Peer

What an honour to contribute to Amanda Jane Graham’s exhibition ‘Peer’, whose blending of hairdressing and art parallels my own work as an Egyptologist. Combining a lifelong love of Egypt with the hairdressing extending back generations within my family, our peering back into Egypt’s epic past reveals the world’s earliest hairdressers.

With skills handed down for over three millennia, their work was infused with meaning far beyond the obvious. For hairdressing was then a form of ritual, and the life force allowing hair to be cut yet grow again exemplified in the story of deities Isis and Osiris. Cut down by his red-haired brother Seth, Osiris was mourned by ‘Fair Tressed’ Isis, who cut off a lock in mourning, when her tears created the life-giving River Nile. Her powers even revived the dead, and having transformed Osiris into the god of resurrection, her extension of eternal life to followers was inherited from an even earlier goddess Hathor, ‘She of Beautiful Hair’. 

Yet far beyond the realm of gods, four decades’ research highlights the importance of hair among an ancient population far beyond the 1% literate elite able to leave a written record. Certainly in pre-literate Egypt where combs and hairpins were often placed in burials, one woman’s hairstyle c.3400 BC had been created by someone other than the lady herself, filling out her natural hair with hair extensions ‘rolled’ between the fingers to create locs, and her own greying hair dyed with henna. 

By 3100 BC with the first of three millennia of monarchs regarded as so divine it was a capital offence just to touch them, a rare exception was the royal hairdresser. Shaving the royal head each morning using the sharpest bronze razor which also cut hair, the additional use of combs, hairpins and haircurlers created a range of coiffures, while the role of ‘Royal Hairdresser and Wigmaker’ brought rich rewards.

Courtiers too were shown having their own hair and wigs styled, and with hair extensions used by soldiers before the invention of helmets, they were also added to the hair of royal women by hairdressers like Inu and Henut, shown attaching braids to the hair of Queen Nofret c.2000 BC. Such scenes were found at Deir el-Bahri, home of goddess Hathor ‘Lady of the Lock’, whose trademark ‘bouffant’ coiffure was also replicated for elite women using wigs, like that made of crimped braids for wealthy housewife Merit. Although she retained her own hair beneath, royal contemporaries Nefertiti and stepson Tutankhamen both had shaven heads in addition to the short wigs buried with each of them. By contrast the wig of Tutankhamen’s great-grandfather Yuya was an elaborate long style often misidentified as 'a noblewoman's wig', the wide variety of hair lengths for both men and women proving so confusing the so-called ‘Mona Lisa of Ancient Egypt’ statue is actually an Egyptian nobleman! 

Yet the coded language of hair was once obvious to all who saw it, both in terms of style and colour. From the blue hair of divinity to the solar yellow occasionally found in excavations and among Egypt’s neighbours the Libyans, they were also portrayed with the same red hair as those from the Levant. This Levantine origin may also explain the natural hair colour of pharaoh Seti I, named after the volatile Seth, and both Seti and son Ramses II using their red hair to rehabilitate Seth as a major deity. The hairdressers of the aging Ramses even restored his original shade with henna, emphasising such kings as followers if not living embodiments of this god.

So too hair treatments among the clergy, whose growing political powers were reflected in wigs whose increasing size was achieved with internal fibre packing. Made inside specialised workshops, hairdressers also worked in the home, with one farmer c.2000 BC telling his family by letter to take good care of his new wife: “Do not keep her hairdresser or servants away from her”.  

Yet with growing foreign influence during the first millennium BC, so too fashions for natural hair, especially among Egypt’s Greek rulers the Ptolemies who combined Greek and Egyptian traditions. So Queen Berenike is shown with her own hair tied back in a Greek-style bun while famously offering a lock of her hair to Aphrodite, the Greek equivalent of Hathor and Isis. Berenike then appears in traditional temple scenes in the same long wig as centuries of queens and goddesses, just like her ultimate successor Cleopatra who even claimed to be Isis’ incarnate.

With portraits suggesting Cleopatra may also have been a redhead, her natural hair was secured in a bun with pearl-tipped hairpins which seem to have served an additional purpose. For ancient accounts of Cleopatra’s suicide in 30 BC claim that 'she carried poison in a hollow bodkin about which she wound her hair'. She also chose to die with her hairdresser Eiras, likely supplying the hairpin with which Cleopatra ended her life to terminate three thousand years of pharaonic rule.

Yet as Cleopatra’s ‘Living Isis’ persona took hold around the Mediterranean, the goddess’ cult was hugely popular among followers who 'declared by their gestures…. of their arms and fingers they were ordained and ready to dress and adorn the goddess's hair' according to a AD C.2nd source. By this time however, growing Christianity was denouncing hairstyling as sinful, and after the Romans replaced Isis with Christianity, her temples were closed down and Egypt’s hieroglyphic script lost for some 1400 years until the invasion of Egypt by the French in 1798.

By this time the French Revolution had even resurrected Isis in opposition to the previous regime, setting up her huge statue pouring out water so all who drank could be renewed. For Isis represented the accumulated knowledge of the ancient world, reflected in the 1767 ‘Recueil des Coiffures’ manifesto of hairdressers seeking recognition and likewise citing their ancient predecessors.

And so too Amanda Jane Graham, encouraging us all to peer beyond the obvious to recognise a profession whose earliest practitioners had achieved the divine.

Professor Joann Fletcher