Grooming

Representations of ancient Mesopotamian men and women in paintings, sculptures, statues, figurines, and cylinder seals show that they were very well groomed and spent a great deal of time making their hair and beards look stylish. However, the vast majority of people pictured in such art were members of the upper classes. They had money, leisure time, and servants. All of these probably allowed them to engage in elaborate, sometimes expensive grooming activities that may not have been practical for people in the lower, working classes. It can likely be safely assumed that average people did adopt the same hair and beard styles, as well as clothing styles, of the well-to-do. But poorer folk could not afford expensive fabrics and jewelry and probably did not have the time to fuss with their hair and beards to the degree that wealthy people did.

As for hairstyles, artistic renderings show that in the third millennium B. C. Mesopotamian women grew their hair long. But they usually braided and plaited it on top of the head and held it in place with scarves or nets. Well-to-do women also frequently wore jewelry items in their hair, wedging them between the plaited locks. Excavations of graves in the royal cemetery at Ur dating to circa 2600 b. c. brought to light evidence of women with gold leaves, lapis lazuli beads, silver hairpins, and blue lapis lazuli flowers in their hair. Meanwhile, men were either bald or had long hair and long beards. The latter group carefully waved and groomed their hair and beards. These same styles carried over into the second millennium B. C., as Assyrian reliefs from that period show men with elaborately curled beards and mustaches. There is some evidence that men (again, probably mainly upper-class men) dyed their hair when it started to turn gray.

Unfortunately, the surviving evidence for the use of cosmetics in ancient Mesopotamia is scarce. But enough remnants of cosmetic and grooming items have been found to show that women, at least upper-class women, did use them on a regular basis. For example, archaeologists discovered some women’s makeup kits in the cemetery at Ur. Included were seashells containing blue, green, yellow, red, and black eye makeup, which was made from antimony paste. A woman applied it with a wooden or ivory pin. Also found in the graves, as well as in the ruins of a few Mesopotamian houses, were wooden and ivory combs, metal tweezers, and hand mirrors made of highly polished copper, bronze, and silver.

Mesopotamian women, and possibly men, too, also used perfume. Perfumes were made by soaking fragrant-smelling plants in water for several days to extract their essence and then mixing that essence with sesame oil or other plant oils. Evidence shows that aromatic resins taken from imported cypress, cedar, and myrtle trees were used to make perfumes in Mari, located on the upper Euphrates.

See Also: bathing; clothing; women