For the social framing of changes in the female body, archaeology provides a pattern of material evidence from the period 2200 to 2000 Bc, in the better-recorded excavation of cemeteries north of Qau. Distinctive leg and hand amulets are found at the ankle and wrist particularly in burials of younger women, around teenage years: most are of red carnelian (Dubiel 2008). The material and the age and gender of the wearers together suggest that these amulets offered protection through menarchy, when the disruptive and powerful force of menstrual blood first announced the change of the girl into a woman able to give birth. In the burials, the amulets perhaps promised the possibility of becoming a mother in the afterlife, for a girl who had not yet reached puberty when she died. We cannot be sure that such amulets were made for and worn by the living as well as the dead, until there are finds of the same kind of amulets at places other than burials—at sites such as settlements or more secret places in the landscape—or until new research investigates traces of wear on the amulets before they were placed in the tomb. Nevertheless, the forms and material demonstrate ancient attention to individuals who needed support through a bodily change in their lives (Figure 2.10a and b).
Another, more opaque red stone is associated with menstrual blood in a short formula copied on funerary papyri from 1400 BC to the Roman Period:
Formula for a tiyet-amulet of red jasper placed at the neck of this transfigured one:
You have your blood, Isis,
You have your changing powers (akhu), Isis!
The healing amulet (wedjaf) is the protection of this great one,
Guarding against his injurer.
Again, the phrasing may have been adapted for the special context of embalming, burial, and eternal cult of the dead. Nevertheless, the first lines marrying blood and power may capture an ancient recital of words by and for a woman in her adult monthly cycle. From 1350 BC on, examples of the tiyet are known in material form, as amulets in red jasper or carnelian or the artificial paste faience, again often in red. The motif itself is found already at the end of the fourth millennium BC. The tiyet has a form similar to the ankh, “life,” but with side loops downward rather than short horizontal arms; plausibly, both were originally lengths of cloth which were looped and loosely tied. Where the ankh became the general symbol of life, the tiyet had a closer connection with women and notably with the great healing
(a)
(b)
Figure 2.10 Protective material: (a) hands of red carnelian among strings of amulets (nos. 4, 10, 13), as found on a burial near modern Dishasha, late Old Kingdom, about 2200 bc. W. petrie, Deshasheh, London: Exploration Fund, 1898; (b) tiyet or Isis knot amulet, unusually in bronze, from burial of a pure-priest of Isis, Saiset, at Abdju, Eighteenth Dynasty. © petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL.
Goddess Isis. It may, as Westendorf argued, evoke general use of cloth at menstruation, or specific bandaging in extremes, above all at birth (Westendorf 1965).
Similar uncertainty surrounds the age frame for other gendered items to be worn, as found in the archaeological record both as separate material items and in depictions. Cowrie-shell girdles are found in burials of wealthier women in 1900-1750 Bc and again in 900-600 BC; they are depicted on faience fertility figurines of the earlier period, always worn by young women, who are often tattooed (cf. Morris 2011). The shell may, then, have evoked, and perhaps protected, the young woman, perhaps specifically her ability to give birth. The questions then arise whether the girdle was worn as part of a puberty ritual, just once or cyclically (monthly or annually?), or until a first childbirth, and whether girdles would be found only in wealthier households or more widely throughout the society.
World History
