Forever Young? The Representation of Older and Ageing Women in Ancient Egyptian Art

Abstract

In Egyptian art, women are generally represented as young and beautiful; representations of older women are rare. By contrast, male ageing is represented far more frequently and in greater detail than that of women, since it was a positive image for men. Nonetheless, examples with some features of ageing, such as a wrinkle on the face, are known from all periods, and associated with both elite and non-elite women. These representations of older women could be an attempt to express the authority and experience conveyed by the image of male ageing. Features of ageing are absent from the images of elite women between the early Eighteenth Dynasty and the Amarna period. Although women did not, by and large, adopt the image of older women to the same degree as Tiy and Nefertiti, after the Amarna period elite women are once more represented with some characteristics of ageing in formal Egyptian art. Egyptian art seldom depicted older women or women growing older: neither pregnancy nor the spreading waistline that many women must have had after years of bearing children is part of the image.1 Women were normally depicted as young, slender and beautiful.2 This was partly due to the performative function of Egyptian art, aimed at establishing whatever was depicted in an alterna tive reality, such as the world of the gods or the afterworld. In principle, people were depicted at the peak of their energy and beauty in order to remain so forever.3 Elite women portrayed in tomb chap els were supposed to be sexually attractive4 to assist in their husband's regeneration and rebirth in the afterworld;5 non-elite women were conventionally portrayed as healthy energetic servants of the tomb-owner and his family in the next life. Egyptian men might be depicted at different stages of life, both in the prime of life and also in successful, portly middle age,6 but women who are anything