the rest of the body was rarely made. Very closely cropped or newly-growing hair was often represented by painting the head a deep pink colour covered with numbers of black or red spots. Good examples of such work may be seen in the tombs of Meryamun and Userhet (nos. 22 and 56). The usual method of representing a wig was to paint it in black or blue, the latter colour being quite frequently used. It is difficult to understand why blue should have been used for this purpose unless we suppose that the ancient Egyptian could not readily distinguish between black and blue, as is the case with the fellahin at the present day. Another possible explanation is that certain kinds of black hair appear to have a bluish tint in a strong light, whereas others are distinctly warm in colourl. Black, however, was the colour more frequently used, though both black and blue wigs are often to be seen in the same wall-painting. A serious disadvantage attended the use of black paint for this purpose in that much of it was not of a permanent nature. In some tombs it has practically disappeared, especially where it has been exposed to a strong light, so that the wigs on many figures appear never to have been painted black at all. 1 In the story of the Destruction of Mankind, it is related that when Re', the Sun-god, was grown old, his "bones were of silver, his flesh of gold, and his hair of lapis lazuli." The writer has not, however, found any instances in the Theban tombs of hair being coloured blue to denote age, nor is it clear that this was intended by the Egyptian writer, who may be referring to the august rather than to the senile appearance of the god.

ERNEST MACKAY

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The wigs of the more important figures in a tomb are represented in several different ways, but the most interesting are those with the curls in relief. These were always very carefully done, and in the finest examples their execution must have occupied the artist a considerable time. The preliminary stage in the best work was to draw a series of fine horizontal lines across the outlined head to serve as guides in order to enable the artist to set the curls in as regular order as possible. The method can be best studied in the tombs of Menkheper (no. 79, see Fig. 1) and of Baki (no. 18), where both the beginning and end

Fig. i.

Heads from the tomb of Menkheper (no. 79).

of the process may be seen'. In the tomb of Menkheper, the lines were drawn about 11 mm. apart, apparently with the help of a very narrow ruler or straight-edge, with whose width the space between the lines evidently corresponded, for no attempt was made to mark off with points the positions of the lines, as would have been done had an ordinary straight-edge been used. The curls, which resemble pear-shaped drops hanging vertically, are composed entirely of thick blue paint or coloured paste. In other tombs such curls were similarly formned,but plaster was generally the substance used for the purpose and was, after setting, painted black or blue. There is only one way in which such curls could have been made, namely, by dipping a pointed stick into the liquid material and applying it to the wall with a drop of plaster or coloured paste hanging from it. In no case so far discovered in the necropolis were such wigs cut out of solid material or modelled in the mass in wet plaster; they were evidently invariably made, curl by curl, from fluid material. The guiding lines above mentioned would obviously be useless for any other method, being drawn, as they are, directly on the unpainted plaster of the tomb wall and at a deeper level than the outer surface of the curls. A very effective wig is to be seen in the tomb of Antef (no. 155). It is made from drops of blue paste in the manner described above, but differs from the wigs already mentioned in that the ground between the raised curls is painted black, the whole forming a very imposing head-dress. Another method of representing the hair on a wig in relief, of which, however, examples have up to the present time been found in only two tombs, namely those of Huy and Rekhmire (nos. 54 and 100), was to make a series of raised lines in plaster radiating from a point on the top of the head, the lower part of the wig nearest the face being composed of drops as in the tombs above mentioned, nos. 18, 54 and 79. These raised lines 1 Such lines are also to be seen in the tomb of Huy (no. 54), in a figure of Huy on the left jamb of the entrance doorway.

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must have been cut or moulded in plaster, as they could hardly have been made in any other way'. Wigs represented in relief in painted tombs appear to date from the period between Tuthmosis II and Amenophis III; none of either earlier or later date have been discovered in the Theban Necropolis. In any given painted tomb the wig of the deceased is never shown in relief more than once or twice; in all the other representations of him it is merely painted on the flat. In the finer painted tombs, however, much care was taken even with a painted wig in order to make it as realistic as possible, and the colours used for this purpose were very varied. A rare method of depicting a curled wig was to paint it blue and to represent the curls by rows of small black triangles, the apices of the triangles in each row touching the bases of those in the row above. Good examples of this method are to be seen in the tombs of Anena (see Fig. 2), Antef and Amenemhet (nos. 81,155 and 182). In the tomb of another Amenemhet (no. 82, see Fig. 32), this arrangement was reversed, for the apices of the triangles point downwards. All these tombs, with one exception, are dated to the

Fig.

2.

From

the tomb

Anena (no. 8i)

of

Fig. 3.

From

DAVIES-GARDINER,

Tombof Amenemhet,P1. VIII

Fig. 4.

From

DAVIES-GARDINER,

Tomb of Amenemhet,PI. XVIII

time of Tuthmosis III; and though the exception, owing to the absence of definite evidence, cannot be exactly dated, there is a strong presumption that it belongs to the samneperiod. This method of representing the curls in a wig by rows of small triangles comes down from the Old Kingdom, but is only found in the Theban Necropolis in tombs of the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty. It should also be noted that in the tombs of Amenemhet (Fig. 43) and Antef (nos. 82 and 155), some of the figures in the wall paintings wear head-dresses with thick black horizontal lines painted on a blue ground. This is a very remarkable way to represent a wig, and beyond the examples in the two tombs mentioned, the writer knows of no others in the necropolis. In four tombs (nos. 16, 147, 181 and 255) there are wigs in which the hair is painted in black on a ground of dark grey-blue or slate grey. The ground-colours used for the wigs in Tombs 38, 43, 55, 56, 64 and 93 were light red and both light and dark brown, the hair, whether in curls or straight, being painted in black. In the tomb of Sennuffer 1 Wigs of a somewhat similar design, but cut in stone, may be seen in the tombs of Ramose and Khaemhet (nos. 55 and 57). 2 See DAVIES-GARDINER, Tomb of Amenem/et (no. 82), P1. VIII. 3 See op. cit., PI. XVIII.

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(no. 96) a wig is to be seen, in which a series of thick black wavy lines representing the hair are painted close together on a yellow ground. The representation of the wigs presented difficulties in the case of the small bodies or gangs of men frequently to be seen in Egyptian wall-paintings, whether the personal servants of the deceased or men over whomnhe had authority when alive, such as soldiers or labourers on temple lands, for they were usually drawn in rows, standing one partly behind the other. The result was that, owing to the Egyptian use of flat colours and the total absence of light and shade in their paintings, the heads and bodies of the figures tended to blend into one another so as to form a shapeless mass of colour. As a general rule, with a view to obviating this difficulty, each figure was outlined with a thin red line of a darkertint than the colour it enclosed, but in many cases this was found to be somewhat unsatisfactory, as such an outline could be seen only from comparatively close to the wall. The simple expedient was, therefore, adopted of painting alternate bodies of a lighter tint, a method extensively used throughout the Theban Necropolis, and the same system was applied in painting the head-dresses of the figures. One of the best examples of this is to be seen in the tomb of Kenamufn (no. 93), where the wigs of three large and important figures standing partly one behind the other are painted in three different colours. The wig of the foremost figure is dark red, that of the second dark yellow and of the third grey, a series of wavy curls being drawn on the ground-colour in each case. Another good example is to be found in the tomb of Amenemiihab(no. 85), where the wigs of a row of figures are painted in turn black, light red, black, blue, black, light red, and so on, with no attempt to represent either curls or straight hair. Then again in the tomb of Ramose (no. 55), a well painted row of mrnenwear black wigs, alternately with red ones adorned with black curls. An exceptionally interesting case of a series of wigs being differentiated without the use of colour is to be seen on the south-west wall of the tomb of Rekhmire (no. 100), where there is a row of six men overlapping each other considerably. No attempt has been made to contrast the figures by the use of different colours, the faces and bodies being merely outlined in dark red, as in the case of single figures, but the wigs are distinguished from each other by varying the shape of the raised plaster curls in alternate figures. Thus the leading figure has a wig with horizontal plaster drops to represent curls, the drops are vertical in the second figure, and so on alternately, the last man having a wig simnilarin design to the second. In portraits of women the wig is painted either black or blue, the latter colour being rarely found. Three types of head-dress are to be seen, namely wigs with hair tassels hanging from the lower border, others with a plain border, and head-dresses consisting mainly of loosely twisted or plaited strands, which were mostly worn by dancing girls and female musicians. The lower borders of the wigs of these three types are drawn either falling in front of the hinder shoulder of the wearer, or partly in front of and partly behind it. No attempt was made to represent in relief the hair upon a wig worn by a woman, which is curious, considering the care expended on the head-dresses worn by the men. Women, with but few exceptions, were never represented with the head bare, and these exceptions are, in all cases, women personating goddesses in funeral ceremonies, as may be seen in the tomb of Amenemhet (no. 82), where the cropped or newly growing hair is plainly indicated on the women's heads'. 1 On the left hand side of the passage. See DAVIES-GARDINER, op. cit., P1.XI.