Dance in Ancient Egypt
Dance in Ancient Egypt
Dancing played an important role in the lives of the ancient Egyptians. However, men and women are never depicted dancing together. The trf was a dance performed by a pair of men during the Old Kingdom. Dance groups were accessible to perform at dinner parties, banquets, lodging houses, and even religious temples. Some women from wealthy harems were trained in music and dance. They danced for royalty accompanied by male musicians playing on guitars, lyres, and harps. Yet, no well-bred Egyptian would dance in public, because that was the privilege of the lower classes. Wealthy Egyptians kept slaves to entertain at their banquets and present pleasant diversions to their owners.
Costumes and headdress of ancient Egyptian dancers
Topless dancer in a back bend, ostrakon, 13th Century B.C., New Kingdom Further information: Clothing in ancient Egypt Female dancers rarely wore the restrictive ordinary dress – a strapped white sheath starting at the bust and running down to the ankles. An exception in the Old Kingdom was for funeral dances. Old Kingdom dancers are not only depicted in dresses but in men's aprons with a scarf or men's skirts.
Middle and New Kingdom dancers never wore men's skirts, but did wear men's aprons without the scarf. By the New Kingdom, adult dancers appear more scantily clad, often wearing only a belt or scarf about their hips, sometimes with a transparent robe to allow observation of their bodies. New Kingdom dancers also wore variations of ordinary dress in their transparent broad long cloaks. Dresses often left the right breast exposed.
Dancers adorned themselves with bracelets and ribbons or garlands on their heads. Old Kingdom dancers would wear ribbons around their chests. New Kingdom dancers would wear floral collars, earrings and cones made of fragranced semi-solid fat or beeswax, used to give out a pleasant perfume as the dancers performed. Dancers' eyes were thickly outlined with kohl.
In the Old and Middle Kingdoms, women's hair dress was characteristically “evenly cut and smoothly combed down, divided into two thinner plaits hanging from the shoulders down to the chest and one broad plait covering the upper part of the back.” Female dancers who did not have long hair resorted to wearing wigs styled in the same fashion.
Female dancers are also depicted with a tattooed or painted symbol on their thigh of Bes, a god of fertility and childbirth affiliated with music and dance. It is unclear whether this decoration was unique to dancers or if women commonly had it applied.
Male dancers had short hair and typically wore the standard men's dress viz. skirt; in the Old and Middle Kingdoms, they would also wear an apron with round edges in the front.
Among the ornaments male dancers would wear were collars or chains around their necks,[citation needed] whereas the younger boys wore bracelets on their feet.
Lexova also added that dancers of that era used a short curved stick or cane while dancing, which is a prop still used by modern Egyptian dancers.
History
The oldest known depictions of dance in this region are found in Predynastic era rock carvings, a linen shroud, a wall painting, a clay model, and pottery in Upper Egypt. The earliest examples of Predynastic dancers come from pottery of the Badarian culture from the 5th millennium B.C. and Naqada I and Naqada II cultures from the 4th millennium B.C. The importance of dance appeared to lessen over time as dancing scenes became rare in the late Naqada period.
The first illustrations of dance in ancient Egypt come from scenes in Old Kingdom tombs of performers associated with funerals.
Researcher Irena Lexová authored the first monograph entirely on ancient Egyptian dance.
Dancers
Professional groups of singers (ḥsı͗t), musicians (ḥnı͗t or ḥnwt), and dancers (ḥbw) often performed at important festivals and funerary services. These groups were referred to in the Old and Middle Kingdoms as the ḫnr or khener, which in context translates to "musical performers." Khener can also be used to describe a troupe of singers and dancers arranged through a bureau. Victorian scholars often confused the term khener with a harem due to poor understanding of the depictions and cultural differences. The khener are depicted as entertainers for religious ceremonies, entertaining the deceased kings, but the khener may not be solely religious. Khener were used at the Temples of Hathor, Bat, Wepwawet, and Horus Iunmutef. Some kheners were itinerant, traveling from their permanent seat to offer their services as indicated in the story of Ruddedet. Dancers also took on work outside performances in order to support themselves.
The main types of ḫnr thought to have existed are those associated with cults and temples, the king and funerary estates. The ḫnr appear to have been dominated and headed by females until the latter days of the Old Kingdom.
Foreign dancers and musicians became more represented in the New Kingdom. Scholars recognize these dancers' origins by costume, hairstyle, and names in texts among other attributes. They apparently could join an ḫnr, but their participation may have been limited. Scenes in temple reliefs indicate that some cult performances were only reserved for elite Egyptian women.
Musical instruments
Before the New Kingdom, dancers were mostly accompanied by clapping or percussion instruments. Afterward, performers could dance to a greater range of music with the introduction of stringed instruments like the lute and the lyre.
The ancient Egyptians used a wide array of musical instruments, such as sistrums, harps, drums, flutes, cymbals, clappers, and tambourines, which played a prominent role in the melodic compositions of ancient Egyptian composers and musicians. It was rare to find wind or stringed instrument players close to dancers in the same scene. However, it was noted that whenever musicians were depicted, dancers were not generally far away.
Types of dancing
Lexová set out classifications for the various dances of the period: the purely movemental dance, the gymnastic dance, the imitative dance, the pair dance, the group dance, the war dance, the dramatic dance, the lyrical dance, the grotesque dance, the funeral dance and the religious dance.
Dance scholar and performer Elizabeth "Artemis" Mourat also categorized dances into six types: religious dances, non-religious dances, banquet dances, harem dances, combat dances and street dances.
Festive dances
Among the festivals during which dancing took place, the following are enumerated:
- Sed festival dances took place during jubilee ceremonies which celebrated the renewal pledge to the king. Such dances varied in accordance to the religious significance and the reflection of the local mythology of the God to whom they were directed.
- Valley festival at Thebes celebrates the God Amun's trip from Karnak temple to visit the tombs on the West Bank passing by the sanctuary of Hathor. As the procession moved from one place to another, families rejoiced and danced.
- Opet Festival: another event associated with God Amun's visit to his wife, Goddess Mut, from Karnak Temple to Luxor Temple. This procession was marked by groups of women doing acrobatic dances together with dark dancers, probably Nubians, who jumped and merged with the drums.
- Feast of Min: god of fertility and regeneration: The dancers in this feast were members of his cult. Drawings representing this feast showed priests and monkeys dancing. These drawings could have had a symbolic meaning rather than an actual representation of reality.
- Nile Flood Feast: (The New Year celebration): Dancing played a vital role in this festivity as it helped transform the dangerous Sekhmet into the mild Hathor, thereby protecting the ancient land from Sekhmet's evil and deadly demons. These dances included all possible forms of movement including acrobats and exotic foreign dances.
| Articles related to: Dance and/or Competitive dance |
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- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Dance_in_Ancient_Egypt ]
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