Hennaed Drums, Part Two: North Africa

In our last blogpost, we explored the possible evidence for hennaed drumheads in medieval Spain. In the end, while there are many images of decorated drums, the lack of any textual or material evidence makes it difficult to say whether these decorations were in fact done with henna or not.

As we move towards the modern period, however, we come across another chapter in the history of hennaed drums which is much clearer: North Africa.

Musician with hennaed drum (tbal), Algeria,
1880s. Photograph by William Tupper.

The History of Harqus: Temporary Facial Decoration in North Africa

I’ve been swamped with thesis research and planning my upcoming move (!) so I apologize if posts have not been coming as regularly. My thesis (on demons in North African Judaism) has also brought up lots of interesting material on henna, so hopefully I can share some of that over the next few posts.

For now, though, I’d like to address an issue which has been floating around the internet for a while: the North African facial art known as ḥarqūs. I’ve seen a few posts on my tumblr referencing it with some misconceptions, so I thought I’d take some time to clarify things and offer some primary sources (both texts and images!).

The entry for ḥarqus from Belkassem Ben Sedira's Arabic-French dictionary (Algeria), 1882.

To begin with, how do we spell it? In standard academic transcription, the Arabic word حرقوس would be written as ḥarqūs, although in some areas of the Maghreb it was pronounced closer to hargus (or hargous in French spelling). Other spellings, like harkus (or harkous) or harkos, are encountered as well. Catherine Cartwright-Jones, who has put some material about it on her site, spells it harquus (with two u’s), following the transliteration system of al-Kitaab, the Georgetown Arabic textbook commonly used for Introductory Arabic throughout the United States, which recommends doubled letters to represent long vowels. While the “two u” spelling has become common on the internet, I prefer not to use it for two main reasons: it does not follow scholarly convention, and it confuses people about the pronunciation (I’ve heard people say “harkwus”). In this post I'll use ḥarqus, except in quotations, where I'll keep whatever spelling the author used. Basically it should be pronounced har-KUS, with a rough ‘h,’ a back-of-the-throat ‘k’ or ‘q,’ and a long ‘u’ as in goose.

Now that we've covered how to spell it and say it, let’s turn to what it is (and is not). Ḥarqus refers to a black ink used for painting the face and hands with small temporary designs. These designs are often very similar (or even identical) to the tattoo designs common in the same areas of North Africa… But ḥarqus is not a tattoo, and the word ḥarqus does not refer to tattooing! Tattooing is known generally as washm or usham in Moroccan Arabic, although many of the tattoos actually have their own names based on the placement and motif (see Herber 1948). It’s true that there is some relationship between them — many designs, as I mentioned, were done both with ḥarqus and tattoo, and tattoo artists also applied ḥarqus (although ḥarqus was also done by individuals at home).

"Fatima and Manoubia applying makeup," Alexandre
Roubtzoff, Tunis, 1917.

But before I get too distracted by tattooing traditions (which are well deserving of their own post), let’s get back to ḥarqus. The word itself is unusual in that it has four root letters; Herber suggests that the word itself ultimately derives from the Greek khalkos, ‘copper,’ although I suspect it is related to the root ḥrq, ‘to burn.’ In some Amazigh communities it was known as tanast.

Ḥarqus is essentially a gall ink, made from the tannic acid of oak galls and iron or copper sulfate, which produces a intensely deep black ink, lasting for a few days on living skin and permanent on parchment (a very similar ink is used in Jewish communities to this day for writing Torah scrolls). It was (and is still) used throughout the Maghreb, mainly Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia; a similar cosmetic was also used in the Arabic peninsula, known there as khiḍab (another subject for a future blogpost). When made at home, poorer women sometimes used just a simple mixture of soot and oil, but ‘professional’ recipes for ḥarqus show the variety of organic and non-organic ingredients:

Period Henna: A Resource Guide for Henna in the SCA

I'll preface this by saying that I'm not a member of the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), although I've been to a few events, and I've met several henna artists who are active members. The SCA is an international organization of historical re-enactment, devoted to the study, recreation, and practice of the "Middle Ages" (loosely defined as post-Roman Empire, pre-1600). SCA members develop a "persona," a character of sorts from a specific time and place, and aim to recreate that person's life "in period" — as close as possible to what clothes they would have worn, what foods they would have eaten, what crafts they would have made, etc.

I'm presenting about henna at a local SCA event and I realized as I was putting my information together that it might be helpful for other artists and enthusiasts, so here you go! This is basically a compilation of previous research that I've done with links to further resources. Feel free to comment or email me with any additional sources or questions — I'd love to hear from you.

Background

There aren't a lot of sources on the early (pre-medieval) history of henna, and I've outlined most of them on my website, here and here. 

Venus with red (hennaed) hair, 1st-2nd century CE

Essentially, it appears that the origins of henna lie primarily around the western coast of the Mediterranean (contemporary Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Syria, Turkey, etc.), where it was used as a perfume and hair dye. 

Henna continued to be known and used in the Greco-Roman world, and traveled into Roman North Africa and even into mainland Europe. We have no direct evidence of henna's use as body art in the ancient world but it seems likely that they used it to dye skin as well as hair.

By the rise of Islam, henna was known as a medium for body art and was seen as feminine adornment in particular, although men used it as well to dye hair and beards. Early Islamic sources indicate that it was used by Jews and pagans in the Arabian peninsula, and that it was associated with joy and celebrations. It was favoured by the Prophet and his family and using henna became part of the sunnah [encouraged behaviour] and a mark of piety. There's more about henna in early Islam here and here.

There are two main areas where henna would have been an important part of cultural aesthetics during the 'SCA Period' — the Iberian peninsula (al-Andalus) / North Africa, and Persia. I'll offer some sources below for each of them, and then some reflections on what kinds of henna would not be "period."

Practicing the Evil Arts of Luxury: Henna in Early Christian Literature

I’ve just come back from a wonderful vacation on the West Coast. While I was in San Francisco I took a tour of the San Francisco Botanical Garden, which includes a ‘Plants of the Ancient Mediterranean’ section — I was disappointed to see that there was no henna!

I had a good talk afterwards with our tour guide, who specializes in botany of the ancient world, about the history of henna and some of the different sources for studying it.

One area that I’ve recently begun researching is the writings of the early leaders of the Christian community, known as the Church Fathers, many of whom lived in North Africa and the Levant. Several Church Fathers attempted to establish standards of modest dress and adornment for their Christian followers, and in their writings they vehemently denounce both men and women for what they saw as excessive pride and vanity.

In doing so, they describe how the people in their communities would dress and adorn themselves, providing a window into the world of late Roman North Africa. It has to be taken with some grains of salt, to be sure — they were likely exaggerating and modifying their descriptions for the sake of argument. But while we can’t take their writing at face value, we may still be able to learn something about the dress and adornment of early North African Christian communities.

None of them, as far as I can tell, specifically mentions henna. However, many of them do allude to dyeing the hair, and especially reddening, which can be interpreted to refer to henna. We know that the Greeks and Romans knew of the use of henna as a hair dye and several pre-Christian writers describe this specifically. For example, the Greek botanist Dioscorides (1st century CE) writes (De Materia Medica 1.124) that henna [kupros] is a small shrub that grows in Judea and Egypt, and the ground leaves can be mixed with soapwort to dye the hair [xanthizei de kai trikhas strouthiou khylo ta phylla leia]. He describes the colour of hennaed hair as xanthos, which can refer to yellow, gold, orange, or even auburn.

Yep, totally a 'Rufus'.
Roman bust of Venus, 1st-2nd century CE

The great Roman scientist Pliny, in his Latin treatise on natural history (NH 23.46), repeats Dioscorides’ observations in his entry on henna [cyprus], describing the colour of hennaed hair as rufus, ‘red’ [ipsa rufant capillum]. Thus it is a reasonable assumption that henna is a plausible assumption for Church Fathers writing about dyeing the hair, especially if they describe the colour as xanthos (if they are writing in Greek) or rufus (in Latin).

More Moroccanalia: Moroccan Body Art in the 20th Century

I had a great time talking about Moroccan henna with Kenzi and Nic on the Caught Red-Handed podcast Google+ hangout. We answered questions for two hours! What a blast. You can watch it on YouTube here. I had shared with them some of the inspirations that I’ve found in older photographs, drawings, and articles on North African body art, and I thought I’d share them here too.

Brides in Marrakech, Bruno Barbey, 1987

The elaborate geometric designs associated with Fes can be seen in tourist photos from the past few decades. It’s especially interesting to look at photos from the 80s and early 90s, before henna in the public sphere shifted in response to increasing tourism. This photo, by Bruno Barbey, was taken at the royal wedding of Princess Lalla Asmaa and Khalid Bouchentouf in 1987, when Moroccans from around the country gathered in Marrakech. The design is classic Fassi style, tightly packed, with lines and zigzags as essentially its only elements. Note also that her fingernails are not hennaed, but rather painted red with Western nail polish, blending Moroccan and European sensibilities.

From the Henna Files: new discoveries in henna research

So I haven’t written a blogpost in a few weeks, not only because I’ve been super busy, but also because I’ve been trying to decide what to write about: I’ve made a few “henna discoveries” in the past few weeks and they’re each worthy of a blogpost… So I’ve combined them into a research update post, as it were, and if anyone’s interested in one of them in particular, let me know (just comment here or on Facebook, or email me) and I’ll expand! 

So, without further ado, a glimpse into the week of a henna researcher: 

Henna in Pylos: not so much…

For some time, when I teach about the early history of henna, I have been mentioning that some scholars have suggested that the Mycenaean dyeing industry, located on the Greek island of Pylos, used henna as one of the ingredients in their dyed/perfumed oils. Chief among them is Cynthia Shelmerdine, who first suggested the idea in her paper “Henna in Mycenaean Perfumery,” presented at the American Philological Association annual meeting in 1983, and expanded upon in her 1985 book The Perfume Industry of Mycenaean Pylos. Her suggestion is that the word e-ti (vocalized possibly as ertis) refers to henna (via a complex philological argument involving a 5th century botanist) and thus these oils were possibly dyed with henna (more likely than being perfumed with henna flowers, which would likely not make the long trip to Pylos from Judea or Egypt where it was grown). 

A Mycenaean tablet in Linear B from Pylos

But now, the discovery: one of Shelmerdine’s students, Mary Jane Cuyler, has published an article re-examining the evidence, which (although published in 2010) I just found now: “Rose, Sage, Cyperus, and E-ti: the adornment of olive oil at the palace of Nestor,” published in Kosmos: jewellery, adornment, and textiles in the Aegean Bronze Age (2010). She argues that the textual evidence is so weak that it would require really strong archaeological support, which it doesn't have: it is unlikely that the oil was dyed with henna, since henna doesn’t really dye oil (being a fat, rather than a protein). You’d think that would be self-evident, but that’s the way academia works (sigh). So she did an experiment, demonstrating that henna mixed with water (or even wine) will dye skin and wool, but henna mixed with oil essentially does nothing. Therefore, she concludes, “henna was probably not infused in olive oil, and therefore the identity of ertis is again open for interpretation. It is likely to have been an aromatic that works synergistically with sage and may have been a plant native to Western Messenia” (pp. 661). Nothing like a good old-fashioned experiment! I guess it’s time to revise my henna history presentation…

Resistance is Futile: Henna in Reverse, Part II

This is part two of the series that we began last week investigating sap and wax resists. Those techniques use a liquid mixture that is drawn on the skin and dries, while the techniques we’re looking at in this post use malleable materials like fabric and dough to shape the designs that will block the henna.

One basic type of this resist uses a simple dough (flour and water) that can be rolled out into thin strands and arranged on the skin. One example of this technique comes from the descriptions of Bahraini wedding ceremonies in the 1970s recorded in Holes’ work on Bahraini Arabic dialects (2005, pg. 164):

Over the following two days [before the wedding] a specialist woman artist (xaḍḍaba [lit. painter]) applied henna to her palms, fingers and feet. This process was called ḥannat ‘ağin [dough henna]. A thin dough would be rolled, twisted and applied to the bride's skin in geometric patterns, leaving some of the skin bare. The red henna dye was then applied to the dough and skin and allowed to dry overnight. In the morning the dough was removed, leaving the henna pattern on the skin. The process was repeated on the third night, known as lēlat il-ḥanna, in order to make the henna tattoos [sic] stand out even more clearly. During these two days, special ditties accompanied the laborious process of decorating the bride.

This technique is apparently still practiced in the Arabian peninsula today; Penni AlZayer described it as she saw it being done in the 1990s in a rural village in al-Sharqiyya, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. She writes that the hennaya [henna artist] worked by “rolling bits of dough from the bowl beside her into very long thin strings,” and then she “arranged and pressed simple spirals and geometric patterns first onto the palms of the bride’s hands and then the soles of her feet” (AlZayer, 2005, pg. 4). After the patterns were finished, the hennaya covered the bride’s hands and feet with henna paste and let it dry.

Kurdish Jewish woman shaping bread dough,
Israel, mid-20th century

Interestingly, a similar technique was practiced by the Jewish community in Sandor (or Sundur), a small village in northern Iraqi Kurdistan. An elderly immigrant from Sandor described the patterns, including celestial imagery in the palm and spirals around the fingers, that she remembered from her wedding in the 1920s (Sienna, 2011, pg. 88):

They would draw here [in the palm], like a moon, a beautiful drawing. [Noam: how would they do it?] They would make a dough, take dough, and put it on a little bit at a time. They would do it here [on the hands], whatever designs they wanted, and then they would put henna on over it... And then they would do the fingers, one by one, a little dough here [in a spiral], so that it would look nice. [The woman doing the henna] would bring the dough, take a little bit, roll it out thinly, thinly, and then put it on the hands, and then henna [on top]. And then [when it was dry] she would wrap [the bride's hands] up in cloth, so that she wouldn't move [and smudge the henna]. It would come out so beautiful, bright red, a strong colour.

While Henny Harald Hansen describes a Kurdish bride with palms “painted with a sun, a crescent moon and a star” (1961, pg. 130), it is not clear whether that was done with a resist or whether it was simply drawn on the skin. No other description of henna from this region includes reference to a dough resist, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the technique was known and used by women in Turkey and Pakistan as well.