The Artifact: Cones!

like hats exactly. They're a little small for that, usually about the size of a drinking cup, but turned upside down. When I see them, I think of a huge, rounded alligator tooth. Sometimes they're white all over. Sometimes they're pale with red and brown colorations that look like inverted flames. In paintings and ba relief spanning more than a thousand years, you can find them in all kinds of scenes. People wear the cones when they're worshiping the gods or playing

musical instruments. Cones appear on the heads of men who are being prepared for funerary rituals or receiving a blessing from the king. Sometimes they show up in scenes of childbirth or on guests being welcomed and served at a feast. People are even shown with these head cones and other planes of existence, for example, while hunting or fishing in the afterlife. For decades, Egyptologists have debated what these objects were. One of the most popular hypotheses is that the cones

were actually lumps of perfumed ngwent. So imagine a softball sized conical mound of animal fat infused with a fragrant resin like mirr. As the cone melted under the sun or from the body's heat, it would turn into an oozing bath of sweet smelling grease that infused the hair and the scalp. This fragrance was meant to cleanse the person both physically and spiritually, to make them fit to

interact with the gods. The Danish egyptologist Lisa Manicky discusses evidence for the unguin interpretation in her book Sacred Luxuries, Fragrance, Aromatherapy and Cosmetics in Ancient Egypt from Cornell University Press. Quote paintings and reliefs from the beginning of the New Kingdom and On show men and women with a lump of solid unguin perched on top of their head either on a bald skull, on the hair, or on top

of a wig. There is little doubt that the material is supposed to be scented matter, for in some contexts we see servants carrying bowls of the same white mass streaked with red or yellow, whilst at the same time they position it on men and women seated at a banquet. She writes that these images are sometimes accompanied by texts that mentions placing a scented resin on top of the head. But one difficulty with any physical explanation of the cones is that, despite how often they appear in art, no

one had ever found physical evidence of one. In the absence of physical examples from archaeology, some experts came to a different conclusion. Maybe the cones never existed as three dimensional objects at all. Instead, maybe they were an artistic convention, a symbol like the halos of saints in medieval Christian artwork. There was no need to assume that Christian saints and

martyrs literally wore wide brimmed gold hats. Instead, the halos told us something about the hidden qualities of the person. A holiness that was invisible to the naked eye was revealed in painting. Could it be that the cones served a similar purpose within Egyptian religious psychography. But Incember twenty nineteen, a report was published in the journal Antiquity by Anna Stephens, Karina E. Rogi, Yolanda E. M. F. Bosch, and Gretchen our Dabs, and this report added interesting new evidence to

help answer the mystery of the cones. This evidence takes the form of two recently excavated graves from the ancient city of Akatatum, now known as Amarna. Amarna plays a

strange and interesting role in Egyptian history. It was something of a religious boom town created by the eighteenth dynasty pharaoh Akatan, who tried to change the official religion of Egypt, forsaking its long time polytheistic pantheon and replacing it with what is sometimes considered an early example of monotheism or monolatry, the special reverence for and worship of only one god,

in particular, in this case, the Sun deity Aten. When Accinatin struck out to cement his new religion, he founded a city to become the home base of the Otton cult. This city was a Marna. One of the reasons a Marna has been important from an archaeological standpoint is the quality of its cemeteries, where we can find evidence of how common people of the time, and not just rich elites with elaborate tombs, were laid to rest and commemorated. It's two of these common graves from a Marna that

are the focus of the twenty nineteen study. What Stevens at all described in the report are the graves of two fourteenth century b C. Egyptians who were buried wearing head cones, the first three dimensional head cones ever discovered. The more intact example measured about eight centimeters in height and ten centimeters across. The cones were cream colored and brittle, with what the authors described as a silky feeling exterior surface. They were ridden with little tunnels made by insects over

the cent trees. The cones were not solid, but hollow, and criss crossing patterns on the inner walls indicate that the wax domes were probably shaped around an inner core made of textile Spectroscopic analysis revealed that the cones were made of biological wax, almost certainly bees wax. These discoveries didn't seem perfectly consistent with either of the two interpretations we've previously discussed. Obviously, these were physical, three dimensional objects

and not merely an artistic convention like a halo. As for the unguint interpretation, Stevens and co authors found no chemical or physical evidence that these cones would have melted into the hair and released perfume. They seem more like tiny, rigid wax hats. Speaking to Colin Barris for an article in Science, Lisa Manicky mentioned the possibility that the cones worn by the people in these graves were dummy cones.

If the true cones were in fact melting lumps of animal fat infused with expensive perfumes, it's possible that less wealthy members of society could attempt to imitate the appearance of the cones without the olfactory function. It's also possible that the kinds of cones worn with the grave clothes would be different from what was used in life. So

what can we conclude from this discovery? A lot of questions remain, but the authors of the study claim that at the very least, the analysis of the Amarna graves quote confirms that three dimensional wax based head cones were sometimes worn by the dead in ancient Egypt and that access to these objects was not restricted to the upper elite.

Beyond that, they say that the cones may have had religious significance related to fertility, and that they could reasonably be interpreted as part of quote a suite of personal accouterments deemed appropriate for use in a range of cell librations and rituals for and involving the living, the dead, the autun and other deities, which, as they acknowledge, doesn't

narrow things down too much. In his article for Science, Barris also quotes run Njord of Emory University, who raises the critique that sometimes modern scholars can read too much religious or afterlife significance into artifacts from ancient Egypt. It's worth keeping open the possibility that these were just little hats. Tune into future editions of the artifact each week, hosted by either Robert or myself. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

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