We do, however, have some clear examples of rank or occupation influencing female hairstyles. Even when short hair was in vogue the most attractive dancers and acrobats wore their hair long, occasionally plaiting weights into the ends so that it gave a good swing when dancing. Pre-pubescent upper-class boys and girls are frequently represented sporting the ‘sidelock of youth’: an almost entirely bald pate with a single long thick curl worn on the side of the head. Hair charms were suspended from the base of the sidelock and brought good luck and protection to their wearer. Unkempt long hair was generally restricted to men and women in mourning, while women in labour are occasionally portrayed with a dishevelled-looking archaic hairstyle intended to ward off evil spirits by sympathetic magic; as the woman loosens her normally neat hair she also symbolically loosens the baby ready for birth.
To cause the hair to fall out: burnt leaf of lotus is put in oil and applied to the head of a hated woman.
Ebers Medical Papyrus
Women did not necessarily regard their natural hair as their crowning glory. Indeed, throughout pharaonic times it was common practice for upper-class men and women to wear their natural hair closely cropped or even shaved as a practical response to the hot climate and a means of avoiding uncomfortable tangles. Fashionable wigs, which protected the near-bald heads against the fierce Egyptian sun, were worn for aesthetic reasons on more formal occasions, and false hair developed into an important commercial industry. Most wealthy people owned at least one hairpiece, and the convenience of a convention which combined cool comfort during the day with elegance at night must have been much appreciated. The best and most natural looking of the wigs were made of over 120,000 human hairs woven into a mesh and glued into place with a mixture of melted beeswax and resin.3 The worst and least natural were made entirely of coarse red date-palm fibre and must have presented a startlingly bizarre appearance.
Recipe to make the hair of a bald person grow: fat of lion, fat of hippopotamus, fat of crocodile, fat of cat, fat of serpent, and fat of ibex are mixed together and the head of the bald person is anointed therewith.
Ebers Medical Papyrus
Despite the evident popularity of shaved heads, mummies of all periods have been recovered with well-dressed heads of natural hair, and the surviving romantic poetry makes it clear that clean and shining tresses were much admired. Indeed, the mummified body of Queen Ahmose Nefertari, who died at an advanced age having lost most of her natural hair, wore a wig of human braids thoughtfully supplied by the embalmers who presumably wished to save her from the indignity of being reborn bald in the Afterlife. The medical papyri supplied useful recipes to enhance the appearance by curing such social embarrassments as unwanted baldness and persistent dandruff, while helpfully suggesting that the fat of black snakes, the blood of black oxen or even a repulsive-sounding compound made from the pulverized genitals of a bitch could usefully be employed to disguise unsightly grey hair. A slightly more acceptable and presumably less smelly means of changing hair colour was the use of henna paste which could also be used to decorate finger and toe nails. Henna is still used as a skin and hair dye in modern Egyptian villages.
Fig. 24 Old Kingdom queen wearing a striking red and yellow wig and perhaps the earliest shoulder-pads in the world
Women’s hair and wig styles changed far more frequently than either clothing or jewellery fashions, graduating from the rather severe cuts worn throughout the Old Kingdom to the longer and more elabor ate styles favoured at the zenith of the Egyptian Empire. It is tempting, although perhaps over-simplistic, to see a direct correlation between the wealth of Egypt and the time and money made available for hair and wig care. During the Old Kingdom the most trendy women sported a short, straight bob such as is frequently seen today. This style gradually became longer, until by the Middle Kingdom shoulder-length hair and heavier wigs had been adopted by all classes. The longer hair was either worn loose or dressed in the so-called ‘tripartite style’, with the hair at the back of the head hanging free and bunches of hair on either side of the head pulled forward to frame the face and expose the ears. This tripartite style was originally confined to females of low status in society, principally the unmarried, but its use gradually spread to higher-ranking married women. Indeed, a more intricate version, the ‘Hathor-style’, which involved binding the two sections of front hair with ribbons and wrapping them round a flat disk-shaped weight, became hugely popular and was the firm favourite of most 18th Dynasty queens. In contrast the Amarna royal ladies, who liked to do most things differently, favoured the rather more masculine ‘Nubian’-style wig based on the short and curly haircuts of Nubian soldiers. As the New Kingdom progressed hair and wig fashions became less standardized, growing generally longer and far more exaggerated, perhaps due to the increasing foreign influence being felt throughout Egypt at this time. A 19th Dynasty vogue for fuller wigs and a corresponding increase in the use of supplementary hairpieces to pad out both wigs and natural hair led to the abandonment of the tripartite hairstyle, and the formerly simple strand wigs were rejected in favour of wild-looking wigs of curls and thin plaits ending in fringes.