Egyptian Worship of the Sun God

In ancient Egypt, the exposure of the female breasts was relatively common. Throughout the Old, Middle and New Kingdom, the most frequently used costume for women was the simple sheath dress, called a kalasiris. A rectangular piece of cloth was folded once and sewn down the edge to make a tube. The kalasiris might cover one or both shoulders or be worn with shoulder straps. While the top could reach anywhere from below the breast to the neck, the bottom hem generally touched the ankles.

Nudity in ancient Egypt was not uncommon. Different kinds of work, including and other manual laborers, required people to doff their clothing. The very poor also tended to go nude. Female servant girls, dancers, acrobats and sacred "prostitutes" went around totally or semi-nude for their jobs.

Servants, fishermen, entertainers, and those involved in vigorous activities are often shown naked, or wearing only a girdle (belt) or loincloth. Girdles (i.e., bands of beads around the hips) were worn by dancing girls and female musicians. Dancers might also wear bead dresses, similar in construction to beaded shrouds, with the beads arranged in a pattern of large, open squares. The dress worn by the dancers is intended to accentuate rather than conceal their nudity, and to maximize their erotic potential.

Papyrus plants are harvested by nude laborers in this mural from an ancient building, engraved 4500 years ago in Egypt.
Roman coins bearing Cleopatra's profile show a rather large nose. She was not a ravishing beauty, but apparently possessed an ability to marshal her feminine resources as needed	A contemporary bust of Cleopatra, on display in a museum in Berlin.

The wealthy on the other hand used clothing and jewelry to indicate their social status. The finer and more elaborate the clothing, the higher the person's social status.

A tale of early sun worship and nudity was unearthed in 1887 at Tell-el-Amarna, a small Egyptian village on the banks of the Nile some 200 miles south of Cairo. There, an Arab woman accidentally stumbled upon the baked-clay tablet archives of Pharaoh Akhen-Aton (1385-1353 B.C.). It was learned through the subsequent translation of these tablets that the brilliant young pharaoh and his exquisitely beautiful queen, Nefertiti, considered the sun, Aton, to be the true wellspring of life and thus justified the practice of nudism for spiritual and physical advancement.

Akhen-Aton and Nefertiti were not the first Egyptians identified with nudity. A fourteenth century, B.C. carving of a nude Sumerian priest is preserved in the British Museum, and a fifteenth century, B.C. painting of a nude Egyptian girl lutist is found on the wall of a Thebes tomb.

The Death of Cleopatra by Guido Cagnacci, 1658 (Larger version 121K)

There are many nude depictions of Cleopatra VII, who at age 22 snuck into 54 year old Caesar's Alexandria quarters wrapped in a carpet (Cleopatra before Caesar [131K] by Jean Leon Gerome 1866). After his murder, she married his heir apparent and nephew, Marc Antony. They lived together for some time while Marc Antony's wife in Rome waited. Marc Anthony and Cleopatra's armies were defeated by Octavian's forces. Cleopatra locked herself and her servants in Antony's tomb, allegedly naked (The Death of Cleopatra [121K] by Jean André Rixens 1874) and bitten on the breast (The Death of Cleopatra [379K] by Guido Cagnacci) by a poisonous asp.

After the Egyptians, the Greeks were well-known for favoring nudity in the gymnasium and at sporting events. Early Greek Dress Bares Breasts >