This is really the story of ‘ellu’, an ancient Mesopotamian word meaning a type of glittering, strikingly luminescent, or beautiful cleanliness—a powerful, non-ascetic, pre-Christian image of beauty that was entirely guilt-free. The cosmetic routine now called ‘pampering’—baths, aromas, facials, manicures, pedicures, hairstyling, and costuming, conducted in sensuous surroundings with or without groups of friends—emerged at both ends of Eurasia during the Bronze Age from c.4000 BCE, along with most of the necessary tools and raw materials. Cosmetics is the underbelly of personal hygiene, usually ignored, often much reviled, but even now forming an essential part of personal health care and self-identity. The sensuous beauty of ellu turns out to be an integral part of the long history of royal court culture, which ran more or less unbroken from this period through five millennia to the present day. Thanks to the Neolithic revolution in technology and trade, Eurasia’s fertile subtropical river valleys, coasts, islands, and hinterlands had produced some tribal societies that had grown very rich indeed.
The Eurasian Bronze Age is famous for an entirely new cast of characters: the super-rich. High kings and queens, high priests and priestesses, pharaohs and emperors—chiefs of the localtribal chiefs, traders, empire-builders, all huge hoarders and displayers of luxury goods. Their urban-based civilizations are the founding myths of Eurasian history; a story told quite simply with a roll-call of their famous cities scattered throughout the fertile subtropical zones, all of which provided the context (and the cash) for their expensive lifestyles. In western Eurasia the Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia supported the Sumerian and Assyrian dynastic cities of Ur (c.5000–2000 BCE), Babylon (c.1792–800 BCE), and Nineveh (c.883–612 BCE); Egypt had created the Nile river port cities of Memphis (c.3000 BCE), Thebes (c.2060 BCE), and Alexandria (c.323 BCE); in central and eastern Eurasia the Harrapans built the stone cities of Harrapa and Mohenjo-Daro (c.2550–1550 BCE) along the Indus valley; the early Bronze Age Shang dynasty founded the Yellow River valley cities of Zhengzhou and An-yang (c.1554–1045 BCE), and the Chou dynasty on the Wei River founded a grid-planned city at Chou-tsung (c.1027 BCE). The large continental ‘inland seas’, with their ports and volcanic-island archipelagos, produced the Mediterranean cities of Knossos (2000–1200 BCE), Sidon (c.1000 BCE), Carthage (814 BCE), and Rome (753 BCE); and the various early volcanic-island civilizations of ancient Japan, Indonesia, and the peninsula of Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Bronze tools and weapons had accelerated one imperial phase in Eurasia; iron tools set off the next round of warring states. Isolated thousands of miles away across the Pacific Ocean, in c.2000 BCE the Mayans and other Meso-Americans were just getting to grips with their Stone Age, to be followed by a prosperous ‘Gold Age’.1
Surplus wealth and increasing populations irrevocably brought about increased social stratification and widening social divisions between city, town, village, and countryside. A pyramid of social ranks rose from a broad agricultural base to a small urban–palace elite (thought to be roughly 10 per cent or less of their populations).2 A similar social stratification can be seen in religious politics. It was around this time that the Indus valley or Vedic caste system (jati), which was heritable down the bloodline, developed as a purification theology which divided the whole of society from top to bottom, into four separate orders or clans (varna) according to a hierarchical order of purity—holy priests (Brahmans), noble warriors (Kshatriyas), wealthy merchants (Vaisyas), and obedient servants (Sudras). (The aboriginal Dalits, or Untouchables, were excluded from this classification by their Aryan conquerors, becoming socially invisible.)3 But whether you were rich or poor, there were three important reasons to groom in the ancient world: bodily protection, social status, and divine protection—the proverbial state of ‘health, wealth, and happiness’ (or peace of mind).
The main regional hubs of the ancient Asian beauty trades scattered along the Eurasian subtropical latitudes served the city civilizations. Within these stratified, centralized societies, grooming had become a ‘high’ art form associated with the modern urban era, clearly distinguishing their populations from earlier or peripheral tribal groups—those without towns, houses, clothing, cookery, kings, or religion. The importance of grooming to the social elites is proved by the quantities of high-class cosmetic evidence they left behind them, leaving the personal grooming (toilet, or toilette) of the remaining 90 per cent of their populations something of a blank. Body-art was not confined to the wealthy; but as you moved up the social scale, you got every extra bit of grooming that time or money could provide (the same strict principle of unequal access that also applied to purification rituals). The old Neolithic nursing and grooming routines, however, were probably insufficient to protect fully those in the bottom ranks, living on bare subsistence, from significant environmental change; particularly those living in increasingly dense urban sites, who were the likely victims of proliferating parasites, (worms, flies, lice, fungi, bacteria), and new species of epidemic disease (malaria, dysentery, bilharzia, tuberculosis) already on the move.4 Each individual may have had similar needs, but there was a wide variety of outcomes.
All these imperial-sized chunks of land carved out by local dynasties were centres of cosmetic excellence, with fragile trading links. A strong dynasty was a definite commercial asset. Dotted about the landscape in strategic positions, massive palaces and temples towered over the rest of the population, and drove the luxury economy. Beauty was a powerful display of rank order; and it was just as true in c.3000 BCE as it was to the Roman author Herodotus later ‘that the countries which lie on the circumference of the inhabited world produce the things which we believe to be most rare and beautiful’.5 If a thing was rare and beautiful, the kings, queens, and chieftains wanted it (which created a trade); and then so did everybody else (which created an industry). Palaces and temples not only created demand, but also refashioned raw materials in their own farms or workshops, turning themselves into middlemen and ‘adding value’ to local resources or cheap imports. At Pylos (c.1550–1200 BCE) in Mycenaean Greece, the palace administrators ran an extensive perfume industry by importing crude oil, recruiting local labour to add imported spices and local herbs, then selling the product either in locally made bulk jars or in small expensive phials, in exchange for all the gold, silver, Egyptian faience, copper, ivory, and wool that the local community and the palace required.6 For the local palace, its suburban ‘service city’, and the local hinterland farmers and gatherers, cosmetics and beauty goods were, literally, a golden trading opportunity: small, portable, and profitable—if you had the technical know-how.
Thanks in part to this sustained demand for beautiful and rare things, almost every useful rock, tree, shrub, plant, fruit, root, flower (or animal part) in Eurasia was gradually discovered and exploited during the Bronze Age between c.3000 and c.1500 BCE. Beautiful and desirable ‘goods’ (i.e. good things) were created from local wood, stone, metal, and animal products, or from the heaps of leaves, seeds, and flora that the gatherers brought in; while already domesticated plants like olives, grapes, corn, flax, and wool were grown, harvested, and manufactured in bulk on an ever-increasing scale. Natural materials exploited for a specific cosmetic purpose around this time included the soft volcanic rock called pumice stone, used for filing or scraping the skin; and the natural sponges found in warm seas, used for sluicing the body. The ornamental cut-flower trade was one of many specialized luxury trades that underwent a long transition. From at least c.3000 BCE the Egyptians gathered two types of native lotus flower, the white and the blue; by c.AD 200 the Indian pink lotus had been introduced, and bulk quantities of roses, narcissus, and lilies were artificially cultivated and shipped off to flower and garland traders in Rome (who were also importing artificial silk garlands from India). It was said that 2,000 lilies were needed for 3 pounds of flower oil: ‘The more times you repeat with fresh lilies, the stronger the ointment will be.’7
Over the course of several millennia Egypt emerged as the main hub of the western Eurasian cosmetic trades. The Egyptian upper classes alone consumed the products of thousands of villages, thousands of miles away. To meet demand and serve their perfumed unguent industry, the Egyptians invaded and developed the ‘Land of Magun’ (ancient Oman) as a spice region. In c.3000 BCE the coastal village of Ras al-Junayz in Oman was apparently connected not only with Old Kingdom Egypt, but with Mesopotamia and the Indus valley:
the inhabitants of the village traded their own products—large mollusc shells, as well as shell rings—with crews of incoming vessels … a manganese oxide of local origin, pyrolusite, was ground to make a black powder used as an unguent (kohl) and kept in shells of small molluscs of the genus ‘Anodara’—and Anodara shells containing a black powder have also been found in the Royal Tombs of Ur… [and there were] other exports, for example the operculi of molluscs, which when ground up, were an essential ingredient in perfumes for incense.8
That all these trading and manufacturing skills should have been contained in one small village in 3000 BCE is a sobering thought.
Cosmetic equipment was now routinely included in the trip to the land of the dead, and grave goods are a main source of evidence outside the imperial courts—even beyond the subtropical zones. That the north-west Eurasian Celts were always well barbered and groomed is underlined by the grave of one Celtic chief, buried honourably with a small bag laid on his chest containing his most essential personal belongings: three iron fish-hooks, five amber beads, a wooden comb, and an iron razor. The Russian Pazyricks were buried with their bronze mirrors. In China the preference was for ivory hairpins. Well before 3000 BCE Egyptian pre-dynastic graves contained long-toothed combs, hairpins, and an especially revered tool among the Egyptians, the eye palette, a thin stone oval or rectangular slate used for grinding up eye paint that became increasingly elaborately decorated and ceremonial in character, and is consistently found in tombs up to the Nineteenth Dynasty and beyond. The most expensive consumer item of all was probably the cosmetic travelling-case; an unusually well-preserved Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty case gives us just a glimpse of this new batterie de toilette. A well-packed traveller’s kit, this resinous cedar box has four compartments containing one terracotta and two alabaster vases for oils and unguents; a piece of pumice stone; two (joined) ‘stibium’ tubes for eye and face paint, a wood and an ivory stick; an ivory comb; a bronze shell for mixing ingredients; a pair of pink gazelle-skin sandals; and three red cushions.9
For valuable cosmetic products especially, the container was now part of the product. Container designs multiplied, and were lavishly decorated with the new range of pigments: Egyptian blue-glass, for example, and Egyptian blue-glass ceramics (faience) were made into small and elegant jars, jugs, and bottles of all sizes, all with handles, stands, lids, and spouts. They were high-class bijoux gifts which were widely traded (and copied) for centuries. Kohl eye paste was normally packed into reeds; but the luxurious kohl tubes of the princess Meritaten, found in her bedroom suite at the royal palace of El Amarna, were made of red, white, and apple-green painted pottery with her name inlaid in white and blue; other kohl tubes found there were ‘made of glass in the shape of a small hand-sized column with a spreading palm-leaf capital, with the column then decorated by bands of different coloured glass, dragged into loops around the stem’. Cosmetic tools and containers now often came in sets; complete sets of tubs and basins were a traditional marriage gift in China.10 For water and other liquids there were bronze or wooden shells, saucers, finger-bowls, hand-basins, foot-basins, small buckets, large buckets, and bathtubs; for drying the skin, bath towels, hand towels, and face cloths; for scraping the body, gold, bronze, and ivory combs, toothpicks, brushes, knives, files, and scissors. Some of these ancient toilette items have survived better than others: wooden, leather, or cloth items were all highly perishable, and the crystal, marble, gold, silver, and bronze baths of which the poets speak were either highly breakable or highly recyclable, or mythical. Only some sturdier stone or pottery baths have survived.11
The serious point that the ancients understood about cosmetic or beauty care was that it kept you well and healthy: ‘such, indeed, are human means of embellishment, and therewith they keep off death from themselves’, as one Vedic author put it.12 A more comprehensive view of the connection between cosmetics and health care can be obtained from some of the very earliest medical texts. Many of these simply recorded a folkloric pharmacology of herbal, animal, and mineral ‘receipts’ (ingredients) for the treatment of various conditions, that continued to be recycled for centuries to come; ancient Indian cosmetic receipts in particular were preserved uninterruptedly from 600 BCE to AD 1600 and onwards to the present day. All these early receipt texts show an overwhelming medical interest in the care of the body surfaces. Egyptian cosmetic receipts appear in medical papyri next to skin salves, eye salves, and tooth remedies; similarly in the early Anglo-Saxon leech books. In the Indian herbals, cosmetic receipts for hair dyes, hair promoters, hair oils, depilatories, and hair-disentangling cream jostle with recipes for the treatment of grey hair, dandruff, lice, and nits. Face paint, lip dyes, and perfumed unguents were set side by side with face salves for moles, blemishes, pimples, and peeling. There were teeth-cleaners, mouth deodorants and washes, nose deodorants (fumes through the nose), and armpit deodorants. There were any number of aromatic oils, unguents, pastes, bath waters, and bath powders for the body—things that ‘will make the bodies of the males and females gold-like, beautiful, fragrant and lovely’.13
The basic common senses—especially vision and touch—that were used to check the general state of the body were natural methods that took no notice whatsoever of any formal division between preventive and curative medicine. It is perhaps easiest to think of this external COBS medicine as operating along a continuum of self-care, ranging from the ephemeral to the urgent—from painting to cleansing; from cleansing to emollients; from emollients to remedies. The Romans clearly regarded cosmetics as a legitimate branch of medicine; for example, Crito, personal physician to the emperor Trajan (AD 98–117) wrote an exhaustive four-volume work on cosmetics, all lost except for its table of contents:
For care of the skin: cleansers, emollients, bleaches, paints, remedies (dryness, wrinkles, freckles, white spots, sunburn, warts, scars, double chin, superfluous hair, deodorants). For the care of the hair: hair-dressings, bleaches, dyes, scalp lotions, remedies (scaliness, falling hair, baldness, lice). For the care of the parts: manicure, pedicure, mouth care, teeth care, throat, remedies (washes, tooth powder, pastilles), bust developers, perfumes (powders, liquids, ointments). Cosmetic tools: mirrors, brushes, combs, fancy pins, hair-bands, razors, tweezers, false hair, curling irons, tongue scrapers, breast binders and false teeth.14
The divine ‘means of embellishment’ took cleansing into a different dimension. In order to understand anything about the full political significance of the toilette and its relationship to society, one needs to understand the workings of ancient courts and palaces—and of temples. In Mesopotamia the earliest kings were simply successful political candidates, primus inter pares (first among equals), but by the end of the Early Dynastic this had been superseded by the doctrine of divine kingship. Throughout Eurasia successful clan dynasties bolstered their credentials not only by appealing and sacrificing to the gods in the traditional manner, but by annexing sacred authority as the gods’ representative on earth, ‘God’s Steward’ for the welfare of the people, and therefore the sole arbiter of rule. Under divine kingship, the king officially had ‘two bodies’: one corporeal, the other spiritual. The purity rules of the courts were a pale echo of those in the temples.15
As formal temple cultures developed throughout Asia, religious purification reached new standards of magnificence and thoroughness. Religious historians have described temple purity rules as a form of ‘graded holiness’, or a ‘Holiness Spectrum’. The central source of ineffable ‘holiness’ was the spiritual presence of the god in the inner sanctuary, radiating divinity outwards far into the wide world up to heaven, protecting the temple and ceaselessly guarding it from the touch, sight, sound, or smell of impure things.16 In third-millennium Sumeria the royal temple ziggurat of the alpha god Nanna at Ur was particularly richly endowed. But before even a brick had been laid at Nanna, a complex series of rituals, omens, visions, meditations, and sacrifices had already been performed in order to determine the site and to protect it with holiness, and many more rituals were to follow. Archaeology confirms what literary evidence suggests, that temple sites were physically purified first by burning over the site and digging the foundations down ‘eighteen cubits’ to clean soil; then filling these pits with clean sand, to receive the first brick, which had already been prepared, purified, and poured by the king into a pure and anointed mould, and exposed to the pure burning sun. On the right day for good omen the local town was cleansed and purified ‘with fire’, and the local townspeople cleansed and purified themselves in order to witness the ritual of the foundation brick. At exactly the right time of day it was struck out, and the freshly purified and abluted king placed the sacred brick-hod over his head and shoulders, and reverently carried the holy brick to its holy resting place: ‘he took for E-ninnu the pure head-pad, and the true brick-mould [of] the decision of fate. Gudea performed completely the proper rites…[And] took on his head the head-pad for the house, as though it had been a holy crown’.17
Elsewhere the sacred statue of the temple, adorned with gold and jewels, was being prepared for the god to enter into it through the ceremony of ‘opening the mouth’, which was followed by the night-long riverside purification ceremony of ‘washing the mouth’. The next morning the eyes of the statue were ritually ‘opened’ and the now living god was led by the hand to his temple and placed in his sanctuary, his resting-place on earth. Thus the ceremonies that worshipped the now living Nanna were reverently, even enthusiastically, tended to by many generations of royal personages, and faithfully preserved by each new generation of priests (as they were all over Eurasia, in very similar rituals). Each morning in Nanna’s sanctuary the god–statues were offered food and were brushed, rubbed, oiled or painted, garlanded, and robed as necessary, each ‘presentation’ of body services and unctions given as a separate grooming ritual. Sweet tamarisk scent perfumed the air, and the holy objects were set out, decorated or made from gold: the sacred bowl, the holy table, the holy kettledrum and balag musical instruments, and the holy water pail. Outside the ziggurat holy trees had been planted in the holy gardens, and the gods had the use of a holy wagon and a holy barge.18
Deep religious reverence was attributed to beauty. It had a strong metaphysical role. In ancient Greece the word kosmos originally meant ‘to order, to arrange, or to adorn’; kosmetikos meant ‘having the power to beautify’; and the high priestess–goddess Kommo was the beautifier and arranger of the temple. The Mesopotamian definition of ellu was ‘free from physical impurities’; anything could be beautifully ellu—a jewel, clean linen, a person, or a sacred place. The sacred books of the Veda laid down kama (the appreciation of beauty) as a religious commandment for the right conduct of life; described in Vatsyayana’s classical version of the Kama Sutra as ‘the enjoyment of appropriate objects by the five senses of hearing, feeling, seeing, tasting, and smelling, assisted by the mind together with the soul’.19 In temples everywhere, the sacred ellu, kosmeticos, kama, or divine cleanliness came from the daily labours and skills of temple servants charged with keeping good order within the precinct. High priests and priestesses supervised lower orders of ‘keepers’, ‘washers’, and ‘anointers’, and chose the most beautiful (or talented) temple servants for ceremonies adorned with musicians, singers, and dancers.
Precise degrees and definitions of what was holy to the touch, taste, sight, sound or smell—the most or least sacred materials, food, colours, objects, animals, and people—were all graded according to the laws handed down. White robes were sacred to the Babylonians and Egyptians; Judaism favoured sky blue; yellow was sacred in eastern Eurasia. Gold was everywhere considered the purest and most beautiful metal. Later Greek authors reported that the temple of Marduk in Babylon used over 20 tons of gold; also that the rituals required over 2 tons of imported frankincense each year.20 In Egypt the exact method of making the sacred holy incense and unguents was a closely guarded secret, written in stone on the walls of the priestly inner sanctum. There was even a holy soap—a carbonate of soda called natron—which was used to purify everything in the temple. Mostly natron was dissolved in water to clean the body, clothes, and furniture; sometimes it was ignited with incense; and to achieve fullest purity, the priests chewed it and drank it internally. It was particularly associated with the purity of the mouth.
The flesh rubbers, kohl pots, rouge pots, lipsticks, razors, and mirrors found in the great water tank and temple courtyard at Mohenjo-Daro (2500 BCE) are evidence of the very early religious grooming traditions in the Indus valley, a thousand years before the incoming Indo-Aryans re-established a Vedic theocracy which abhorred body dirt.21 In Vedic theology any touch or sight of the prohibited bodily secretions—such as sweat, saliva, hair and nail clippings, vomit, urine, blood, sperm, faeces, and afterbirth—was closely monitored, and the Vedic toilette rules were laid down for all classes as a religious duty; their thoroughness (or lack of it) served as an indicator of religious status. Washermen and barbers were especially impure, but played a vital role as the polluted intermediary in all purification ceremonies, including the personal toilette. Public outdoor barber’s shop services that provided shaving, haircutting, manicures, pedicures, nose- and ear-cleaning, existed in ancient India at the same time as public tonsors flourished in ancient Rome. They are still observable on the pavements of Indian cities, or near the religious bathing places (ghats) along the holy River Ganges, where barbers provide traditional grooming to accompany the client’s lustral dip: shampooing (massage) sitting on special shampooing stools; ‘frictions’ (scraping) using the stone columns and walls; hot baths, shaving (designs on the stomach hair a speciality), flower garlands, and every type of face paint and body powder.22
The Egyptian population’s strict adherence to purity rules, and the strength of their religious belief, were considered especially remarkable by that indefatigable traveller and folklore collector Herodotus. It was not just, he said, that they abided by the normal purity rules that any Greek might follow—such as purification at birth, after sexual intercourse, during the menses and sickness, and after childbirth (in a birth-house, or ‘House of Purification’), with minor attentions on minor occasions of possible impurity (before meals, after evacuation, after journeys)—but that he felt they were ‘religious to excess, beyond any nation in the world, and here are some of the customs which illustrate the fact: they drink from brazen cups which they scour every day—everyone, without exception. They wear linen clothes that they make a particular point of continually washing. They circumcise themselves for cleanliness’s sake, preferring to be clean rather than comely… ’.
The highest degree of personal cleanliness was reserved for direct contact with the deity. In addition Egyptian priests were required to ‘shave their bodies all over every other day to guard against the presence of lice, or anything equally unpleasant, while they are about their religious duties … They bathe in cold water twice a day and twice every night—and observe innumerable other ceremonies besides.’23 They shaved their heads, oiled their bodies, kept their feet, hands, and nails clean (with nails kept short), rinsed their mouths, and fumigated all their orifices. The Egyptian priest–pharaohs were excused the more onerous priestly requirements, and enjoyed considerably higher standards of decorative cosmetic care, but had other unique obligations: they were purified at birth, at coronation, before any temple rite, and even, while still alive, and as a precaution, given a purification ritual for the afterlife. After death, it was imagined, the Pharaoh would be bathed, fumigated, shaved, and oiled by the goddesses—after which, not merely cleansed but revived, ‘he received “his bones of metal” [and] stretched out his indestructible limbs … his body came together again [and] was entirely refashioned’.24
Goddesses were themselves the divine high priestesses of the arts of beauty and seduction. The Mesopotamian alpha female fertility goddess Inanna-Ishtar was eulogized as ‘the divine harlot’ and credited with taking 120 men without tiring; at the New Year festival of the Sacred Marriage, the current high king and high priestess acted out the parts of the fertility god DumuziTammuz and his wife, Inanna, on the sacred bed in the temple—a ceremony that naturally aroused the imagination of poets and gave rise to a special genre of love songs (and toilette descriptions) of Inanna: ‘When I have washed myself … When I shall have adorned my body… have put amber on my face, [and] mascara on my eyes … When the lord who sleeps with the pure Inanna … shall have made love to me on the bed, Then I in turn shall show my love for the lord; I shall fix for him a good destiny…‘.25 The Greek poet Homer was obviously on his mettle when it came to his own ‘white-armed’ goddesses, with a similar but especially luscious description of the toilette of the wife–goddess Hera, before her seduction of Zeus:
She began by removing every stain from her comely body with ambrosia, and anointing herself with the delicious and imperishable olive-oil she uses. It was perfumed and had only to be stirred in the Palace of the Bronze Floor for its scent to spread through heaven and earth. With this she rubbed her lovely skin; then she combed her hair, and with her own hands plaited her shining locks and let them fall in their divine beauty from her immortal head. Next she put on her fragrant robe of delicate material that Athene with her skilful hands had made for her and lavishly embroidered. She fastened it over her breast with golden clasps and, at the waist, with a girdle from which a hundred tassels hung. In the pierced lobes of her ears she fixed two earrings, each a thing of lambent beauty with its cluster of three drops. She covered her head with a beautiful new headdress, which was bright as the sun; and last of all, the Lady goddess bound a fine pair of sandals on her shimmering feet.26
In Homer beauty was a sacred gift to favoured individuals, and was absolutely not a power or a favour to be taken lightly. When Athene made Odysseus divinely handsome she added vibrant sex appeal: she ‘gave him ampler stature and ampler presence, and over his head made his hair curl and cluster like a hyacinth. It was as when a man adds gold to a silver vessel … Then he walked to the water’s edge and sat down apart, radiant with handsomeness and grace.’27
How many story-loving Greeks had read or knew by heart Homer’s description of the toilette of Hera? Or Babylonians the toilette of Inanna? There are similar descriptions in almost every language and stories about divine beauty in every mythology, and they must have been at least partly aspirational. Religious eroticism in general cut across all classes, ranks, and gender, and was an occasion for serious sexual display—and a very careful toilette. Purposeful erotic diversions, orgies, and sexual rituals often involved entire cities and populations in licensed communal mating exercises on behalf of the gods, ranging from fertility bull cults to phallus worship and love goddesses.28 The Indian god Shiva was the god of youth, sensuous delights, and erotic activity and Lord of the Dance of Life; in Greece, Aphrodite was the goddess of love, beauty, and fertility, honoured by women, and was also the patron goddess of the public concubines—the heterae. During the annual regenerational bath, or ‘Aphrodisia’, at her supposed birthplace in Paphos, Aphrodite’s statue would be attended by hundreds of girls and women purifying themselves for her rites; it is reported that the renowned hetera Phyrne of Paphos, though usually very closely gowned in public, would at this festival time walk into the sea fully naked with her hair loose and flowing, as a living image of the goddess (also that the famous sculptor Apelles made her the model of his Aphrodite Anadyomene, a genre which later produced the famous sea-bathing Venus by Botticelli).29
Back at the palace, divinity mingled with more earthy considerations. For the tribal leader and his household the palace complex was a fortress, a regional entrepôt, a cultic headquarters, and a home. Its main function was to defend and protect the body, family, and kin of the tribal chief or tribal alpha male (or female) from every possible catastrophe, in all possible senses—not just military ones. The royal presence created a sacred space; so it was deemed absolutely essential that the king or queen’s ‘two bodies’—their private selves and their public godlike selves—should be ceaselessly protected not only with layer after layer of palace stonework, but with an invisible web of palace purity rules, working like a comprehensive security system, with various different checkpoints and access levels. The internal architectural layout of the palace of Knossos illustrates the basic spatial arrangements in many Eurasian palaces then and thereafter, carefully designed to express architecturally, step by step, the spiritual, social, and dynastic intentions of the reigning king. Here the monarch was heavily guarded by a long Corridor of Procession, a Central Court, a Great Hall, and various lustral basins and pools that also decontaminated anyone entering the adjoining antechambers and shrines of the Temple of Rhea. The royal suite was the sanctuary at the heart of the complex: a pillared tower block, four storeys high, containing the private domestic quarters of the royal household, guarded by a purificatory royal shrine and a lustral bath at the threshold. This tower block was divided by gender as between husband and wife but also shared, as in a nuclear family. A large staircase (one of five in the private wing) led up to the royal megara, or living suites, of the king and queen, one on either side of a large corridor paved with white gypsum and green schist, ablaze with frescoes. The king’s apartments were larger, but the queen’s suite had a bathroom; both had private stairways to a shared rooftop loggia. The public and private ‘two bodies’ were represented symbolically: the king’s doorway was open and imposing, while the small door to the queen’s apartments, her megara, was guarded and concealed by a private, narrow, crooked corridor. The superior privacy, intimacy, and safety of the queen’s suite was further underlined by the presence of the king’s personal treasure room housed in an annexe off it.
The Babylonian palace at Eshnunna in 2300 BCE had five bathrooms and six lavatories, with seats of glazed brick; apparently all Babylonian palaces had elaborate drainage systems, and used hydraulic engineering to bring in clean water, and to recycle grey or dirty water (onto gardens or middens). In 2000–1200 BCE Knossos was also supplied with a white-/grey-/black-water drainage system that was connected to the queen’s famous bathroom and its plumbed annexe, usually described as a flush toilet (though it may have been a shower room); the king’s suite had plumbed, wall-mounted washbasins.30 The queen’s whole suite (which had been expensively redecorated many times) was what the Egyptians called a ‘Cabinet of the Morning’—a bedroom, bathroom, and reception room acting as a grooming area, later called the boudoir. The boudoir, or the Cabinet of the Morning, is central to any history of cosmetics—and to most court political histories.
The royal nuclear family was small, but it built a large extended family around itself, and leant on a close trusted circle of lesser kin, ‘unique friends’ or companions, and body servants, for its physical needs. The bulk of the people who actually inhabited palaces on a daily basis were the servants who kept the building and all its numerous contents clean and sound, and managed the inflow and outflow of its supplies. Thanks to scrupulous tomb and temple records, we know how royal households, especially, ran to a strict calendar and daily timetable of events as demanded by custom or ritual. The more intimate daily body services of the royal boudoir, however, were determined by the strict rules of palace behaviour and status that came to be called etiquette. The age-old question of precedence—who shall be closest to the royal body—was determined in the temple by the chief priests, and in the palace by the chief courtiers, according to the royal will. Body servants came in both genders; but male ‘grooms’, or young pages, were far outnumbered by the proverbial ‘handmaidens’, or ladies of the bedchamber, or ladies-in-waiting.
In the worldwide system of ‘guest honour’—ways of greeting and welcoming guests—there were many courteous invitations to wash, groom, or otherwise be made clean, at the threshold of the home. On one level greeting cleansing was a mark of politeness and care; on another level, it meant that no dirty, polluted, or unkempt person was actually allowed to disturb the purity, order, and honour of the dwelling-place. In smaller palaces—or even in lowlier houses—the purity precautions might only physically consist of an anteroom or two, a place to remove outdoor garments (especially shoes); or simply a washbasin by the threshold. In the royal Persian courts, guests were given slippers even before their feet touched the threshold, so that they did not tread upon the king’s ‘holy ground’.31 Courtiers were not allowed to touch or even breathe upon the king. In the ancient world guest honour was rarely violated, since it was also designed to give ‘face’ or respect to both parties, and provide ‘good report’, as Homer’s queen Penelope stated:
For how can you ever know, my guest, whether or not I stand high among womankind in thoughtfulness and regard for others if you sit down to a meal in this hall with skin unsoothed and garments wretched? … But if a man is gracious in thought and deed, his guests carry good report of him far and wide over the world, and he finds many to call him noble.32
In Homer’s Bronze Age world, to wash or bathe someone was a particular sign of respect, or of status, or of occasion. In the Odyssey the male guests are always washed on arrival (eight times bodily, three for hands or feet only) and occasionally on leaving (twice); often they had ‘handsome tunics and woollen cloaks put round them’. Old women washed old men; young women washed young men; the young washed the hands of the elders before eating, and all washed before the feast. Palace servants endlessly cleansed and served in the hall.
Most people probably started the day with a dawn prayer, a rough comb, and possibly a rough wash, before setting off to work. The rich arose and pottered about their bedroom suites. For the elite classes, life was somewhat different from the norm, even slightly unreal—which of course was the desired effect. Pleasure and play were a serious business in early societies, and pleasuring themselves was what the Bronze Age aristocracy did best, most of their time.33 For Egyptian aristocrats, the first rising was followed by ‘the hour of i’w’, the hour of the bath, the (unspecified) breakfast–grooming hour which forever afterwards was the mark of the well-to-do; after which they would emerge perfectly fresh, trim, and ready to meet, greet—and administer—the world. Courtly afternoons were usually reserved for outings, games, and sports; but as the sun went down, preparations in the private suite would begin for the full evening toilette, le grand tenue, which would outshine everything else.
By c.1500 BCE, court and city fashion demanded a highly cleansed and polished naked skin, framed by immaculate cloth; with a carefully modified repertoire of the old adornments of nakedness especially concentrated on the frontal erogenous zones.34 Personal hygiene consisted of very careful attention to the skin, and equally careful attention to the body’s artificially costumed ‘second skin’. Hot-water bathing and perfumery went together. Subtly perfumed unguents and oils were used lavishly on all the warm parts of the body, wet or dry—in the bath or out. Oiling the skin was just as important as washing, if not more so. Perfumery reached new technical heights—literally, in Egypt, in the famous head-cone of perfumed wax that was allowed to drip through high-class hair down the neck and shoulders on festive occasions. (When washed afterwards, both the hair and linen would be supple and shining.)35 The top-of-the-range rubbing oil around the Mediterranean was the famous Egyptian ‘Mendesian unguent’, originally consisting of rare oil of ben and resinous myrrh, but which by the later Tutankhamun period was made up to a more exotic recipe of oil of bitter almonds, olive oil, cardamoms, sweet rushes, honey, wine, myrrh, seed of balsam, galbanum, and turpentine. (Cheaper local vegetable oils—castor oil, olive oil—served the poor, and even animal fats would do the job.)36
3 The renowned Egyptian beauty Queen Nefertari, pictured on her tomb in the Valley of the Queens in Egypt, at a feast, wearing her royal headdress, a figure-hugging sheath tunic and gauze overgarment, face paint, immaculate nails and hair, with shoulder, wrist, and ear ornaments.
In India both male and female head-hair was treated with a perfumed paste that held it in hundreds of different styles, ready to be garlanded and adorned. The Tamil woman ‘bathed her fragrant black hair soft as the flowers till it shone, in the perfumed oil prepared by mixing up ten different kinds of astringent, five spices and thirty-two herbs soaked in water; she dried it in fuming incense, and perfumed the different plaits with the thick paste [called] musk deer’. Because of all the different perfumes and odoriferous applications, the ordinary morning toilette of an ‘affluent citizen’ in India, ‘desirous of keeping good health’, might consist of a dozen or more different operations:
A man as soon as he got up cleaned his teeth with the toothbrush, washed his mouth and eyes … applied collyrium [kohl] to his eyes and chewed a few betel leaves. At the time of his bath he anointed his hair with oil … and his body, thoroughly massaged and rubbed it, took physical exercises and finally took his bath, after which he combed his hair … shaving and paring his nails. [He anointed] the body with scented paste and then he put on gems, flowers, and clean clothes after which he put scent on his face.37
Among the treasures rescued from the grave of Queen Hetepheres were her golden razors. Shaving and depilation was a social insignia in the ancient world. Some societies shaved more than others, or in different ways; according to one Roman author the Celts ‘wash their hair constantly in lime-water, and they scrape it back from the forehead to the crown of the head … The nobles keep their cheeks smooth but let their moustaches grow.’38 From anciently being fully bearded and braided (like the Mesopotamians) the Egyptian male became clean-shaven, kept his hair short or shaven, shaved, plucked, or used depilatory unguents on his entire body, as did Egyptian women. Egyptian and Indian tastes and habits in this respect were very similar. The ten-day cleansing and deodorizing regime for Vatsyayana’s ‘affluent citizen’ (undoubtedly a Brahman) included the full depilatory ordeal:
He should bathe daily, anoint his body with oil every other day, apply a lathering substance to his body every three days, get his head (including face) shaved every four days, and the other parts of his body every five or ten days [ten days are allowed when the hair is taken out with a pair of pincers]. All of these things should be done without fail, and the sweat of the armpits should also be removed.39
Civilized body-art neglected none of the body parts. Tooth care was evidently a problem; tooth decay from excess honey or sugar is one of the so-called ‘diseases of civilization’ that probably even then affected the wealthy, but many ancient Egyptians (for example) had teeth worn to the quick by poorly milled flour. Aromatic pastes, aromatic gums, leaves and washes, and scented wood (or gold or ivory) toothpicks were used throughout Eurasia. In both Egypt and India the eye paints used on the eyes were considered essential in the same way as we regard modern toothpaste, and used as widely. At some point very early in their history, the Egyptians made a green–blue pigment derived from green malachite, a copper ore which they called vaz and used exclusively as an eye paint. All the eye paints of the early dynasties are green; sometime later the fashion changed to a dark grey powder from an ore of lead which they called mestem and was later known as kohl. In India it was known as collyrium; the Indian author Susruta said that collyrium ‘alleviated the burning and itching sensation, removed local pain, increased the range of vision … furthered the growth of beautiful eyelashes, cleansed the eyes by removing unhealthy secretions, made the eyes more wide and graceful and also [when a touch of poisonous antimony was added] imparted a brilliant lustre to the pupils’.40
High-class bodies were now more often gowned than not; nakedness was reserved for intimate household occasions, or for work, or for the poor. Elite Egyptian women of the Old Kingdom wore clinging, heavily pleated, white linen dresses that revealed every curve of their body; but later high-quality, semi-transparent linen gauzes were worn, and the pictures of Nefertiti and her daughters in the Eighteenth Dynasty (c.1575–1308 BCE) show their beautiful naked skin tantalizingly revealed by gowns that are mostly completely open down the front.41 Similar, but entirely differently designed, swathes of semi-concealing, semi-revealing, pleated cloth lengths were being created from the new animal and plant fibres discovered in various ecological niches throughout Eurasia, notably the new lightweight linen from flax (and nettles etc.), cotton in India, and silk in China. But when, as so often, we see ancient Egyptian, Greek, or Roman images wearing pure ‘white’ bleached or undyed robes, we should spare a thought for the expensively coloured cloths of the ancient world, still wonderfully and intensely displayed in ancient costumes on all continents. The Egyptians in particular extended their pigment colour range to include deep blue, green, vermilion, and purple (echoing the colours of the new cut-and-polished precious and semi-precious gems—lapis lazuli, turquoise, emerald, ruby, quartz, and topaz); and were very fond of mixing the pastel colours pale gold, pale blue, and especially pale pink. In the matter of colour the Minoan Cretan islanders were particularly resourceful. They were famous for their dyes: a crimson red dye collected from the ‘kermes’ insect; yellow dyes from the saffron lily; and a famous deep purple dye, collected from local sea snails. They became the cloth experts of the Mediterranean, developing new dyes, patterned dye stamps, coloured embroidery, and hand-cut tailoring, with a large trade into Egypt.42
The perfection, purity, colours, and strong perfume of natural flowers gave the final sensual touch to the Eurasian toilette. You might set out wearing flowers for a social engagement, but you also would very likely be given flowers or a floral garland when you arrived, as a sign of peaceful hospitality. Flowers were strongly attached to Eurasian religious observances, particularly funeral rites. The lotus was the sacred flower of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and northern India; in southern India, the marigold and jasmine; in Bali and Java the traditional annual religious calendar has a different scent for every season of the year—‘a calendar of scents’—and a great deal of money was and still is spent on flowers. All classes in ancient India wore flower garlands, particularly in north-west India, where there were flower chaplets for the waist, flower chaplets for the ears, and ‘strings of flowers falling from the back of the hair were known as prabhrastaka and those falling from the front as lalamaka. Pralamba and rajulamba were the chaplets falling on the forehead, and the garland worn across the chest under the right arm and over the left shoulder was known as vaikaksika.’43
4 The Ladies in Blue. These famously decorative Minoan frescoes were also advertisements for high-quality fashion products using local resources and labour.
We have reconstructed a bare outline of the ancient world’s large cosmetics industry, some of its social ideologies, and most of its accoutrements—all widely dispersed, and so close to the daily lives of so many people. But there is one other story which has been running subliminally throughout: the position of women at the centre of all this activity.
Originally a biologically determined body-surface treatment, the routines of the cosmetic toilette brought physical aid and comfort to mind and body by clearing up skin diseases, repairing damage, covering up imperfections, and in general enhancing personal beauty and vitality. Whoever did it, allo-grooming was obviously a very valuable skill or service; whatever went on before, it was clearly already strongly gendered and socially organized in Eurasia by c.3000 BCE; i.e. it was mainly performed by women, for men (and to a lesser extent for themselves and children). Secondly, it had acquired a new economic status—in fact it had almost become a profession. The Eurasian concubine, courtesan, geisha, bes, hetera, ganika, and other ‘public women’ were the supreme exponents of the ancient toilette.
From their very first historical appearance in the royal graves at Ur and stretching forward into later court history, we see these massed troupes of courtly women, acting much like ‘B’ - and ‘C’-ranking allo-grooming primate females. At the bottom of it all was the control and exploitation of sexuality—and nothing in the ancient court was more important than royal seduction and procreation. Women, especially beautiful or skilful women, were regarded in law as valuable chattels, and all ancient Indian rulers kept troupes of women for their sexual and social entertainment, taking them along on courtesy calls, or ordering ‘all lovely maidens’ to the gates of the city as a greeting honour for important diplomatic visitors. The Arabic word harem originally signified the ‘sanctuary or a sacred precinct’ of the king’s quarters; but the word gradually became synonymous with the female quarters.44 Unofficially, it was the old custom of polygamy for the chief male; officially, these extra women were servants of the chief female, her sewing maidens, whose youth, joie de vivre, and sportiveness gave them the stamina to perform constantly at feasts, picnics, and celebrations—like one Persian monarch whose ‘maner is, that watching in the night, and then banketting with his women, being an hundred and forty in number, he sleepeth most of the day’.45
Water-play was always erotic, especially banqueting or picnicking by canals, streams, or rivers: ‘See’, said an Egyptian love poem from 1300 BCE, ‘how sweet is the canal in it which you dug with your own hand for us to be refreshed by the breeze, a lovely place to wander.’ Or more explicitly: ‘I love to go and bathe before you. I allow you to see my beauty in a dress of finest linen, drenched with fragrant unguent. I go down to the water to be with you and come up to you again with a red fish looking splendid on my fingers.’46 The Kama Sutra by Vatsyayana (c.AD 400) was originally written ‘at the request of the public women of Pataliputra’—a guild of courtesans. If a public woman mastered the seductive and sexual arts of the Sutra and Shastra, said Vatsyayana, she would become ‘a ganika, or public woman of high quality’, expert in the arts of dress, witty disputation, poetry, game-playing, music, and dance, and a woman universally honoured and praised. Vatsyayana set the seduction scene
in the pleasure room, decorated with flowers, and fragrant with perfumes, attended by his friends and servants, [he] will receive the woman, who will come bathed and dressed, and will invite her to take refreshment. He should then seat her on his left side, and holding her hair, and touching also the end of the knot of her garment, he should gently embrace her with his right hand. They should then carry on an amusing conversation on various subjects, and talk suggestively… sing … and persuade each other to drink …At last when the woman is overcome with love and desire [he] should dismiss the people that may be with him, giving them flowers, ointments, and betel leaves, and then when the two are left alone, they should proceed as has already been described in the previous chapters.47
These were the chapters that covered the famous sixty-four erotic sexual positions (derived from already ancient sacred texts) known as the Kama Shastra, which the practically minded Vatsyayana reduced to eight essential bodily embraces: four to do with touching, piercing, rubbing, and pressing, and four which were gymnastic (twining, climbing, lying, lap-sitting); eight types of kiss, and eight kinds of lovebite with attractive names such as ‘the coral and the jewel’, or ‘the broken cloud’. He gave many helpful cosmetic receipts for beautification, and reported among other things on the adornment of the penis—‘the people of the southern countries think that true sexual pleasure cannot be obtained without perforating the lingam, and they therefore cause it to be pierced like the lobes of the ears of an infant pierced with earrings’.48
It is not surprising that the beauty of some of these public women became legendary, or that they apparently enjoyed a high degree of public support and affection; their fame also rested on their public performances of religious dancing and music-making (much like performing stars today), and these public appearances helped to set popular standards of beauty and grooming. The skills and accomplishments of the professional courtesan help to illuminate the lives of some of the famous queens of ancient history; from this perspective Queen Cleopatra, for instance, can be seen as a royal-born ganika playing for high stakes.49 But for every expensive Queen Cleopatra (or King Nebuchadnezzar) there were a thousand other princesses and princes, all with their toilettes to prepare, and marriages to make. Each individual faced a shifting kaleidoscope of physical and social advantage or disadvantage throughout their lives which directly affected their grooming habits—and even the poorest had some grooming habits. If they were lucky they had a protective home, family, and kin who performed loving, intimate acts of grooming and gave medical attention ‘for free’, in their ‘free’ rest times. Baths, expensive paints, scents, and oils were not essential; simple ingredients, simple tools, and home preparations would do. But even these scanty advantages would be wrecked if the work dried up, or local politics changed for the worse.
Up to around 1700 BCE, Eurasian trade and industry had provided an uninterrupted flood of new capital, high technology, and disposable income. Economically speaking, the beauty trades were an early capitalist success story, a luxury that became a necessity. In eastern Eurasia many ancient cosmetic customs and trades were preserved up to present times; in western Eurasia, however, physical circumstances dictated a different path. Few ancient empires could withstand such natural ecological shocks as the massive eruption at Thera (Santorini) in 1628 BCE, from which the Minoans never recovered; or the deforestation, silting, and salination that destroyed crop yields and created desert in the Fertile Crescent: Nineveh was eventually sacked in 612 BCE and Nebuchadnezzar’s fabulous golden city of Babylon was overrun in 539 BCE.50 But as it turned out, however, the ancient Mediterranean trading system and its luxury trades had not even reached their peak. Around the Aegean archipelago the Greeks were well dug in by 539 BCE. The Greeks are normally where the history of hygiene begins.
