"How to paint that Egyptian headdress?" Topic

OK, so I bought a couple packs of Egyptian infantry for Of Gods and Mortals, and now I am wondering how to paint that headdress.

From what I can gather on wiki, the striped one made famous by King Tut is called a nemes and is tied at the back, so all the striped converge at the back, like so:

The one that is left open at the back is called a khat, and wiki says it's un-pleated and un-striped, yet most pictures you see of Egyptian troops show them with stripes.

Now I'm OK with that, but in these pictures the stripes above the forehead seem to run "along" the flow of the cloth, yet the stripes on the sides seem to run "across" the flow – how does that work in real life?

Annoyingly, most pictures do not show the back of the figures' heads.

Some figures have a transition, with the "along" stripes ending abruptly at the vertex of the head, while the "across stripes run from one edge of the cloth to the other. Is this accurate?

Do help enlighten a confused Hittite player!

I am really glad someone has brought that up – in fact twice within the last day: TMP link

I have some 28mm Egyptians I have been meaning to paint for a long time and could never decide how I was going to paint those, thinking maybe I would just leave them plain white since painting the top 'front to back' and the sides 'ear to ear' just seemed to look weird. Looking at different ancient sources I have never been able to find one that shows the back of the head like that, even the Angus McBride drawings in the Ospreys don't give a good look.

And if anyone has hints for painting those on about 100 figures let me know, I was thinking of drawing them on with a pen of some type rather than paint them!

Well, that was me too. :p

I am tempted to leave them just white too, unless someone has a definitive answer.

Being graduated in Egyptology and having studied the question for some years, I came to the conclusion that the famous "stripped headdress" is only royal. Infantrymen wore either black wigs, or helmets (which could have horizontal stripes like scale or lamellar mail armor), but never stripped linen headdress like you see in films or most tabletop miniatures… For my miniatures, I file the folds, put a bit of putty, and paint it black.

White linen, actually dirty white linen for the common types I am of the assumption that they may have been padded as well as a protection, abate a not very effective one but still something this falls in with the rest of what they wore including the front protection of their kilt wraps. Most material of the time are either linens"flax" or wools I am not sure of cotton so plain whites through to dirty browns with vegetable dyes of muted reds, blues, yellows mainly as trims. Test for your self what line drapes where by taking a piece of rectangular cloth ( do this in private if you don't want to be 'ragged' about it;-) and se how it would fall. The egyptians in the main either kept their hair short or preferred a bald appearance so Renaud S is correct about wigs and helmets woven from linen and grasses and then painted/stained two tone. Hope this is helpful. cheers

When I painted my 15mm Egyptians I painted 5 stripes on each headdress, starting by painting a stripe down the centre of the headdress from the forehead to the nape and then painting 2 inverted "L" shapes on each side. While this looked good on 15mm miniatures I don't know whether it would work in 28. There are some pictures on my blog link
Cheers

Thanks to all who replied, especially Renaud.

I think even if they were just linen, they provided protection from the sun, which is important when you fight in a place like Egypt.

I guess I will paint them plain white then.

I must however point out that while checking hundreds of soldiers reliefs in situ, the only colour remains that I found was black for the wigs (the so called linen headdress doesn't exist, it sometimes seems it is, but the only colour found is black, which means it's a wig). Helmets can have colours, but their shape is distinct (they don't fall straight in the back, but follow the curve of the skull).

Yes, I too could not find any depiction of soldiers with the headdress, but many of figurines of soldiers with that bob hairdo.

If I had got your answer before I purchased the packs, I probably would have gone that route.

I guess now Hollyood will have partial victory… but then again, these figres are fighting alongside Set and mummies…

I looked for documentation myself and came the conclusion that it was scant. At the same time, even with my Napoleonics,where I try to get the details right as much as possible, sometimes you just go with with looks best. GIven our conditioning, right or wrong, especially if you are using them in a semi fantasy setting, I'd go the Hollywood route myself. At the end of the day, I'm their Pharaoh, and if I say they wear striped, headdresses, then by Horus, they will! :-)

YMMV, of course.

Peter