SECRETS OF AN ANCIENT BEAUTY BOX

This month as we continue with our ongoing ‘Ancient Adornments Project’ as highlighted in our social media posts, the carefully made-up face and exquisitely styled hair of priestess Tutu (in triplicate above) has proved especially popular https://x.com/ImmortalEgypt/status/1830565686306869403. So how amazing that we can still take a look inside Tutu’s actual cosmetic chest (below) and see the very tools she used to create this signature look over three thousand years ago.

Tutu’s cosmetic chest (© Treasuresofancientegypt)

Working as a ‘chantress’ in the service of the god of Amun at Karnak Temple during the early C.13th BC, Tutu also held the title ‘Lady of the House’ – housewife – and was clearly of high status. Married to the royal scribe Ani with whom she lived, the handsome couple are captured together in the colourful vignettes throughout their Book of the Dead funerary papyrus made around 1280 BC  (https://www.ushabtis.com/papyrus-ani-bm-ea10470-2/). A particularly fine scene shows them playing senet together (below), and although Ani gets the chair while Tutu sits on a stool beside him, only she gets the nice plump red cushion (also loving the footstools).

Tutu sits with husband Ani as they play senet (© British Museum)

The papyrus also shows more of the couple’s furniture being carried into their tomb in preparation for their afterlife together (below), a well-padded chair and bed followed by the tools of Ani’s trade, his scribal palette and writing equipment. The lead porter also carries a long staff, a pair of white sandals looped over his right arm plus two tall perfume vessels on a tray. And with what could be Tutu’s aforementioned cosmetic chest and a second such weighty box transported using a pair of wooden yokes (below), an actual yoke was found in the tomb of another married couple, the architect Kha and his wife Merit.

Porters carry Ani & Tutu’s perfume vessels, bed, chair and scribal equipment into their tomb (© British Museum)

Pair of storage chests carried into Ani & Tutu’s tomb using wooden yokes (© BM) with the yoke found in the tomb of Kha and Merit (© ImmortalEgypt)

Merit, like Tutu, held the title ‘lady of the house’ around a century earlier, and the tomb she had shared with husband Kha at Deir el-Medina was discovered intact in 1906 by Italian archaeologists. And with their 500+ grave goods photographed in situ before almost all were sent to Turin’s Egyptian Museum, there we’ve been privileged to study and handle them over the years, including of course the contents of Merit’s own wonderful cosmetic chest (below & at 7’50 into https://www.facebook.com/drjoannfletcher/videos/life-and-death-in-the-valley-of-the-kings-part-one/637360233093370/).

Inside Merit’s compartmentalised cosmetic chest (© Museo Egizio)

We were even given access to Kha and Merit’s painted tomb’s chapel and subterranean rock-cut burial chamber (watch at: https://www.youtube.com/live/ejKNwaVIrT0?t=6768s), no doubt very similar in type to the tomb of Ani and Tutu which was likewise located on Thebes’ West Bank. But already discovered in the late C.19th by local people who then sold its contents to Luxor’s antiquity dealers in 1887, the complete lack of excavation or any form of recording has left a real void in our knowledge about Ani and Tutu, from their tomb’s actual location to the fate of their mummified bodies. 

All that knowingly survives are the objects acquired by Sir Ernest Wallis Budge (below), Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum, during his 1887 trip to Baghdad via Egypt where, among many other things, he acquired parts of Ani and Tutu’s tomb contents, from the cosmetic chest to their famous funerary papyrus. 

Sir Ernest Wallis Budge at his museum desk, with his autobiography ‘By Nile & Tigris’ (© Worthpoint)

As Budge reveals in his snappily titled autobiography ‘By Nile and Tigris: a Narrative of Journeys in Egypt and Mesopotamia on behalf of the British Museum between the years 1886 and 1913’ (read at: https://archive.org/details/byniletigrisnarr01budguoft/page/n167/mode/2up?q=+ani), he’d been alerted to a series of new discoveries so had travelled south to Luxor, where ‘one evening’, he set off “for the place on the western bank where the ‘finds’ of papyri had been made. Here I found a rich store of fine and rare objects, and among them the largest roll of papyrus I had ever seen. The roll was tied round with a thick band of papyrus cord, and was in a perfect state of preservation, and the clay seal which kept together the ends of the cord was unbroken. The roll lay in a rectangular niche in the north wall of the sarcophagus chamber, among a few hard stone amulets”, suggesting he himself had entered the tomb of Ani and Tutu. 

And it was certainly a productive night for Budge. For although he never actually specifies where he went, he does admit that “in other places” he was shown more funerary papyri “and various other objects of the highest interest and importance. I took possession of all these papyri, etc., and we returned to Luxor at daybreak”, where the antiquities were boxed up and placed in temporary storage in the dealers’ safehouse before Budge enjoyed morning coffee at the home of local antiquities dealer Mohammed Mohassib. 

Eugène Grébaut (L) and his staff oversee the unwrapping of a mummified 21st dyn Amun priestess in the Giza Museum in 1891 (artist PD Philippoteaux (c) Leicester Galleries)

Yet clearly Budge’s ongoing exploits did not sit well with the French Director of Egypt’s Antiquities Service Eugène Grébaut (above). Having failed to reach Luxor in time to acquire the antiquities for Cairo Museum (then located at Bulaq before moving again to Giza in 1891), Grébaut ordered soldiers and the local police “to take possession of every house containing antiquities in Luxor and to arrest their owners”, including the mudbrick storehouse housing Budge’s new purchases, now off limits. 

Late C.19th image of the old Luxor Hotel and its gardens surrounded by mudbrick walls © A.Beato/ https://www.aaazizbooks.com/old_luxor_hotel_photo_gallery)

Yet the storehouse’s location abutting the Luxor Hotel gardens did allow a small group of what Budge describes as ‘sturdy gardeners’ to tunnel through its mudbrick wall that same night. And while he and the hotel manager watched them work, the police guarding the house entrance were distracted when the hotel sent them over a lamb dinner, allowing the majority of Budge’s new purchases to be silently removed box by box via the hotel garden and down to the Nile to await shipment north to Cairo. 

And while the crates of antiquities – including the cosmetic chest – seem to have remained in temporary storage in Egypt, Budge himself took the papyri to Cairo, from where he was leaving for Baghdad so the papyri were transported back to London in the ‘official baggage’ of one of his officer pals in the British Army. Only on his return to work could Budge examine Ani and Tutu’s papyrus in detail, adding that “when the papyrus was unrolled in London the inscribed portion of it was found to be 78 feet long” (23.5m) (as reassembled at https://www.ushabtis.com/papyrus-ani-bm-ea10470-2/). He then cut it up into 37 separate sheets “for the sake of convenience of storage and display”, contradicting most accounts which claim he'd cut it up while still in Egypt to make its transport more ‘manageable’.

3rd framed sheet of Ani & Tutu’s funerary papyrus (©BM)

With the papyrus formally accessioned by the museum in 1888, more objects from Ani and Tutu’s tomb soon followed, in 1891 a bronze mirror with ivory handle and an elaborate wooden harp, plus a basket of woodworking tools including an adze, chisels and hollow ox horn (duplicating those from the tomb of Kha and Merit). There was also a small wooden figure of a pharaoh, most likely Ani’s boss Seti I or his successor Ramses II, and an equally small gilded bronze image of Seth, a god closely associated with the 19th dynasty royal house; both pierced at the back to be worn as amulets most likely by Ani himself, these are possibly the ‘few hard stone amulets’ Budge fleetingly described as lying with the papyrus in the dark recess of the burial chamber. 

Wooden amulet of unnamed pharaoh pierced for suspension (5.5cm) & gilded bronze amulet of the god Seth with suspension loop (6.1cm) (© BM)

In 1897 the museum then acquired a superb folding stool of ivory-inlaid wood with feet carved as duck heads, again from the tomb via Budge’s old friend Mohammed Mohassib (and again very similar to a stool from Kha and Merit’s tomb). As for the cosmetic chest, this had already been accessioned into the museum in 1893, arriving via Budge’s antiquities agents Robert Moss & Co. 

The chest in 1936 (© The Art of Ancient Egypt, Phaidon Press)

And it is surely one of the museum’s star items. Ever since I first saw it back in the 1980s, the intimate nature of its contents made an immediate connection, not only to New Kingdom Egypt but to Tutu herself. For even without her physical remains, these personal items almost embody the woman who must have used them on an almost daily basis to maintain her striking appearance. It’s certainly easy to imagine her opening the chest by unwinding the cord once tied figure-of-8 around the wooden knobs on the front to then lift its lid, revealing the 4 separate compartments housing the cosmetic equipment Tutu may well have shared with husband Ani. 

The two alabaster vessels at the back of the chest (© Treasuresofancientegypt)

Of two alabaster jars, one still clearly contains its original contents, most likely a fat-based moisturiser familiar from other examples we’ve analysed, and often found to be enhanced with the addition of fragrant herbs or resins. And like the burial of Kha and Merit, Ani and Tutu’s tomb also contained an oil vessel made from an animal horn, sealed at the end to function as a convenient container, and although said to have been found in a basket of carpenter’s tools more likely served as part of the couple’s cosmetic equipment. If you look closely, several of their portraits do in fact show Ani and Tutu with an oil-based mixture rubbed generously into their skin, the upper part of their fine linen garments they’d then put on shown as having absorbed this oil in much the same way as putting on clothes after using sun tan oil today.  

Ani & Tutu’s moisturising body oil shown as orange-brown marks on the upper parts of their linen garments, alongside the ‘oil horn’ (© BM)

The chest also contains three circular lids made from woven palm fibre, presumably protective tops for the calcite jars and additional pottery vessel. There’s also a shallow bronze dish used for mixing ingredients, plus a slender applicator stick accompanying a double kohl tube made from a pair of hollow reeds, again very similar to that found in Kha’s own small cosmetic box. 

Left & centre double kohl tube in Ani & Tutu’s chest (©Phaidon Press) with Kha’s kohl tube on right (© ImmortalEgypt)

For such black eye paint was certainly worn by men and women alike, both to shade their eyes from the sun and to deter the flies which caused eye infections. And with both Ani and Tutu shown wearing copious eyeliner in their papyrus vignettes (below), the widowed Tutu is even shown kneeling beside Ani’s coffin where her black eyepaint runs down her cheeks as she cries for him.

Tutu & Ani both with black kohl eyeliner & superb coiffures, & Tutu mourning Ani (© BM)

In similar fashion, both Ani and Tutu are also portrayed with the most intricately styled hair, highly likely created using wigs and hair extensions of the kind we’ve been studying for the last 40 years (eg. https://rawi-publishing.com/articles/the-most-democratic-form-of-adornment). From the long wig of human hair buried with Meryt (below left & https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue42/6/4.cfm) to the multiple hair extensions of Tutu’s contemporary and possible neighbour Katebet, like her a priestess of Amun at Thebes, we studied Katebet’s dark brown hair extensions at the museum back in 1998 (below centre, & ‘Piecing Together Ancient Egypt’, British Museum Magazine (33), https://ocean.exacteditions.com/issues/92800/page/3). 

L: Merit’s wig (© Museo Egizio), Katebet’s hair extensions centre (© ImmortalEgypt) & R: man’s double style wig (© ImmortalEgypt)

As for scribe Ani with his hair set in the two sections forming the so-called duplex or ‘double’ style (above right), this reflects the same ‘double style’ wig found in an anonymous tomb on Luxor’s West Bank and by 1835. Once again ending up in the British Museum where we’ve studied it on several occasions, we’ve worked with our ‘Ancient Adornments’ colleague and expert wigmaker Filippo Salamone to make an exact replica (see: https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue42/6/3.cfm).

So unsurprisingly, Ani and Tutu’s chest contains hair styling equipment too, an ivory comb and ivory hair pin, both of which were used to groom and style the hair on a practical level while closely associated with goddess Hathor as ‘Lady of the Locks’, the deity believed to reside in the Theban hills where she took all dead souls into her care (see: https://www.immortalegypt.co.uk/post/hidden-histories-of-the-hair-pin-starring-cleopatra-the-wearers-of-black)

Ivory comb and hair pin from the chest of Ani & Tutu (© BM)

Another piece of cosmetic equipment closely associated with Hathor is the mirror, whose shining bronze disc represented the goddess’s divine parent the sun god Ra. And with a mirror’s powers often enhanced with a handle featuring Hathor as goddess of beauty and vitality, the mirror handle of Ani and Tutu takes the form of a club (below), forming the hieroglyph 𓍛 'hem', meaning ‘servant’. And although it's suggested that the handle ‘served’ the metal disc above it, hem also referred to the ‘servants of the gods’, the priests and priestesses. Mirrors were the focus of rituals such as the so-called ‘Mirror dance’ performed in Hathor’s honour, so could this mirror have been one of the tools of Tutu’s own trade as priestess beyond its obvious use as a simple cosmetic aid? It would certainly have helped to know where in her tomb the mirror was found, either within the chest or maybe even among the mummy wrappings where mirrors were sometimes placed directly over the face, the disc reflecting the living image believed to assist in the resurrection made possible by Ra and Hathor (and one of the Egyptian terms for mirror being ankh, the word for ‘life’ itself).

Mirror from Ani & Tutu’s tomb (© BM), with the Mirror Dance in the tomb of Mereruka (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/clappers-in-the-female-sphere-Mirror-dance-Mastaba-of-Mereruka-chamber-a-13-saqqara_fig1_343541834

As for the chunky pumice stone (below) used to file the nails and keep the feet smooth, so too the pumice stones found with cosmetic equipment at other Egyptian sites like Kahun and Sedment. Recent analysis reveals these originated from volcanic eruptions on the Greek island of Santorini (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440309001228), so perhaps Tutu’s pumice stone did too? Clearly the couple’s carefully rendered pristine nails reveal regular manicures were of great importance, in contrast to the hands of manual workers described in the New Kingdom ‘Satire of the Trades’, like the hardworking bricklayer, “his hands all covered with soil, when he eats bread with his fingers he washes at the same time”.

Pumice stone & red leather sandals from Ani & Tutu’s cosmetic chest (© BM)

Finally displayed with the chest are a pair of delicate sandals (above), the toes turned up in the fashion of the day and their red leather construction predating the trademark red soles of renowned designer Christian Louboutin by several millennia.

And so for me, the cosmetic chest of Tutu and Ani tells a fascinating story on so many levels, from the dramatic way antiquities were often acquired during the C.19th to much further back in time, revealing how Egypt’s ancient elite took care of themselves. Giving us a privileged glimpse back into a lost world, it’s the closest thing we’ll ever have to sitting at an ancient dressing table or peering into an ancient handbag, a tiny bit of a shared experience that really does transcend millennia...

• Maybe see some of you at one of our forthcoming talks in Wigan on 5th October at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/pharaohs-creatures-the-animal-world-of-ancient-egypt-with-joann-fletcher-tickets-939339187797, in Barnsley on 12 October at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ancient-egypt-in-yorkshire-tickets-989156262007 and in Halifax on 11th November at: https://www.facebook.com/events/1715765675893538/