The principal female figures depicted in formal paintings are almost invariably upper-class wives or daughters included in the scene by virtue of their relationship to a particular man. That is, they are shown in the tomb of their husband, father or son, rather than being tomb owners in their own right. It is not surprising that these women conform to a stereotyped view of the role of the Egyptian female as a passive support to her husband or father. Women take a secondary role in the proceedings; although they may be both active and prominent, they are obviously less active and less prominent than the male tomb owner. Often depicted on a much smaller scale than their spouse, they almost always stand behind their man. How far this formal representation of the relationship between men and women reflects the true situation we can now only guess, but it does seem obvious that within their tombs Egyptian husbands wished to preserve the traditional image of the man as the head of the household.
One exception to the general rule of the inert female is provided by the tombs of the queens of Egypt. Several of these women-only burials include scenes where wives act independently of their husbands; for example the 4th Dynasty tomb of Queen Meresankh (‘She-Loves-Life’) reveals the queen picking lotus blossoms while enjoying an informal boating expedition with her mother.2 An even more striking contrast to the conventional depiction of passive women is provided by the representation of a besieged Asiatic town found on the wall of an Old Kingdom
Fig. 2 Queen Meresankh boating in the marshes with her mother, Queen Hetepheres
tomb at Deshasha. This unique scene clearly shows the village women fighting with knives and bare hands to defend their homes from enemy Egyptian bowmen. Whether or not the scene should be read as an appreciation of the bravery of the local (non-Egyptian) women, or as a less than flattering comment on the valour of their menfolk, is not now clear.3
I was an artist skilled in my art and pre-eminent in my learning… I knew how to depict the movements of a man and the carriage of a woman… No one succeeds in all of this apart from myself and the eldest son of my body.
Inscription of the sculptor Irtisen
Fig. 3 Women fighting in the streets
The principal private individuals painted by the artists were almost invariably presented as perfect physical specimens dressed in gleaming white clothes, adorned with spectacular jewels and positively bursting with vigorous good health. The women, their femininity emphasized by rounded breasts and buttocks and less well-defined muscle groups, were all, without exception, beautiful. Every feature on their idealized body was shown from its best or most typical angle, and some rather contrived and contorted-looking poses developed as the artists struggled to paint their standing subjects with the head in profile, a single eye and eyebrow shown as from the front, the torso also shown from the front, the hips viewed from the side and the legs shown separately and slightly apart.
To modern eyes, accustomed to images which faithfully mirror reality and the now conventional use of foreshortening and perspective, this stylization leads to an unnatural and rather primitive-looking painting technique which makes all Egyptian two-dimensional art instantly recognizable. However, to the Egyptians, who expected to see a formalized rather than an impressionistic form, it was a necessary precaution. After all, the Egyptians reasoned with their own intensely practical brand of logic, if a part of the body couldn’t be seen, it almost certainly wasn’t there. It was vital that the main figures painted on tomb walls should be both seen and understood to be complete because, if by some mischance the physical body should defy the art of the embalmers and decompose after death, the spirit of the deceased might be compelled to live on in his or her painted image. Few Egyptians were willing to run the risk of surviving minus an arm or a leg in the Afterlife.4
The ‘fairer sex’, who conventionally worked indoors away from the burning Egyptian sun, were invariably painted with lighter skins than their ochre-coloured menfolk. This convention completely ignored the fact that society was racially well-mixed at all levels; as has already been noted, the Egyptians did not require their art to be an accurate representation of life. Some women were depicted with a black skin, but this did not necessarily imply a Negroid origin. Black, the colour of the fertile Egyptian soil, symbolized regeneration and was therefore used to indicate those awaiting rebirth in the Afterlife. Following this logic, a lady depicted with green skin was understood to be dead, green in this instance being the colour of life (i.e. the expectation of resurrection) rather than putrefaction. For both men and women, dead and alive, colour was used to fill in the outline of the figure without any attempt at shading, so that the image appeared complete to the pedantic Egyptian observers.