By Any Other Name: Words for Henna Across the World

There was a recent post on one of the henna forums online about the etymology of the word ‘henna’ and it occurred to me that exploring the different names for henna and their etymologies might make an interesting subject for a blogpost! I’ve tried to group them by age and area, and of course I’ve stuck mostly to languages that I’m (at least somewhat) familiar with. If you know more names for henna, or more about what I’ve written here, please add them in the comments!!

Ancient Languages: Egypt

Let’s start with the oldest word for henna that we know… It’s actually difficult to say what that might be. In general, identifying plant and animal names in ancient languages is one of the most hotly contested fields of linguistics — it’s hard enough to know exactly what plant or animal a word refers to in any language, and it’s especially difficult when there are no speakers to ask, “Can you point to the plant you mean when you say X?”

The oldest records of henna use come from Egypt, but the textual evidence is very unclear. The most promising candidate for a plant name that might refer to henna is ‘nḥ-imi, or ankh-imy, which might be translated as the ‘Life-is-in-it’-plant (Germer 2008, pg. 42). In hieroglyphs it’s written like this:

You might be able to recognize the word/symbol ankh, for ‘life’. This plant was used during the embalming process, and it was described as protecting the bed of the Pharaoh (Charpentier 1981, pp. 158-159, Germer 2008, pp. 42-43); its scent was thought to bring the dead back to life (Germer 1992, pg. 124). 

Now it is very tempting to connect this to archaeological records of hennaed mummified bodies and starting imagining some postmortem henna ritual in ancient Egypt… BUT we must be very cautious. There is no indication in any Egyptian text that the ‘nḥ-imi plant had any dyeing properties, and other scholars argue that the ‘nḥ-imi plant is not henna, but a type of lotus (Aufrère 1987, pp. 34-35). So the bottom line is we can’t be sure.

Jews with Tattoos? Tattooing Traditions of the Beta Israel

In looking through some statistics for my blog, I discovered that seven people have found my blog by searching “beautiful Ethiopian women.” At the risk of increasing that number, I thought I would devote some time to traditions of body art among the Jewish communities of Ethiopia. While henna is used among Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Ethiopians, in this post I’m going to go (a little) out of my field and talk about tattooing.

The origins of the Ethiopian Jews are murky and, to my mind, irrelevant to this discussion (but see Kaplan 1992, Parfitt 1999, or Weil 2011 for some approaches). Suffice it to say that by the 19th century there was a large community of Jewish Ethiopians, living mostly in the areas of Gondar, Wegera, Semien, Wolqayt and Shire in Tigray (yes, there is both a Gondar and a Shire in Ethiopia; no, it is not Middle Earth). A related community is known as Feresmura or Falashmura, Jews who had converted (or been converted) to Christianity in the nineteenth century, but maintained a separate communal identity. Ethiopian Jews are also known as Beta Israel, ‘the House of Israel’ (an older term, Falasha, literally ‘exiles,’ has been largely rejected by the community).

Ethiopian Jews in Israel celebrating Sigd, Jerusalem, 2010.
Photo by Noam Sienna

In Ethiopia, the Beta Israel practiced a Torah-based form of Judaism — that is, without the additional customs, explanations, festivals, and practices of rabbinic Judaism as codified in the Talmud and later scholars. Since coming to Israel, they have largely been assimilated to the structure of normative Judaism; the Feresmura have also reverted to Jewish practice in Israel. Some excellent introductions are here, here, and here.

One of the most striking features of the Ethiopian Jewish community is their tattooing. Historically, the vast majority of Jewish communities generally refrained from tattooing, even when living in environments with established tattoo traditions, due to the prohibition on tattoos in Leviticus 19:28. Technically, in the Biblical context this was a prohibition on imitating Canaanite mourning practices of cuttings and tattooed inscriptions for the dead. The rabbis, however, eventually identify this with any form of putting ink permanently under the skin, whether writing or drawing, for any purpose. While I’m on the subject, let me remind everyone that tattooing, while thus prohibited, does not disqualify one from burial in a Jewish cemetery or access to any other Jewish service (so hopefully that myth can finally be busted).