With so many distinguished Egyptologists devoting entire careers to the Amarna Period, it was difficult to imagine how anything could be added to the subject which hadn’t been considered a hundred times before. Yet, inspired by Julia Samson’s belief that a study of the regalia and wigs worn by the Amarna royals could help us understand more about this extraordinary period in history, I was greatly encouraged in my own research.
A quick glance at my family history shows that those of us not employed in the funeral trade were generally involved with hairdressing. As far back as 1884 my maternal great-grandfather was apprenticed to a gentleman’s hairdresser’s in Barnsley, and my uncle’s family ran a large hairdressing business in the Channel Islands. On the other side of the family my paternal great-grandfather ran a barber’s shop and hairdresser’s in a small village just outside Barnsley, and my aunt managed one of the largest salons in the area. It was even my own alternative choice of career should Egyptology not work out, since hair and how people treat it has always intrigued me.
While studying Egyptology at UCL I decided to combine my interests and in 1985, with the encouragement of my tutor, a former student of Margaret Murray, I began research into the fascinating world of ancient Egyptian hair. I had assumed that masses would already have been written on such a fascinating subject, but was surprised to discover that hair had never really received the detailed treatment it so obviously deserved. Largely ignored by most earlier Egyptologists, who seemed to regard it as very much a ‘woman’s subject’, it was seen as a rather bizarre choice of study when compared to the more mainstream areas that had been pored over by generations of learned men.
Whilst immensely important, of course, the tendency to overemphasise obscure linguistic conundrums and grammatical niceties can sometimes create something of an imbalance in Egyptology. Less than 1 per cent of the ancient population were able to read and write, so could it really be the best way to study the lives of the vast majority of the population? I suppose the answer depended to a large extent on who you considered the ancient Egyptians to have been. For many early scholars, ancient Egypt appears to have been populated by a literate male elite of kings, priests and scribes, with the silent majority dismissed as little more than illiterate peasants. But it was these same peasants whose efforts created the culture in the first place, and regardless of their inability to leave behind a convenient written record, they too clearly deserved to be the subject of serious study.
Fortunately, the Egyptian climate provided a democracy of its own by preserving the people themselves. Since time immemorial ordinary burials had taken place in little more than a hole in the sand, and the hot, dry surroundings had often preserved skin and hair as effectively as any expensively prepared mummy within an elaborate tomb. By studying such remains, I felt it should be possible to obtain a good idea of how Egyptians throughout society had treated their hair and what they had done to enhance their appearance and demonstrate their status; in short, to find out what had made these people tick.
They had certainly regarded hair as potent stuff, and whilst many of them had worn hair extensions, others had shaved their heads and worn wigs, combining a desire for ornate and impressive hairstyles with the practical considerations of comfort. In such a hot climate a shaven or cropped head would have been the coolest option, but some sort of head cover would then be needed to guard against the sun. A wig provided a better solution than a scarf or turban since it allowed body heat to escape through its net-like base at the same time as protecting the head. Inevitably wigs developed as a means of showing off wealth, status or religious affiliations, with certain styles only worn by certain people. I wanted to discover whether it was possible to identify otherwise anonymous individuals on the basis of their hairstyle.
I began with the Petrie Museum’s hair-related material, from the beautifully coiffured Amarna nobleman carved on the back of the co-regency stela to the wide variety of ancient hairdressing tools, together with the different types of hair Petrie had found in both towns and tombs. I also spent a great deal of time down the road in the British Museum, wandering through its galleries, making notes of the sculptures, reliefs and paintings, and studying the museum’s reserve collection of mummified heads. I was also given permission to examine an amazing wig acquired in the nineteenth century which was composed entirely of human hair set in light brown curls over several hundred dark brown plaits. Found along with its wig box in a tomb at the village of Deir el-Medina, it had been studied only once before, in 1975, by a leading hair specialist based in the Channel Islands. Given my own family’s hairdressing links on the islands, we began to compare notes, and so began a rather unusual correspondence on matters relating to ancient hair.
Even when I had produced the required undergraduate dissertation I had still only scratched the surface of this vast subject, and very much wanted to carry on. By comparing surviving wigs and mummy hair with the way they were portrayed in art, I felt it might be possible to set up some sort of chronology which didn’t rely solely on written evidence. Doing the job properly would mean looking through more than three thousand years’ worth of paintings, reliefs, sculptures, wigs and the mummies themselves, all of which were scattered across the world, in collections, in store rooms and in Egypt itself.
Although this research would obviously take years I remained blithely undaunted, no doubt fuelled in part by naive enthusiasm. It was just as Margaret Murray had once described it, as ‘having added to the knowledge of your subject, of having filled a small and possibly not very important gap, but still a gap. This is one of the purest joys that life can give . . . it at once becomes a habit, and like dram-drinking you can’t stop, you must go on.’
Armed with a degree in ancient history and Egyptology, followed by a year studying German to help me to track down some of the more obscure hair-related references, I was raring to go and decided to apply to Manchester University as a postgraduate student. Grants were pretty thin on the ground even then, so my first year was to be self-funded, on the understanding that I could apply to the university for a grant if my research looked promising.
Manchester was the perfect choice situated in the north and so relatively close to my hometown. Much of its fine collection of Egyptology material came from Petrie’s excavations following his split from the Egypt Exploration Society in 1886. After this date he had received alternative funding from Amelia Edwards’s friend, a wealthy Bolton manufacturer named Jesse Haworth. Having financed Petrie’s work for nine years, Haworth donated his share of the antiquities to Manchester’s University Museum.
A perfect complement to Petrie’s own collection at UCL, Manchester ended up with a most impressive array of objects relating to daily life. Many were discovered at Kahun, a well-planned town that housed pyramid builders more than five hundred years before the Amarna Period. Amongst their personal possessions Petrie found equipment belonging to builders, carpenters, potters and even the town magician, together with pots of green and black eye paint, powdered red haematite for reddening the lips, and wooden cosmetics boxes with sliding lids. The finished effect would have been admired in the polished bronze mirrors he found, their handles shaped like lotus flowers or the head of Hathor, goddess of beauty, perhaps reflecting the hopes of the ancient owner to absorb a little of the goddess’s legendary good looks. There were also ivory hair pins, finetoothed wooden combs, small bronze hair-curlers, part of an intricately made wig and even a supply of carefully prepared lengths of hair assumed to be dolls’ hair – the building it was found in dubbed the ‘Toy-maker’s Shop’.
There was a similar division between UCL and Manchester of finds from Petrie’s excavations at Gurob, the town in northern Egypt where he discovered burials of blond-haired people whom he believed were of Aegean origin. Gurob was also the site of Amenhotep III’s country retreat, an old royal palace enlarged to house his vast entourage of wives, female relatives and children. It seems to have been a place where the royal family could escape the pressures of royal life, and its luxurious rooms were decorated and furnished with Egyptian and foreign designs similar to those seen further south in the official palace at Malkata.
In addition to fine blue-glazed Egyptian pottery, Aegean ware and Syrian-inspired vessels, the excavations also produced items of dress and adornment worn by the ancient inhabitants. There were detachable linen sleeves – a convenient way to keep clean those parts of a garment which get most dirty, especially when worn by children – as well as alabaster dishes and perfume pots, razors, combs, rings, necklaces, scarab seal amulets and an eye paint container naming Akhenaten’s sister, Princess Henuttaneb. Even toys were found, such as a miniature horse and a pull-along boat on wheels complete with a ramming device and steering oar, which may have come from the royal nursery.
After Amenhotep III’s death the palace had been inherited by Akhenaten and Nefertiti, and Queen Tiy seems to have spent much of her time at Gurob with her daughters. Beautifully dressed figurines of her female staff of servants and singers headed by Lady Teye were found in a tomb there by locals in the late nineteenth century, together with a magnificent head of the great dowager queen herself. Made from a combination of imported Cypriot yew wood and Egyptian acacia, the head, now housed in Berlin, is only about two inches high, yet her extraordinary face is so life-like that it conveys a powerful sense of the queen’s determined personality.
Manchester also housed a fine selection of objects from Amarna, discovered during the excavations of Petrie, Woolley and Pendlebury. Along with an exact copy of Nefertiti’s famous ‘beautiful’ bust were fragments of the queen’s statuary, pieces of carved stone reliefs and decorative inlays, feathers made of sandstone, glazed tiles set with small white daisies and green leaves, offering pots inscribed with the Aten’s name, and part of a wand-like object inscribed ‘Neferneferuaten Nefertiti, may she live forever and eternally’. This was part of a model throw-stick, based on the full-sized weapons used to catch wildfowl and often placed in kings’ tombs for use in the Afterlife: one was found in Akhenaten’s tomb and that of Nefertiti was discovered in the ruins of the city.
During my first year’s research at Manchester I was finally able to visit Amarna when I was awarded a Nile Studentship by the Egypt Exploration Society, offered annually by Swan Hellenic to the Society’s student members. I was the lucky recipient of a seventeen-day cruise, which the Society hoped ‘would be an enjoyable and instructive experience’– possibly the under-statement of the decade.
The six hundred-mile journey up the Nile began in Cairo. Revisiting the delights of the wonderful museum, I was able to make notes of everything that interested me, particularly the incredible collection of wigs worn by the priests of Amen around 1000 BC. They were huge things which looked like a cross between a bird’s nest and an octopus, their impressive dimensions created by using bundles of date palm fibre as internal padding beneath the layers of carefully dressed hair.
The same room contained many of the fragmentary treasures which had been found in some of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, including what was left of an anonymous wig hidden in a corner of one of the cabinets. Although the remains were much depleted, short hair, both brown and blond, was still attached to the well-made foundation cap, which had been constructed around a narrow centre parting. The short sections of detailed plaits displayed alongside could have added little to the wig’s overall size, indicating that it must have been fairly short when worn; the plaits’ differing lengths also suggested a layered effect of the sort seen in portrayals of the so-called Nubian wig. This was only a possibility, but it seemed the most likely explanation given the amounts of hair present.
Amongst the treasures of Queen Tiy’s parents, Yuya and Tuya, were what remained of Yuya’s ‘ceremonial wig’ – placed so high on a glass shelf that I could only make out a few plaited ends. I also revisited some of my favourite objects from the tomb of their great-grandson Tutankhamen – his wig box, eye paint containers, mirrors and clothing – and I also found the lock of hair which had belonged to his grandmother Tiy, thought to have been placed in his tomb as some sort of heirloom. A return visit to the rest of the family included the ‘grotesque’ statues of Akhenaten and Nefertiti and several quartzite heads of their daughters. There was also Akhenaten’s heavily restored canopic box, which once held his mummified organs. Outside, in the museum gardens, was his granite sarcophagus. Restored from numerous small pieces, four figures of Nefertiti in a splendid wig of tile-like curls still protected each corner, her arms outstretched in a permanent pose of protection.
As our boat set off on its stately progress down the Nile, we stopped at some of the more remote places that would be difficult to visit on a standard tour, enabling me to fill many of the gaps left from my first visit eight years before. Arriving at Sakkara, some of the smaller pyramids seemed far more interesting than their giant cousins of Giza: the rubble-heap pyramid of Unas, for instance, which you wouldn’t really look at twice from the outside, contained a stunning burial chamber covered in the bright blue hieroglyphs of the so-called ‘Pyramid Texts’. After a visit to the collapsed Pyramid of Medum with its blancmange-like outline we were shown the burial chamber of the mysterious bench-shaped tomb next door, its sarcophagus still wedged open by the wooden mallet of those who had robbed it more than four thousand years ago.
Docking at the dramatic cliffside location of Beni Hassan, we visited some of the rock-cut tombs of local governors who had controlled the region back around 2000 BC, their walls filled to bursting with scenes of all manner of daily activities. There was hunting in the desert and wrestling, dancing, weaving, farming and fishing, while Egyptians traded with a delegation of brightly dressed Palestinians who had brought supplies of the ever-popular black kohl eye paint in the saddle bags of their donkeys. But, best of all as far as I was concerned, the ancient barbers could be seen hard at work, shaving the heads of their customers, with their title written beside them in hieroglyphs featuring the razor symbol as the tool of their trade.
Past the rock-cut shrine built high in the cliffs by the female pharaoh Hatsheput for the local lioness goddess Pakhet, ‘She who Mauls’, lay el-Ashmunein, which Sicard the Jesuit priest had first visited almost three hundred years ago. It had once been the sacred city of Thoth, god of wisdom, and a huge pair of quartzite statues of him set up by Amenhotep III were pretty much all that was left of the ancient temple. Yet, looking closely at the hieroglyphic inscriptions on their bases, it was clear that someone had been busy erasing all references to the state god Amen. For now we were in Akhenaten’s territory, and the ancient city of Amarna lay just across the river. That evening we moored at the village of el-Till on the same stretch of river where the Amarna royal family would have arrived in the golden state barge. I was finally here, at the remote city where Tutankhamen had been born, where the great Queen Tiy had spent her last years and where Akhenaten and Nefertiti had once lived and reigned.
As the early morning sun began to appear above the cliffs of Amarna, we trundled across the desert in a customised green trailer pulled by tractor, then the standard means of moving tourists across the large expanse of barren terrain to the Northern Tombs of the city’s officials. Although hacked about by Christian squatters who had done a little interior redesigning by putting in recesses and cutting out two of the columns supporting the roof, the walls in High Priest Meryra’s great tomb were still covered in finely detailed carvings which in many cases still retained their original bright colours. Beside a huge bouquet of flowers made up of poppies, cornflowers and the ever-present lotus, Meryra, shaven headed in his priestly role, worshipped the rising sun in finely pleated linen embellished with four thick gold necklaces. On the opposite wall stood his wife Tenra in the finest linen pleats, her long, thick wig topped by one of the cone-shaped lumps of semi-solid perfume to show that she was expensively scented. And as husband and wife gave praise to the Aten and the king, Tenra expressed the wish that ‘the king’s great wife Neferneferuaten Nefertiti, living for ever and ever, may be by his side’.
Looking at the wall scenes beyond was rather like flicking through Meryra’s photo album. At the high point of his career there he was, raised high on the shoulders of his colleagues to receive his promotion to High Priest, while Akhenaten and Nefertiti leaned out from their great Window of Appearances, well padded with a great squashy red bolster to cushion the royal elbows. Then, in a huge scene that dominated the entire wall, the royal couple were off, their robes streaming out behind them in the wind as they raced through the city each in their own chariot. Surrounded by their armed bodyguard, they arrived at the Great Temple where the staff had come out to greet them, lining up, raising their arms to the accompaniment of female clergy playing tambourines while a small girl waved a palm branch and danced. Some of the officials even held out bouquets. It all looked very like the typical public response when the British Queen goes walkabout today.
Standing in the midst of beautiful gardens with tall flagpoles at its entrance, the temple was shown in some detail, its columns flanked by the same statues of the king and queen which Howard Carter had found when excavating the temple site a century before. Inside were hundreds of open-air altars piled with offerings, and, as sacrificial cattle with elaborately decorated horns awaited their fate, Meryra accompanied the royal family into the temple. With Nefertiti’s imposing feather crown making her easily the tallest figure in the scene, she and Akhenaten stood before an enormous offering table piled high with choice cuts of beef, geese, loaves of bread and bouquets. And as the nearby temple store rooms burst at the seams with provisions of every kind, Akhenaten and Nefertiti rewarded their High Priest for a job well done, telling the overseer of the Treasury to ‘take the High Priest Meryra and put gold around all his neck and gold around his legs, because of his obedience to the royal will and for doing all he was told’. And there was Meryra, arms raised in triumph, almost punching the air for joy as servants swathed him in numerous gold collars and earrings to complement the costly perfumes he wore. Then, just before the couple took their leave in their chariots waiting close by, further offerings were made at another well-stocked altar, this time topped with burning incense from which clouds of smoke drifted up toward the sun disc uniquely adorned with a multi-coloured rainbow.
A little further on, the ‘Royal Scribe and Fan Bearer on the King’s Right Hand’, Ahmose, stood at his tomb door. His figure was carved at either side of the entrance, coming forward with arms raised to worship the sun as if in greeting. He was dressed in fashionable linen robes, his ostrich feather fan of office slung across his back alongside the vicious-looking military axe that he would have wielded in his capacity as royal bodyguard. After long sections of hieroglyphic inscriptions describing the beauties of the Aten, much of the tomb was left unfinished. As a result its blank walls had been embellished with more than fifty snippets of ancient Greek graffiti – clearly this had been a popular spot with many early tourists. Yet on one wall the unfinished figures of Akhenaten and Nefertiti had been mapped out in red paint, now barely visible. This time sharing a chariot, Akhenaten held the reins as Nefertiti turned almost to touch his face with hers, while their eldest daughter, Meritaten, peered over the front of the chariot at the dancing plumes on the horses’ heads. Accompanying the three was an escort of more than forty well-carved men, their varied dress and hairstyles identifying them as Egyptian, Nubian and Syrian. Although armed with clubs, spears, scimitars, axes, and bows and arrows, they were not in fact off to war but simply escorting the royal family on their daily visit to the temple.
The last tomb we visited on our Amarna tour was that of the priest Panehesy, whose name means ‘the Southerner’, carved with the king, queen and their three daughters offering the usual assortment of goodies to the sun disc. My guide book also drew attention to figures of the queen’s sister Mutnodjmet, her hair dressed in a similar sidelock hairstyle to that worn by her nieces, the royal princesses, and accompanied by her two dwarf attendants.
To the right of the entrance were further figures of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, and there was no doubt that both were wearing the elaborate ‘atef’ crown of a king. Nefertiti was also described as ‘the heiress, great of favour, mistress of all women, the wife of the king whom he loves’, and the accompanying phrase ‘she says all things and they are done’ was surely evidence of her very real power.
As the royal couple drove out in their individual chariots to the temple, accompanied by what looked like half the army, Nefertiti, unlike her husband, used a whip to achieve greater speed. Once within the temple the royal pair stood at the high altar, side by side and so identical as to appear almost one figure as they performed their worship – despite the fact that a Coptic apse had been built later which interrupted the view of these ancient rituals.
At the foot of the cliffs, we were taken on to the North Palace, to which Nefertiti was once thought to have been banished. Now believed to have been equipped as a separate palace for her eldest daughter, Meritaten, it was an impressive spread of substantial mudbrick walls, white limestone column bases and small rectangular pools once flanked by beautiful gardens. As our small party made its way around we began to attract the attention of the local children, who do a nice line in woven baskets, and before I knew it I was wandering about like some latter-day offering-bearer with armfuls of the things.
Further gaps in my understanding continued to be filled in as the cruise progressed south. In ancient times pilgrims flocked to Abydos, cult centre of Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, to bring him all manner of offerings, from the contents of pots which still cover the site to locks of their hair. The god’s cult fetish itself was an elaborate wig mounted on a stand, and the wall scenes in the superb temple built in his honour featured the long, luxuriant sidelocks of royal children beside the multi-layered, multi-coloured hairstyles of the goddesses Isis and Hathor. The walls and ceiling of Hathor’s temple at Dendera were a feast of detail embellished by a carved ceiling relief of Egypt’s oldest-known zodiac (an exact copy replacing the original now in the Louvre in Paris). On the exterior walls were a huge figure of the legendary Cleopatra, and another of Hathor herself, ‘Lady of the Beautiful Tresses and Breasts’, named after her most prominent attributes.
At Luxor our boat tied up beside some of the huge floating ‘gin palaces’ which now ply the Nile. In the searing afternoon temperatures of early September, we wandered around the tombs in the Valley of the Kings at our leisure, each one giving a unique view on how the king would spend eternity in the company of favourite deities.
After the obligatory visit to Tut’s tomb, our guide pointed out the ancient graffiti in the tomb of Ramses VI, one dated to 1120 BC revealing that the tomb had already been robbed and laid open a mere twenty years after it was completed. The king’s mummy, salvaged and rewrapped by the priests, was eventually reburied in the tomb of Amenhotep II, our next port of call. And, just as on my earlier visit, the wall of that side chamber was still sealed up and gave absolutely nothing away.
Also in Luxor were the Tombs of the Nobles. High in the hills behind the village of Qurna lay the tomb of Sennefer, mayor of Thebes under Amenhotep II. Its uneven ceiling had been cleverly disguised as a vineyard and the tomb owner himself, sitting beneath large bunches of grapes, was resplendent in a range of black curly wigs and flashy gold jewellery which changed from scene to scene.
Sennefer’s boss, the Vizier (Prime Minister) Rekhmire, had a much larger tomb, decorated with impressive scenes of tribute bearers arriving from every corner of the empire, all to emphasise his high-status role as the pharaoh’s deputy. Syrians brought horses and fine wines, Nubians arrived with elephant tusks, gold and animal skins, and the Keftiu, the long-haired men of Crete, brought costly Aegean vessels to Egypt’s pharaoh. Tribute bearers gave way to figures of the craftsmen working on the Temple of Amen across the river at Karnak, the region’s largest employer. All were hard at work producing pottery, jewellery, sandals, metal vases, wooden furniture and mudbricks, or hanging off scaffolding to finish huge statues. On the opposite wall it was party time, and, at a banquet in full swing, a harpist sang the latest hit, ‘Perfume the Hair of the Goddess of Truth’, while the guests were attended by graceful servants with multi-plaited hair. In the nearby tomb of Userhet, a small group of men sat in the shade of a tree, patiently waiting their turn at the barber’s; and rows of scribes in the tomb of Khaemhat bowed to receive perfume as a mark of honour from the king.
We ended in the tomb of Ramose, ‘Master of All Wardrobes’, whose job title was borne out by the stunning appearance of his family and friends. Figures of men and women in high relief, decked out in rippling wigs made up of individual zig-zag strands, appeared to be emerging from the walls as they watched us through black kohl-rimmed eyes startlingly defined against the white limestone background.
Ramose himself had at some stage been promoted, swapping wardrobe duties for the somewhat more stressful role of vizier to successive kings Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten, still known as Amenhotep IV when the tomb was built. Although one scene depicted the newly crowned Amenhotep IV in the traditional style, the last scenes to be carved in the tomb within the first couple of years of the new reign suddenly changed. The beautiful people of Amenhotep III’s court had somehow morphed into figures with the same curious proportions we’d seen at Amarna.
As the new king leaned forward from a Window of Appearances, framed by images of himself as a sphinx trampling his enemies, there beside him, making her first public appearance, was ‘the King’s Great Wife, his Beloved, Mistress of the Two Lands’ (the two halves of Egypt) – Nefertiti herself. Wearing a short wig set in the face-framing layers of the Nubian style, and holding a drooping, queenly lily sceptre in her left hand, she looked the perfect image of the dutiful wife standing passively by.
The next stop was Luxor’s Museum of Ancient Egyptian Art, a building as small and pristine as the Cairo Museum is vast and dusty. Among the larger objects displayed in the museum’s well-kept gardens was an image of the great warrior king Amenhotep II on a large red granite stela, firing arrows from his chariot right through thick copper targets. And numerous representations of the smiling Amenhotep III inside were succeeded by those of his son, including two more of the so-called grotesque statues found at the Karnak Aten temples. These flanked a whole wall of small sandstone blocks recovered from the Ninth Pylon gateway at Karnak, reassembled in the museum to give a good idea of how the Aten temple walls might once have looked. The restored wall showed some of the key temple personnel at work: female musicians played lutes, flutes and tambourines while men in Syrian costume plucked the strings of a giant harp. There were also armies of busy little people in the temple’s storehouses, warehouses, workshops and brewery; one man was even depicted sitting down to enjoy his meal of bread and onions at his lunch break.
Yet the focus of every scene was once again the royal couple. Akhenaten and Nefertiti stood as usual beneath the rays of the Aten, the king wearing a variety of crowns and head covers and Nefertiti the same Nubian wig she’d worn in the tomb of Ramose. According to the museum’s guide book, ‘Nefertiti and her daughters seem to have set a trend for wearing the Nubian wig . . . a coiffure first worn by Nubian mercenaries and clearly associated with the military.’ The wig in question was adorned with the protective cobra at her brow and sometimes bound with a golden diadem, while matching golden Aten cartouches jangled at her wrists as she raised up endless offerings to the sun.
Before leaving Egypt I was also given a rare glimpse of Amarna art at Aswan, carved on one of the granite rocks which lay beneath part of the modern town. Although the waste pipe of the house above dripped a steady flow of water on to the scene, which could only be seen in the late afternoon light, it was still a vital piece of evidence for the reign. Carved around year 9 of Akhenaten, it showed the royal sculptor Bek worshipping a figure of Akhenaten, whose heavily defaced outline could still be made out beneath the Aten’s rays. Here Bek actually described himself as ‘the apprentice whom his majesty instructed’, something he repeated on his pot-bellied statue now in Berlin. This suggests that he may well have been responsible for carving the so-called grotesque colossi of Akhenaten and Nefertiti which once stood at Karnak.
Back home after an amazing seventeen days on the Nile, a letter from Manchester University told me that I’d been awarded a three-year studentship to do my research. I was ecstatic – this would give me enough time to do the bulk of the work. Soon I began in earnest, starting with the University Museum’s collection of mummified remains, a fantastic resource for anyone wanting to study the way in which the Egyptians had treated their dead.
The museum’s first acquisition way back in 1825 was a mummy, the superbly preserved body of Asru, a shaven-headed priestess of Amen who had worked in Karnak Temple around 600 BC. Although Asru had been unwrapped by curious owners before they handed her over, the mummy of her colleague Perenbast, found by Petrie in a tomb at Qurna, remained tightly wrapped and strewn with lotus flowers, much as she would have been when placed in her tomb on the day of her burial. Other museum occupants included an Amen priest named Khary from around 1200 BC and a woman named Ta-aath from about 1000 BC. After Ta-aath’s mummy had been unwrapped, photographed, then rewrapped, her owners donated her to the museum because she apparently brought them bad luck – typical of the way mummies were often given to museums by people who were uneasy at the thought of an ancient Egyptian watching them from the corner of the drawing room.
In 1907 the museum had also acquired the entire contents of an intact tomb, some four thousand years old, that Petrie had discovered at the cemetery of Rifeh, near Asyut. The mummies in question were two minor noblemen, half-brothers named Khnumnakht and Nekhtankh. When the indefatigable Margaret Murray arrived in Manchester in 1908 to catalogue the collection and give lectures, she also initiated one of the first scientific unwrappings of an Egyptian mummy as she worked on the brothers’ remains. Although the earliest such event had taken place in Leeds in 1824, the Manchester unwrapping still represented a milestone; as Murray said, ‘every vestige of ancient remains must be carefully studied and recorded without sentimentality and without fear of the outcry of the ignorant.’
And so, on a typically wet Mancunian afternoon in May, Murray, dressed for the occasion in a carefully pressed white apron, gathered her small team of anatomist, chemist and two textile experts in the university’s chemist auditorium before an invited audience of five hundred local worthies and interested parties. Under the headline ‘Unrolling a mummy: novel ceremony in Manchester’, the local press reported the event as being
of great interest to Egyptologists. It was the unrolling of the 4,500 year old mummy of Ghnum-nakht [Khnumnakht] of the XII [sic] Dynasty and his brother, a high priest of the time. The operation was conducted under the superintendence of Miss Margaret Murray, F.S.A. Scot., of University College, London, who has been delivering a course of lectures on Ancient Egypt at Manchester University . . . Miss Murray, having given an explanatory address the unfolding was commenced. The operation, which was naturally conducted with the greatest care, occupied considerable time.
In fact it took ninety minutes. The report concluded that ‘those who wished to have a piece of the mummy wrappings as a memento were invited to leave their names and addresses’, and a small section of bandage mounted on a glass slide would be sent to them in the post.
In addition to complete mummies, the museum’s store rooms housed a whole range of assorted mummified heads, hands, feet and entrails – and, to my great delight, numerous hair samples dating back over five thousand years from sites all over Egypt. With so many different types of hair, the first requirement was to work out the precise nature of each sample. Although hair fragments tend to be labelled ‘wigs’, close examination often reveals that this is not the case. I needed to work out whether each sample consisted of the natural scalp hair, even if now separated from the body, or had once been part of a wig or hair extensions. Then there was always the possibility that the hair was a votive or funerary offering, a practice found throughout ancient Egyptian history – although some archaeologists, at a loss to describe this custom, often ignore it and leave it out of their excavation reports.
Yet the ancient Egyptians are known to have placed locks of hair amongst mummy wrappings. Funerary texts refer to the ‘Braided tress of Isis, which Anubis has affixed by means of the craft of the embalmer’, and in earlier Pyramid Texts the mummy of the king is told to ‘loosen your bonds, for they are not bonds, they are the tresses of the goddess Nephthys’. Locks of hair had also been found amongst the wrappings of both Tutankhamen and Ramses V, and since both of them were shaven or crop-headed this was clearly not a piece of their own hair which fell away during the wrapping. Perhaps it was hair’s ability to regenerate when cut that made it a suitably potent substance to be placed in such close proximity to the mummy.
I looked at all the hair held in storage, and a simple visual examination using nothing more technical than a magnifying glass established basic facts about the hair’s condition, colour, length and any evidence of styling techniques. Then, using a high-powered electron microscope put at my disposal by generous colleagues elsewhere in the university, I was able to find out all sorts of things about the ancient Egyptians via their hair.
Hair really does have tremendous potential, and can give information about diet, diseases, levels of environmental pollution and even the use of drugs and poisons, which remain in the hair shaft long after they have left the rest of the body. And often all that is needed for such analysis is a single hair.
As regards ancient styling techniques, close examination of the ends of the hair showed that very sharp blades had been used for cutting and trimming as early as 3000 BC. And although hair colour can fade over time or be changed by environmental conditions or even by the materials used during mummification, the multi-coloured hairstyles shown in art were not merely figments of the artist’s imagination, because the Egyptians had been dab hands with hair dye. The most common was henna, which is still familiar today and which gave the hair an attractive orange-red tone.
One of the most intriguing results came from a body that Petrie discovered at Gurob, wearing ‘a copious wig of black hair, reaching down to the waist, but beneath this on the scalp was yellow or light brown hair’. Taking this as evidence of an Aegean settler, he concluded that ‘the person was light-haired during life, and wore a wig of black, hiding the foreign token’. Yet when I had the ‘black wig’ analysed, it turned out to be part of a dark blue woollen head cover; and, far from trying to play down the hair colour, it had actually been accentuated with a yellow vegetable colourant.
One of the oldest samples in storage was a portion of loose auburn hair, believed to date to around 3000 BC, which had been found at Abydos. Although the hair was in quite good condition, it was covered in the tiny white egg cases of the head louse, commonly known as nits, and a careful search recovered three adult lice each only a few millimetres long. To me this was hidden treasure of the most exciting kind, and, whilst not exactly the standard type of archaeological discovery, it did demonstrate another reason why the Egyptians had shaven off their own hair and worn wigs.
As early as 450 BC the Greek traveller Herodotus had noticed that ‘Egyptian priests shave their bodies all over every other day to guard against the presence of lice, or anything else equally unpleasant, while they are about their religious duties’. Yet the desire to get rid of them was far more than religious or aesthetic, and as I pursued a growing fascination with these tiny creatures I discovered that lice can transmit diseases such as typhus, and have been responsible for more human deaths than any other insect except the mosquito.
As well as shaving off their hair, the ancient Egyptians devised a whole range of potions to prevent ‘that which moves about on the head’, one recipe recommending ‘fruit of the castor-oil plant, ox fat and moringa oil: combine to a paste and apply every day’. Traces of lice and their eggs between the teeth of ancient combs resembling modern nit combs revealed another means of delousing, whilst wigs which were taken off on a regular basis would take the creatures away from their only food source, the scalp’s blood supply. Lice were no respecters of class, preferring clean, well-groomed heads, since feeding was hindered if the head was dirty. Indeed, I’ve even found them hiding out in the hair of several princesses, queens and even one or two of the pharaohs themselves.
The lice were photographed using an electron microscope, and the resultant images were much in demand, and have even graced the British Museum’s new mummy galleries. News of the unusual discoveries reached the local press and was soon picked up by the nationals, always in search of a quirky angle and daft headline; the Daily Mirror announced, ‘Nits! The Curse of the Pharaohs’, ‘The Nit-Picking Pharaohs’ appeared in New Scientist, and the Guardian went with ‘The Oldest Nit in the World’. Interviews on local radio led to appearances on the World Service and Radio 4’s Midweek programme, whilst the publicity even led to French-based chemical and cosmetics company Sanofi, the makers of Derbac louse shampoo, providing sponsorship for this unusual offshoot of my research.
Over the next few years I examined ancient hair, wigs and mummies in collections across the UK, in Europe, the USA and of course Egypt, and soon started to arrive at some interesting conclusions. Contrary to the general belief that ancient Egyptian wigs were made from wool or horse-hair, the material used was invariably human hair. And although no precise details were available to explain where the hair came from, it seems most likely to have been their own, or to have been traded for, since hair appears to have been a valuable commodity ranked alongside gold and incense in ancient accounts lists found at Kahun.
After removing any tangles or lice eggs with fine-toothed combs, the hair would have been styled into an assortment of braids, plaits or curls, depending on the fashion required. The individual sections were then attached directly to the natural hair as hair extensions, or could be used to create an actual wig by fastening them on to a mesh-type foundation. Again usually made from fine lengths of plaited or woven human hair, as in the case of a fabulous wig I was allowed to examine in the Berlin Museum, the base would have been made on a head-shaped wooden mount just like today’s polystyrene equivalents. The whole lot was secured with a setting lotion made from warmed beeswax and resin which hardened when cool and kept the style in place, not only during the owner’s lifetime but for a long time afterwards. It also coincidentally preserved hair which might otherwise have rotted away after burial in damp conditions.
Such sophisticated construction techniques and the skills of the ancient hairdressers produced wigs of similar quality to modern examples. Since some people had wondered whether these ancient wigs could have been responsible for some of the known cases of skull deformation among the ancient population, we decided to test this and after weighing a few were able to show that their lightweight construction would have made them as easy to wear as their modern counterparts.
With the office of ‘Royal Wigmaker and Hairdresser’ appearing by around 2500 BC I wanted to find the actual evidence for early wigmaking, and tracked down what was usually described as ‘the world’s oldest surviving false hair’. It had been dated to around 3000 BC and was discovered at Abydos by Petrie, who described it as a ‘plait of hair and piece of false fringe found in the tomb of king Zer [Djer], probably belonging to his queen’. He also noted that ‘the fringe of locks is exquisitely made, entirely on a band of hair, showing a long acquaintance with hair work at that age. It is now in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford.’ Although Djer had ruled in about 3000 BC, the site of his tomb had been identified by later generations as that of the god Osiris, and ancient pilgrims travelled there to leave hair as a votive offering.
When I saw this piece for myself, the fringe and plait turned out to be just one item from three boxes full of hair made up into woven lengths, using construction techniques familiar from other examples dated to around 1500 BC and later. But soon I had tracked down the same type of samples from the same site in several other collections, and ‘the world’s oldest surviving false hair’ was no longer quite so old, nor was it unique. Yet it did provide further evidence that Osiris, as god of resurrection, was closely associated with hair as well as with crops, since both were magical substances which continued to grow even after being cut.
Following the original discovery, however, it was assumed that even if the hair had been associated with Djer it probably belonged to his queen. This interpretation reflected an attitude which was not only alive and well a century ago in Petrie’s day, but remains so in certain quarters today. There is still a tendency to assign anything vaguely decorative to a woman even if it is found in a man’s burial, in the same way that weapons in a female burial are frequently assumed to have belonged to a man.
Yet even the briefest glance at ancient Egyptian art reveals elaborate hairstyles, not to mention generous quantities of make-up, perfume and jewellery, worn by both men and women of all ages right across society. Both sexes wore intricately styled hair of varying length, with hair both real and false playing an important part in love and seduction. This was most obvious in representations of women leading up to the Amarna Period, who were shown with all the attributes of the goddess Hathor, known for good reason as ‘she of the beautiful hair and beautiful breasts’.
The art is also supported by the literature of the time, with the highly improper suggestion ‘Put on your wig and let us lie together’ featured in the oft-told ‘Tale of Two Brothers’. A love poem of similar date also uses hair to suggest the intense feelings of a love-struck woman, who declares that ‘My heart is once again invaded by your love when only half my hair is braided . . . I’ll trouble myself no longer over my hairdressing and put on a wig to be ready,’ whilst in another love poem a similarly afflicted male tells how the object of his desire ‘casts the noose on me with her hair’, although whether the hair is actually her own he doesn’t say.
As in many cultures, long hair was linked to male virility and strength and the magic powers of regeneration, and, whilst men frequently wore their hair long and flowing, women are also found with short, cropped or even shaven hair. Whether consciously or not, the modern world is still very much influenced by Christian attitudes dating back to the first century ad when St Paul dictated that men’s hair should be shorter than that of women. This relatively modern attitude can cause all sorts of problems and misunderstandings when used to interpret ancient Egyptian material, giving rise to the tendency to assume that bodies with short or shaven hair are male and that those with long or intricately styled hair are female, this is simply not the case.
To take one example, a limestone figure in Birmingham City Museum was for years swooned over as an icon of feminine beauty, hailed as the ‘Mona Lisa of Ancient Egypt’ and ‘The Birmingham Isis’. Yet this gorgeous individual is in fact a well-to-do man from around 1300 BC, wearing the typically elaborate ‘double-style’ wig fashionable at the time. The wonderful wig in the British Museum is set in exactly this style, yet again has often been described as ‘a noblewoman’s wig’, as have others set in the same fashion. Amongst the enormous wigs I’d looked at in the Cairo Museum, one had been found in a wig box sealed with the name of a high priest. Yet it was still described as belonging to his wife, even though her wig was quite clearly the much smaller, more stylish creation of curls typical of the short feminine fashions popular around 1000 BC.
Women’s wigs were generally less elaborate than those worn by men. The best-preserved example dates from the reign of Amenhotep III, around 1380 BC, and was found in the tall wooden wig box of a lady named Meryt. In the well-stocked tomb she shared with her husband Kha at the tomb builders’ village of Deir el-Medina, the couple were even provided with his and hers cosmetics chests. Their numerous possessions are today displayed in Turin’s Egyptology Museum, where I was able to examine Meryt’s wig. It was made up of numerous wavy braids of dark brown hair attached to a narrow plait forming the central parting, just like the fragmentary wig in the Cairo Museum. Yet in contrast to this short style, Meryt’s voluminous wig would have reached down to shoulder level, just like the beautiful long wigs worn by the women in the tomb of Ramose.
Whilst I was doing all this research, I was asked to contribute to the Clothing of the Pharaohs exhibition at Leiden’s Rijks-museum in the Netherlands. Since the textile historian organising the exhibition needed information about wigs, hairstyles and cosmetics, she invited me to write a couple of chapters for the accompanying book. She also told me about her work at Amarna in the 1980s when she studied the textiles found around the city, everything from ancient underwear to the textiles found in the Royal Tomb. We soon realised we had rather a lot in common – despite her Dutch married name, our families came from the same small village just outside Barnsley! This was a good omen for the work ahead, and we have remained friends.
To my great delight she also invited me to contribute to the Tutankhamen Textile and Clothing Project organised by the Textile Research Centre at Leiden University. Amongst the thousands of objects conserved and catalogued during the ten years it took Howard Carter to clear the tomb, the largest group of objects were the textiles. These included clothing which not only belonged to Tutankhamen but in some cases carried the names of Akhenaten and his mysterious co-regent Ankhkheperura, whom some Egyptologists believe to have been Nefertiti herself.
The majority of the garments were originally placed neatly inside storage chests and boxes, but the ancient thieves had pulled out many of them in their search for gold, and the officials sent in to tidy up had simply stuffed them back inside the nearest boxes. But, regardless of three thousand-year-old creases, Carter realised that the royal clothing was unique and would need very careful study. However, since immediate attention was focussed on the gold and works of art, the textiles lay largely neglected for seventy years until the Leiden researchers realised their importance.
With almost all the garments badly faded and some little more than a black, crumbly mass, exact replicas were made as a record of the fragile originals to save them from further damage. One of the discoveries made on examining these pieces was that Tutankhamen had a 31-inch chest, a 29-inch waist and 43-inch hips – possibly the origin of the pear-shaped body that seemed so exaggerated in portrayals of the Amarna royal family.
The replica garments provided a real understanding of how originals had been made, and I had great fun trying some of them on. This form of hands-on archaeology also solved some of the mysteries of how these garments had been worn. A number of the ‘head-dresses’ described by Carter turned out to be elaborate armbands which formed the wings of the falcon god, whilst other garments emblazoned with slogans such as ‘Protector of the Country’ and ‘Vanquisher of All the Enemies of Egypt’ were obviously designed to enhance royal status.
Amongst the sumptuous robes, gold-encrusted tunics and a large supply of neatly folded underwear were several pairs of royal socks. They were made with a gap between the big toe and the rest to accommodate the thongs of the forty-seven pairs of flip-flop sandals found in the tomb. The look was completed by golden collars, earrings, bracelets and one of a range of royal crowns, and it was my role to provide details of the finishing touches, from the sweet perfumed oils and thick black kohl eyeliner to the wig worn on the king’s shaven head.
Working from Carter’s original notes and photographs, I knew that the royal wig box had been found empty, tipped on its side with the lid pulled off. A portion of artificially curled, light brown human hair had been discovered in a small alabaster chest, its fragmentary state suggesting that the robbers had taken the original wig out of its box and ripped it apart to get at the jewelled decorations. The officials who restored the burial had then presumably collected up the hair fragments and dumped them in the chest in the same way that they’d restored an earlier burial of a queen, sweeping up the remains of her wig and hastily shoving them into a box of preserved meat! Even after such treatment, however, it was possible to work out the original style of the king’s wig. The dimensions of the wig box meant that it could have been no more than fifteen inches in length, whilst the curled fragments suggested the relatively short curled style found in the art of the time.
But the ancient Egyptians hadn’t all worn wigs: many men and women throughout society used hair extensions as a less costly alternative. One man buried in a simple sand-hollow around 1650 BC had lengthened his hair by attaching a single braid with thread. At the other end of the social spectrum, the wavy brown hair of a queen of slightly later date had been filled out around the crown and temples with numerous tapered braids to produce the top-heavy effect so fashionable at the time. She had also been buried with a duplicate set of braids as part of her funerary equipment – though none too carefully prepared, to judge from the sprinkling of lice eggs I found on them.
On a more practical level, such braids were also used to disguise baldness. For instance, an unnamed soldier from a mass grave of around 2000 BC at Deir el-Bahari had supplemented his own thinning locks with short, curly hair extensions. Since his burial was carried out hastily following battle, this hairstyle was unlikely to have been created by the morticians to prepare him for the Afterlife and must therefore have been worn during his life, perhaps to give his head that little bit of extra protection in the days before helmets, or simply for reasons of vanity. A similar technique had been adopted by the hairdressers of Egypt’s elderly queens, whose mummies had been studied by Manchester’s anatomy professor, Grafton Elliot Smith, when he held the same post at Cairo University’s School of Medicine between 1900 and 1909.
Most of the mummies he examined came from a great cache of royal bodies at Deir el-Bahari, discovered by locals in 1871 and ten years later by the authorities. Many had already been unwrapped by Gaston Maspero, head of the French-run Antiquities Service, in the original Cairo Museum located in an old palace at Giza. Then, when the current Cairo Museum was opened in 1902, some forty-five thousand artefacts were transferred, including the mummies. Maspero wanted Smith to reexamine them, as well as to unwrap and examine those discovered more recently in the second royal cache found in 1898 in the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV.35).
Smith’s long-term studies of the royal mummies began with Akhenaten’s grandfather Tuthmosis IV, when the king’s mummy was ‘unrolled’ at 2pm on 26 March 1903 in the new museum before an invited audience, including Lord Cromer, the British Consul-General and the most powerful man in Egypt, Howard Carter ‘and several ladies’. Later, when carrying out further examinations in more detail and presumably without the intimidating audience, Smith decided to X-ray the king’s mummy to try to determine its age. Since Cairo’s only X-ray machine was located in a private nursing home, Smith, assisted by Howard Carter, ‘took the rigid Pharaoh in a cab to the nursing-home. It was the first [royal] mummy ever submitted to X-ray photography.’
Impressed by Smith’s findings, and no doubt also by his initiative, Maspero invited him to make a thorough examination of all fifty of the royal mummies found in the two great caches at Deir el-Bahari and the tomb of Amenhotep II (KV.35), as well as the 160 priests and priestesses from a third cache discovered in 1891. Between 1903 and 1905 Smith practised on the clergy before tackling the pharaohs and queens. Then, between 1906 and 1909 Smith and his assistant, Dr Maynard Pain, occasionally helped out by Howard Carter, examined, described and photographed the remaining royal mummies.
After moving to Manchester to become anatomy professor, and apparently unaffected by ‘the sudden transition from the sunshine and oriental glamour of Egypt to the smoky ungenial skies of Manchester’ Smith continued to write up his notes, which finally appeared as ‘The Royal Mummies, Catalogue Général des Antiquités Égyptiennes de la Musée du Caire, Nos. 61051–61100’. Published in 1912, it is still the standard reference work on the subject, and until its republication eighty-eight years later in paperback, this huge, rare volume was only to be found on the shelves of specialist libraries. Concentrating my attentions on the hair and wigs it described and portrayed, I worked my way through it chronologically.
Beginning with the mummy of the murdered pharaoh Seqenre, his hair still matted with blood from the wounds which had killed him, Smith went on to describe the mummy of his elderly mother Queen Tetisheri, her own sparse hair interplaited with false braids. Then came a whole succession of queens and princesses of the early 18th dynasty, many of whom had inherited the family trait of buck teeth. Seqenre’s wife, Queen Inhapi, had plaited hair set with resinous setting lotion and dressed ‘in a peculiar manner, which in itself is sufficient to indicate the beginning of the New Empire [Kingdom] as the date of this mummy’. The hair of the elderly princess Hentempet was streaked with grey, and she had been buried in a wig of long plaits with a second wig of artificially curled locks thoughtfully placed on her chest ready for a quick change in the Afterlife. Sadly, she no longer had access to it – using the old photographs, I had tracked it down, adrift and unlabelled, beside the priests’ wigs in the Cairo Museum.
The first queen of the 18th dynasty, Ahmose-Nefertari, ‘had very little hair on her head and the vertex was quite bald. Elaborate pains had been taken to hide her deficiency. Twenty strings, composed of twisted human hair, were placed across the top of her head; and to these were attached numerous tight plaits . . . which hung down as far as the clavicle. Other plaits were tied to her own scanty locks.’ The queen had been nursed by the much younger Lady Rai, ‘the least unlovely’ of all the mummies that Smith described, whose abundant masses of natural hair had been finely plaited and arranged in two sections which hung down over each shoulder, the upper parts twice as thick as the rest in order to create the fashionable top-heavy style of the day.
Then came a succession of 18th dynasty pharaohs beginning with King Ahmose, still garlanded with delphiniums and with his dark brown ringlets coated with thick resinous paste. Although his son and successor Amenhotep I has never been unwrapped, the mummy believed to be his successor, Tuthmosis I, had a completely shaven head whilst his son and successor in turn, Tuthmosis II, had a bald scalp surrounded by a wreath of dark, wavy hair. Smith suspected it had been artificially curled, and judging by the photographs it certainly looked as though his hairdresser had been creative with the curling tongs to make up for the pharaoh’s own trichological limitations. The lack of hair continued with his son Tuthmosis III, ‘the Napoleon of ancient Egypt’, who seems to have had none at all – perfect for those long foreign campaigns.
Then Smith encountered a problem, because Tuthmosis III’s son, Amenhotep II, was not amongst his relatives in Cairo but still lay in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings where he’d been found by Victor Loret, French head of the Antiquities Service, back in 1898. So, having a day to spare in 1907, Smith says he ‘made a hasty examination’ of the king’s mummy with help from Arthur Weigall, then working as the antiquities inspector for the Luxor region. At around six feet tall Amenhotep II had been the tallest of the pharaohs, with greying brown wavy hair around a large bald patch. His arms were crossed over his chest, as with most of the pharaohs, and both hands were still clenched as if to grasp long-vanished sceptres. During his examination Smith noticed the distinct impressions of jewellery and regalia in the resin coating the skin.
He then referred to three more mummies which in 1907 were still in the tomb with the king, inside one of the side chambers – apparently the same sealed-up room that had so intrigued me on my visits there. So who were they?
The first Smith simply called the ‘Elder Woman’, ‘a small, middle-aged woman with long brown, wavy, lustrous hair, parted in the centre and falling down on both sides of the head on to the shoulders. Its ends are converted into numerous apparently natural curls’; as the photographs revealed, her amazing hair framed a truly regal face. Although much of her torso had been smashed in by ancient robbers searching for jewellery, her arms remained in place, ‘the right arm placed vertically-extended [sic] at the side and the palm of the hand is placed flat upon the right thigh. The left hand was tightly clenched, but with the thumb fully extended: it is placed in front of the manubrium sterni, the forearm being sharply flexed upon the brachium.’ Or, to put it plainly, she had her left arm bent up with the hand still clasped around a long-vanished sceptre in the well-known pose of a queen.
Smith described the second mummy as that of a boy around eleven years of age, his hair ‘shaved from the greater part of [the] scalp: but on the right side of the head . . . the hair has not been cut and forms a great, long, wavy, lustrous mass . . . which from the nature of its waviness was probably plaited at some time’. This was the typical hairstyle of a royal child. Since this mummy had been found in the tomb of Amenhotep II, Smith followed Loret’s initial suggestion that he was ‘probably the Royal prince Ouabkhousenou’(his name also translated as Webensenu) whose wooden funerary figurines had been found amongst the tomb debris. He also stated that the mummy ‘presented an extraordinary likeness to a beautiful statue of the god Khonsu, discovered at Karnak . . . Not only does the god wear a Horus-lock like that of this prince, but the statue is characterised also by his exceptional brachycephalism’, which is defined as ‘having a head nearly as broad from side to side as from front to back’.
In fact the statue Smith mentioned actually represented Akhenaten’s son Tutankhamen, portrayed as Khonsu, son of Amen, to signify the young king’s return to the traditional religion. I compared Smith’s photographs of the boy’s mummy, showing his wide-set eyes and pleasant, slightly smiling expression, with the Tutankhamen Khonsu statue, and they did indeed look quite similar. And, like Tutankhamen, the boy clearly had pierced ears, which from my own interest in body piercing I knew had only been adopted by royal males after Amenhotep II’s reign.
It was on examination of the third mummy that Smith was most surprised. Loret had stated that this was the body of a man, ‘whereas it requires no great knowledge of anatomy to decide that the excellently preserved naked body is a young woman’s. Every later writer had followed Loret in his description of this mummy as a man. The only reason I can assign for such a curious and obvious mistake is the absence of hair on the head. All the hair had been clipped very short or shaved.’ Smith also mentioned two small perforations in the remaining ear, the left one – although, turning to the photographs of the mummy, a front and side view, I couldn’t make them out myself. Yet, looking closely at her profile, the complete lack of hair accentuating her long, graceful neck, I was suddenly struck with how familiar she seemed. She looked just like the famous head of Nefertiti in Berlin, the one we had a copy of in Manchester.
From the front, it was clear that the mummy’s face had suffered terribly, presumably during the robbers’ search for jewel-lery, and as with her companions, the Elder Woman and the boy, her chest had been smashed in. But a routine search for valuables could not explain why her face had been so savagely attacked, and the only reason I could think of for inflicting this kind of damage was a malicious one. Had someone wanted to destroy her features, and in doing so deprive her of the ability to breathe in the Afterlife? And not only that – the photographs and sketch that Smith had made showed that her right arm had been torn off. He said that in his notes, ‘hurriedly made during my short visit to the tomb . . . I find no further reference to this arm: but these remarks occur . . . ‘‘along with these three mummies there is the well-preserved right forearm of a woman, which had been flexed at the elbow’’ and ‘‘the hand was clasped’’.’ Clasped, of course, to hold a sceptre just like the Elder Woman buried with her. But in this case it was the right arm, which as far as I knew was only ever bent up when the deceased had been king.
With my brain working overtime, and trying desperately not to get completely carried away with the implications of all this, in my search for further clues I went on to read what else Smith had said. While trying to discover how old she was he admitted that ‘the exact age cannot be determined’, adding that ‘in the remote Biban el Molouk [Arabic for Valley of the Kings], it is hardly feasible to examine the body with X-rays’.
Gazing out of the window, staring abstractedly towards the very house in which Smith had written up his notes on these mummies over eighty years before, I felt decidedly strange. I sat there thinking for some time, and was still there when a colleague called round later that evening. I decided to show her Smith’s pictures of the ‘Younger Woman’ and see what she thought. I remember half-joking about it all in case she told me not to be so stupid. But she didn’t laugh at all.
As we talked through some of the possible repercussions of such an identification, however unlikely, we became more and more fascinated with the idea that this might just be the great woman herself. Putting her former career as a graphic artist to good use, my friend began the first of a number of sketches, outlines and scale drawings of the mummy’s profile in order to compare it in detail with the famous bust which it so closely resembled. Whilst in no way conclusive, and done as much for our own private interest as anything else, this work at least provided me with a starting point and I began to think of how I might get to see this intriguing individual for myself.
Since all three bodies were listed in Smith’s royal mummies catalogue under their Cairo Museum accession numbers, I assumed they must now be stored somewhere in the museum. I also assumed that they must have been examined when all the royal mummies were X-rayed in the 1970s by a combined team from the universities of Alexandria and Michigan, who had begun to re-examine the mummies in 1967 to try to determine their state of health, the types of diseases they had suffered from, the mummification techniques used, their ages at death and, where unknown, their possible identities.
Although I couldn’t find any reference to the shaven-headed woman in their X-Ray Atlas of the Royal Mummies, they had certainly X-rayed the boy. Although still calling him ‘Prince Ouabkhousenou’, they believed he might be as old as twelve or thirteen as opposed to Smith’s estimate of eleven. Pointing out the difficulties of using statistics based on Western bodies in trying to interpret the ages of Egyptians, either ancient or modern, they noted that a Nubian or Egyptian child thought to be eleven years of age by American standards might actually be as old as thirteen.
Yet their findings regarding the Elder Woman made my eyes pop right out of my head. After X-raying the mummies they had worked out a set of measurements which allowed them to map out the contours of each face. Using a statistical approach called cluster analysis they compared all the royal females, and discovered that Tuya’s mummy was ‘more similar to that of the unknown mummy ‘‘The Elder Lady’’ than any other queen in the royal collection’. This finding suggested that the Elder Woman might be Tuya’s daughter, Queen Tiy, a conclusion they later confirmed by comparing the hair of the Elder Woman with the lock of Tiy’s hair found in Tutankhamen’s tomb that I’d seen in Cairo Museum.
During the summer, when all this began to link together in my head, the newspapers had been full of rather more high-profile Egyptian discoveries being made at Highclere Castle in Hampshire, family seat of the earls of Carnarvon. As I knew from my childhood fascination with the whole story, the fifth earl, George Edward Stanhope Molyneaux Herbert, had first gone out to Egypt on medical advice while recovering from a serious car crash. Spending his winters in the luxury of the Winter Palace Hotel overlooking the Nile in Luxor, he had unsurprisingly succumbed to the lure of archaeology and in 1907 hired Howard Carter as his professional archaeologist. The two men spent the next sixteen years making a series of finds which culminated in the spectacular discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922.
Then, following the earl’s tragic death from pneumonia in 1923, amidst spurious rumours of a curse, his family removed all traces of Egypt from their home. The late earl’s fabulous collection of ancient artefacts was packed away by Carter and sold to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, except for ‘a few unimportant antiquities’ which were left in storage at Highclere. In the late 1980s these had literally started coming out of the woodwork, after the family butler found one hoard stashed away behind wall panelling, another stuffed in a drawer in the housekeeper’s room and a third hidden away in the gun cabinet. Although certain quarters of the press were almost suggesting that golden treasures had been stuffed down the back of the drawing room sofa, the artefacts recovered were relatively modest. They were, nevertheless, fascinating.
Some of the pieces had come from the huge tomb of Tutankhamen’s grandfather Amenhotep III during Carter’s excavations in 1915. They included several funerary figurines with the king’s characteristic large almond-shaped eyes and smiling lips, and part of a funerary figurine belonging to his great royal wife, Queen Tiy – quite possibly Smith’s Elder Woman. There was also a superb archer’s wrist-guard of red leather, which the king may well have worn when hunting lion and wild bulls, one of his favourite pastimes. Together with a whole range of canopic equipment, figurines, jewellery, caskets and pottery, these items formed the centrepiece of a conference to be held in June 1990 at Highclere Castle, in the library where Carnarvon and Carter had planned their excavations.
As soon as I heard about the forthcoming conference I put my name down, and in due course became one of the 150 delegates. The distinguished list of speakers included John Harris, who, together with Julia Samson, had done so much to prove Nefertiti’s kingly status, and a member of the American team which had X-rayed the royal mummies and identified Queen Tiy. The presence of so many senior Egyptologists made this a tremendous event, and in the informal atmosphere of evening socialising I felt brave enough to ask a few questions. Following a lecture on the royal mummies by the expert from the American team, I got talking to him about some of the details of the work they had carried out.
Aware that the Elder Woman’s bent left arm signified her queenly status, the team had started by trying to ascertain which queen was ‘missing’ amongst the royal mummies and wondered if she might be Hatshepsut or Tiy. When they discovered her close facial similarity to the mummy of Tuya, known to have been Tiy’s mother, they presented their findings to the Egyptian authorities and asked to examine a sample of hair inscribed with Tiy’s name which came from Tutankhamen’s tomb and is now in the Cairo Museum. Using the scientific techniques of ion etching and scanning electron microprobe analysis, they compared it to a sample of the Elder Woman’s hair. Their results were said to have demonstrated ‘a near perfect superimposition’. This strongly supported their argument that ‘the hair samples from both King Tutankhamen’s tomb and the mummy from Amenhotep II’s tomb are indeed those of the same person – Queen Tiy of the Eighteenth Dynasty, wife of Amenhotep III and mother of the heretic pharaoh Amenhotep IV or Akhenaten’.
But when I tracked down their findings in a science journal, there was another surprise in store. When they had begun to look for the mummy of the Elder Woman in order to X-ray her along with all the other royal mummies in the Cairo Museum in the 1970s, she seemed to have vanished. Eventually she was traced to the side chamber of the tomb where she’d been all the time. After X-rays of her skull had been taken she had been left there, walled up with the boy and, presumably, the shaven-headed woman. And to keep all three mummies safe the chamber had been sealed up again.
I couldn’t believe it. Why had they been left there? I could only conclude that, with many authorities unconvinced by the team’s findings, the three mummies were still to all intents and purposes anonymous. And without an identity, no one wanted to know.
Matters weren’t helped by the fact that Victor Loret’s original excavation plans had disappeared, leaving precious little to work from other than his article published in 1899 in an obscure French journal – one of the few our university library didn’t have. Fortunately, however, his comments about the mummies he found in the tomb had been quoted in a recent book on the history of the Valley of the Kings, and they made fascinating reading.
By flickering candlelight in the darkness of the tomb, Loret had described each of the three bodies in turn. He had begun with the Elder Woman, Tiy, whose abundant hair spread out over the floor on either side of her head, and then moved on to the boy, who appeared to be totally bald apart from a magnifi-cent tress on the right side of his head, which Loret referred to as the hairstyle of royal princes. Finally he came to the third body, which, much to Smith’s later consternation, he had described as a man, whose ‘head was shaved but a wig lay on the ground not far from him’.
A wig – the shaven-headed woman had been buried with a wig! But what sort was it? And where was it now?
Although these three mummies had been left in the tomb, all the other finds had gone straight off to the Cairo Museum where they were listed in one of the huge catalogues. On the shelves of the university library I eventually found the relevant details: a ‘wig of wavy hair of dark brown colour, mounted on a net of lengths of plaited hair’ and ‘One long plait and four other fragments of hair perhaps once part of the aforementioned wig’. Although this description didn’t give much away, the fact that Loret had assumed that the body was male argued against the wig being made up of long hair, which he would automatically have associated with a woman. Checking through my photographs of wigs from the museum, the fragmentary example which I believed had once formed the Nubian style seemed closest to the description. A letter from the museum’s curators later confirmed that this was indeed the wig found in the tomb’s side chamber beside the shaven-headed mummy. As the hairstyle most closely associated with the royal women of Amarna, another large piece was added to the puzzle.
Realising that I’d need more than a few ancient wig fragments to prove anything, I began the long search for corroborating evidence with the help of a few trusted colleagues. Each was able to add pieces to my jigsaw through their expert knowledge of Amarna art, pharaonic costume, palaeopathology and chemical analysis.
I also knew I had to find a way of getting into the sealed up chamber to see the three mummies for myself, and it wouldn’t be easy.