The implement used in tattooing consists of seven needles fixed into a short stick, which is bound round the end and then plastered over to keep the needles firmly in position. Sometimes smaller needles, and only five in number, are used for tattooing children. Lamp black is the pigment employed, and this is usually mixed with oil, though some people say that water is used.
Unfortunately, tattooing is a practice which leaves little tangible trace, so that although female figurines with incised and painted body decorations have been found in Dynastic graves of all periods it is not until the Middle Kingdom that the mummified bodies of ladies tentatively identified as royal concubines confirm its use.5 The tradition appears to have died out by the New Kingdom, although some New Kingdom entertainers and servant girls displayed a small picture of the dwarf god Bes high on each thigh as a good luck symbol and a less than subtle means of drawing attention to their hidden charms. It has been suggested that this particular tattoo may have been the trade mark of a prostitute, but it seems equally likely to have been worn as an amuletic guard against the dangers of childbirth, or even as a protection against sexually transmitted diseases. Tattooing seems to have been confined to lower-class women and to men, who were tattooed less extensively.
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Although artistic conventions decreed that women should be depicted as fashionably gaunt, there is very little direct evidence to show whether Egyptian women struggled to lose weight. The loose untailored clothing could have been worn by women of any size, and we do not have the equivalent of ancient diet sheets or exercise routines, while the medical papyri remain tantalizingly silent in this area. Comparison with modern rural Egypt suggests that although women may have been expected to be thinner than men the almost skeletal appearance currently admired in western societies would not have been appreciated. It seems that only in societies where famine is unthinkable is this female body type greatly admired. Naked female figurines recovered from tombs generally have gently rounded figures with relatively wide hips and slightly prominent buttocks. These figurines were included among grave goods for men, women and children, not as models of individual women but as generalized fertility symbols representing the whole process of Egyptian family life including reproduction and child-rearing. They suggest that, perhaps above all, a good child-bearing physique would be the most widely admired female physical type.
Most Egyptians were very comfortable with their own bodies and were not offended by nudity in others. Nakedness in its correct place was not regarded as in any way shocking or indecent, and tomb owners showed no false modesty when depicting scenes of daily life which included fishermen or other workers whose occupations would have made the wearing of clothes inappropriate to their task. Nakedness could be used by the artists as a means of indicating low social status, and children were often illustrated nude although we know that they were normally dressed in clothes similar to those worn by their parents. During the New Kingdom female nudity, or semi-nudity, became common for those lower-status women whose employment was in some way related to their physical charms. Dancers and acrobats, for example, were depicted wearing either an eye-catching girdle or a practical short flared skirt, sometimes with narrow straps crossed over the breasts for purely decorative purposes. Servant girls at work wore a simple kilt with no blouse, and were frequently portrayed as either entirely naked but for ornamental bead collars and belts, or dressed in flimsy see-through garments. The trend for New Kingdom female nudity even extended to the gods, with a few naked foreign deities such as the Asian war-goddess Astarte developing cult followings in Egypt at this time.
It would, however, have been both inaccurate and inappropriate for the upper classes to be shown without their clothes. All indications are that those of high rank delighted in showing off their finery, and viewed elegant garments as a means of underlining their social position. It was only during the short-lived Amarna period, when all the old conventions were turned on their heads, that royal ladies allowed themselves to be depicted either naked or wearing casually unfastened robes which left nothing to the imagination. Whether nudity was, in fact, common in private life, ‘off camera’, we have no means of telling, although it seems reasonable to assume that nudity would not have been popular during the cool winters or in the chilly early mornings.
My lover, it is pleasant to go to the pond and bathe myself while you watch me. In this way I may let you see my beauty revealed through my tunic of finest white linen, when it becomes wet and clinging… I go down with you into the water and come out again to you with a red fish which lies beautiful on my fingers… Come and look at me.