DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.55201#0220
SEASON OF I93O-I93I
207
some berries, lichen, roots, a coil of grass, and some unground mala-
chite for eye paint wrapped in a bit of cloth (pl. 37). Twice we had
found these bits of wood with articles of the toilet, and the lichen and
berries with them the second time suggested that the wood had been
aromatic. It is obvious that the lady of the Eleventh Dynasty bought
these little sticks of sweet-scented wood for perfumes which she made
by grinding off the ends and collecting the powder from them to
sprinkle in her clothes or hair.
While we are on the subject of hairdressing, there is one extraordi-
nary case of the survival of a style throughout four thousand years
that is well worth a note. Most of the Eleventh Dynasty tombs at
Thebes contained dolls. Some of them already mentioned in these
reports8 undoubtedly represented dancing girls and were put in the
tomb in order that their spirits might while away the time of the
Theban grandees in the tedious hours of eternity. Others look more
like children’s toys and actually had seen hard use, although they
too may have found a burial as representations of dancing girls rather
than as children’s playthings.
They are barbarous looking things, whittled out of thin paddles of
wood, gaudily painted, and with great mops of hair made of strings
of little beads of black mud ending in elongated blobs (pl. 38). Strange
as they may look, they are not one whit more uncouth than a modern
doll bought in 1931 at Amadeh in Nubia which has each thin plait of
hair tipped with a blob of clay. And these blobs of clay are no childish
fancy, for the well-dressed woman of Der, the capital of Nubia, ends
off every one of her coal-black tresses with just such a lump of yellow
clay. The styles of Thebes four thousand years ago are still to be met
with in Nubia to-day.
There is one puzzle which some one should try to work out. With
the toilet box and the aromatic wood there was a pair of bone casta-
nets (pl. 40). The type is well enough known, with tips shaped like
hands and at the top holes, the edges of which have been worn by the
strings which once bound the castanets together. With the baskets of
aromatic wood were found two ivory objects, common enough in all
Middle Kingdom cemeteries9 and yet to my mind not perfectly under-
stood by us to-day. Some are plain, and it seems to me that they must
have been simply “bones” like those rattled in a negro minstrel show,
but others—and one of those found by us belongs among them—are
8 See above, page 72.
9 For instance at Lisht; see Bulletin, October, 1914, p. 220, and fig. 11; November,
1921, part II, p. 18, and figs. 16, 17.
207
some berries, lichen, roots, a coil of grass, and some unground mala-
chite for eye paint wrapped in a bit of cloth (pl. 37). Twice we had
found these bits of wood with articles of the toilet, and the lichen and
berries with them the second time suggested that the wood had been
aromatic. It is obvious that the lady of the Eleventh Dynasty bought
these little sticks of sweet-scented wood for perfumes which she made
by grinding off the ends and collecting the powder from them to
sprinkle in her clothes or hair.
While we are on the subject of hairdressing, there is one extraordi-
nary case of the survival of a style throughout four thousand years
that is well worth a note. Most of the Eleventh Dynasty tombs at
Thebes contained dolls. Some of them already mentioned in these
reports8 undoubtedly represented dancing girls and were put in the
tomb in order that their spirits might while away the time of the
Theban grandees in the tedious hours of eternity. Others look more
like children’s toys and actually had seen hard use, although they
too may have found a burial as representations of dancing girls rather
than as children’s playthings.
They are barbarous looking things, whittled out of thin paddles of
wood, gaudily painted, and with great mops of hair made of strings
of little beads of black mud ending in elongated blobs (pl. 38). Strange
as they may look, they are not one whit more uncouth than a modern
doll bought in 1931 at Amadeh in Nubia which has each thin plait of
hair tipped with a blob of clay. And these blobs of clay are no childish
fancy, for the well-dressed woman of Der, the capital of Nubia, ends
off every one of her coal-black tresses with just such a lump of yellow
clay. The styles of Thebes four thousand years ago are still to be met
with in Nubia to-day.
There is one puzzle which some one should try to work out. With
the toilet box and the aromatic wood there was a pair of bone casta-
nets (pl. 40). The type is well enough known, with tips shaped like
hands and at the top holes, the edges of which have been worn by the
strings which once bound the castanets together. With the baskets of
aromatic wood were found two ivory objects, common enough in all
Middle Kingdom cemeteries9 and yet to my mind not perfectly under-
stood by us to-day. Some are plain, and it seems to me that they must
have been simply “bones” like those rattled in a negro minstrel show,
but others—and one of those found by us belongs among them—are
8 See above, page 72.
9 For instance at Lisht; see Bulletin, October, 1914, p. 220, and fig. 11; November,
1921, part II, p. 18, and figs. 16, 17.