Ancient Egyptian 'head cone mystery' solved by archaeologists
Ancient Egyptian art is crammed with images of reverent celebrants with pointy cones on their heads. Men and ladies are shown with head cones in artistic characterizations on everything from papyrus scrolls to coffins, donning the pointed objects as they take part in royal feasts and divine rituals. Women who wear the cones are sometimes also depicted in childbirth, an activity associated with certain Gods.
But while the head cones were very common in Egyptian art for more than a thousand years, their purpose and existence has remained a mystery. No archaeologist had ever uncovered one of the enigmatic objects, leading some scholars to think of Egyptian head cones as just symbolic representations—the equal of the halos that appear on saints and angels in Christian iconography.
Now it appears that an international team of archaeologists have indeed found the first physical evidence for the elusive head accessories, according to a new paper published in the journal Antiquity, The discovery comes from the cemeteries of Amarna, an ancient Egyptian city whose temples were built by Akhenaten, a pharaoh thought to be King Tutankhamun’s father. Rapidly built in the 14th century B.C. and substantial for just about 15 years, the city was residence to roughly 30,000 people. Only about ten percent were wealthy elite who were laid to rest in luxurious tombs; the rest were normal folks who were interred in modest burials. It was in these burials, which generally don’t contain much of value, where members of the Amarna Project, a University of Cambridge-led project with funding from the National Geographic Society and other institutions, originally found the remains of head cones back in 2009.
While it’s been a decade since the excavations, Anna Stevens, an archaeologist at Monash University who is assistant director of the Amarna Project and co-director of endless research at the city’s non-elite cemeteries, remembers the day the first cone was found. “I think I’ve got one of those head cones!” a coworker, Mary Shepperson, called out. When Stevens went to examine, she saw a telltale point above the head of a female skeleton.
It was obviously very, very different, not something we’d seen in any burials before,” Stevens says. But the pointy object was very similar to the strange head ornament in Egyptian art that some scholars had dismissed as a piece of artistic nonsense. Another adult burial, which couldn’t be identified as male or female, turned up an additional head cone.
It took scholars almost a decade to secure funding and complete a substantial examination of the head cones, giving them a chance to test another popular theory about the different objects: The head cones were actually solid lumps of scented fat that melted over the heads of their wearers and acted as a sort of ancient, fragranced hair gel.
The conclusions from Amarna seem to contradict the ancient styling product theory. The cones weren’t solid—they were hollow crusts folded around brown-black organic matter the team thinks may be fabric. Both head cones had chemical signatures of old wax; the team concluded they were made of beeswax, the only biological wax known to be used by ancient Egyptians. Furthermore, no evidence of wax was found in the hair of the most well-preserved skeleton.
Given artistic institutes of the objects with childbirth, and the fact that at least one of the samples was an adult woman, the team suggests the cones had sonething to do with fertility. But the fact that they were found in a non-elite cemetery makes it difficult to clarify the meaning behind them.
In Egyptian iconography, the people portrayed wearing the head cones were mostly elite, though some seem to have been attendants, says Nicola Harrington, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney. The Amarna tombs have less artwork than other burial sites, but a few images show people wearing the cones as they orepare for burials and make offerings. “Essentially, [the cones] are worn in the presence of the divine,” she says.
Harrington has her own theory for the identities of the cone-wearing women: Maybe they were dancers. Both samples had spinal fractures, and one had a degenerative joint disease. Though bone difficulties could be chalked up to stressful lives and the intense labor of non-elite Egyptians, Harrington points out that stress and compression fractures are common among professional dancers. Perhaps the cones “marked [dancers] as members of a community that served the gods,” she says. That could explain why these people were buried with the cones, Harrington suggests, despite their “basic burials.”
Without more archaeological evidence, though, there’s no way to know how the cones were certainly used—or if they were used more widely. Unfortunately, says Stevens, we may never find out. “In the very early days of Egyptology, the work was very rushed, a bit haphazard,” she says. Today’s more careful archaeological methods will hopefully insure and identify head cones in future excavations, but their presence in earlier burials may have been affected completely.
But even if these cones are the only two that have survived to today, the chance discoery still has value. Archaeologists know a lot about the aristocracy in ancient Egypt from executive records and elaborately painted tombs, but the dearth of written and artistic records of non-elite Egyptians makes their lives a lot more mysterious to modern researchers. That absence of information about the lives of the majority of people who lived in ancient Egypt makes this find even more precious—and serves as a reminder of the millions of buried stories that are still untold.