Dance in ancient Egypt
[3] Dance groups were accessible to perform at dinner parties, banquets, lodging houses, and even religious temples.
[6] 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.
[8][9] Professional groups of singers (ḥsı͗t), musicians (ḥnı͗t or ḥnwt), and dancers (ḥbw) often performed at important festivals and funerary services.
[14] Victorian scholars often confused the term khener with a harem due to poor understanding of the depictions and cultural differences.
[14] Some kheners were itinerant, traveling from their permanent seat to offer their services as indicated in the story of Ruddedet.
[15] The main types of ḫnr thought to have existed are those associated with cults and temples, the king and funerary estates.
[13] Female dancers rarely wore the restrictive ordinary dress – a strapped white sheath starting at the bust and running down to the ankles.
[20] 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.
[20][2] New Kingdom dancers also wore variations of ordinary dress in their transparent broad long cloaks.
[2] 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.”[21] Female dancers who did not have long hair resorted to wearing wigs styled in the same fashion.
[citation needed] 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.
[23] Among the ornaments male dancers would wear were collars[23] or chains around their necks,[citation needed] whereas the younger boys wore bracelets on their feet.
[2] Afterward, performers could dance to a greater range of music with the introduction of stringed instruments like the lute and the lyre.
[11] During the Middle and New Kingdom periods, a separate funeral dance was practiced dedicated to Hathor in the goddess's role as guide for the dead into the afterlife.
It involved leaping or skipping and was accompanied by a sung or spoken prayer to the sounds of percussion, including the clapping of hands and sticks.
They performed at various points in the funeral, wearing kilts and crowns of woven reed or palm fiber that signified their role as ferrymen.
[35] There are indications that dancing dwarfs replaced mww dancers at the tomb entrance by the Twentieth Dynasty.
