Egyptian musician

EGYPTIAN MUSICIAN from the New Kingdom (1570 BC – 1069 BC), corresponding to the Late Bronze Age and early stages of the Iron Age in the Eastern Mediterranean. This reconstruction represents a lute player based on tomb paintings such as the famous scene of three female musicians from the tomb of Nakht in Thebes (featuring two girls in a see-through dress playing a harp and a double flute respectively, and a third girl playing a lute completely naked except for her jewellery), or a painting from another tomb from Thebes representing a larger group of similar musicians. A naked female lute player is also represented in a blue faience bowl in the National Museum of Antiquities of Leiden (Netherlands), and in this case, the girl has an image of the dwarf god Bes tattooed on her thigs, which I also included in my illustration. Bes was an Egyptian god of possible Kushite / Nubian origin, associated with dance, music and erotism. The cult and image of Bes was later adopted by the Phoenicians (who named the island of Ibiza after him) and the Romans, and images of Bes can also be found on the easternmost edge of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (such as the Oxus Treasure, found in Central Asia), and I have an unverified suspicion that Persian images of Bes may have inspired the representations of early Buddhist yakshas as potbellied dwarves with grotesque faces in India.
Ancient Egyptian women, including musicians and dancers, during festivities, wore a characteristic diadem with a blue lotus on their forehead, and a cone on top of their head. The colours and patterns of these diadems match the floral broad collars found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, suggesting a similar construction. The diadem represented here contains rows of olive leaves, nightshade berries and faience beads, after one of the floral collars of Tutankhamun. The head cone, as evidenced by a recent analysis of finds of such cones in tombs in Amarna, would be made of perfumed beeswax (NOT perfumed fat as it was previously believed). As for the make-up, ancient Egyptians lined their eyes with kohl and a green pigment made of malachite, and nails were sometimes dyed with red henna as shown here.