Clothing and adornment

Clothing

The clothes worn by most Egyptian people were made from linen from the flax plant, a fabric that is cool and comfortable to wear.  The quality of the linen ranged from an almost see through woven fabric for the rich – to a coarse cloth worn by the peasants.  From studies of clothing styles depicted on wall decorations, sculptures and fabric found in graves, clothing clearly played an important role as a status symbol.  The richer the person, the more elaborate and expensive their clothing and adornment was.  

Ancient Egyptian fashions were simple with men wearing a piece of linen wrapped around their waists like a kilt or loincloth and women a dress with straps or plain sheath wrapped around her body. The kilts varied in length. Other types of everyday clothing included underwear, cloaks, sleeves, shawls and kerchiefs.

Most people wore plain linen, decorated by pleating, as only the rich could afford brightly coloured cloth. Both sexes sometimes wore cloaks of thick material depending on the weather.

Labourers mainly wore linen loincloths or nothing at all, or if they were clad, the clothes were plain and undecorated. Most pre-pubescent children wore no clothes and had their heads shaved, except for a long plait on the side of their head, which was called ‘the lock of youth’.

The working classes like the serving girls, musicians and prostitutes for instance, did not wear a lot of clothes. They compensated for the lack of adornment by tattooing their bodies. The prostitutes especially did this. They had the image of the god Bes tattooed on their thighs. Bes was portrayed as a grotesque dwarf and was regarded as a protective spirit who averted evil.

Dresses worn by dancers and prostitutes were made from bead-net decorated with semiprecious stones and beads. Bead-net dresses were also worn by respectable ladies, but only over their everyday dresses. Beautifully decorated bead-nets with ankh symbols, the hieroglyphic sign meaning life, and djed pillars were placed over mummies. The djed hieroglyph means stability and is regarded as the backbone of Osiris, the god of the Underworld.

Professional mourners wore special clothing. These ladies lamented with bare breasts and dust on their heads and no wigs. The normal kilt was lowered and draped around the waist to expose the breasts.

Make up

The Egyptian predilection for the elaborate eye make-up portrayed in modern films had an early beginning. Copper ore, malachite, and lead ore, galena, were ground on cosmetic slate palettes to adorn the eyes of men and women. It probably also had a medicinal effect in helping to ward off flies. The ground powders were stored in small cosmetic jars of stone, and applied to the eyes with a little kohl stick.

Hair and Headdresses

Men were usually clean-shaven or had small pointed beards and sometimes a moustache. Wigs became very popular among wealthier classes and they were constructed to ensure ventilation – an important consideration in Egypt’s hot climate.  Hair was either cropped short or shaven underneath. 

It is obvious from their art that Egyptians had a huge array of hairstyles – most of which were embellished by some sort of ornamentation.

A popular headdress for a pharaoh was the nemes – a striped cloth placed around the wig and stretched across the ears to tie at the back of the neck.  The side flaps were left hanging over the shoulders.

Another distinct headdress of the pharaoh was his crown, called the pschent. The crown was white, but after the unification of Egypt, it was combined with the red crown of Lower Egypt to form the Double Crown. 

Jewellery

From the earliest times onwards jewellery was worn by men and women in life and death. They wore finger-rings, bracelets, anklets, collars, necklaces, and earrings. Even the poorest burials would have had a string of beads or two. The gods, too, had their jewellery.

In the case of the ancient Egyptian the most compelling reason to wear ornaments was as protection against evil forces and therefore charms or amulets were worn for this specific purpose. Not just the shape of the amulet, or material it was made of played a role, but also the colour. Popular colours were red, which symbolised the red of life-blood, green to celebrate the regeneration of life through the life cycles of plants, and the blue of water and the sky. Gold especially, was the colour of the gods.

These amulets had another role to fulfill. They also played a part as funerary adornment and certain funerary amulets were made for putting on the wrapped mummy to ward off evil and to protect the body against destruction. Groups of the Four Sons of Horus, protectors of the mummified internal organs, only came in use in the Third Intermediate Period.

The amulet in the shape of a scarab is perhaps the best known of all the amulets. It first appeared in the First Intermediate Period and was manufactured until the Greco-Roman Period.  It was also made in Syria and Palestine. Every material known to the Egyptians was used to make scarabs.

The industrious scarab or dung beetle, pushing a very large ball of dung to his underground home, fascinated the Egyptians. They imagined a huge black beetle pushing the sun-disc across the sky every day in the same manner. Not understanding the life cycle of the scarab beetle, the ancient Egyptians thought that the small beetles hatched from the same ball of dung. Therefore, the beetle became synonymous with spontaneous regeneration and resurrection. The new-born sun was called Khepri, and this god was portrayed with the body of a man and the head was replaced with a complete beetle.