Re: Harquus Question, Please help
Posted by Catherine Cartwright Jones on January 23, 2000 at 16:49:32:
In Reply to: Harquus Question, Please help posted by Natalie on January 23, 2000 at 07:22:33:
I haven't found a perfect traditional harquus for dance use, even
going through a lot of old books. The problem is, that if you add
enough oil to make it cool and easy to apply, it's very smeary. The
ladies in photos that I've seen who are wearing real tribal harquus
have smearing problems too.
Facial tattooing was the norm for women in the Middle Eastern and
North Africa to accompany and complement their henna patterns
(alongside kohl) probably from the Neolithic period forward, certainly
from the Bronze age on. Harquus replaced the tattoos when religion
forbade it (after 1000 BCE or so, Judaism, later Christianity and
Islam) and when body ornamentation fell out of favor (500 BCE forward
under Greek and Roman influenced areas). Women kept their traditional
tattoos in areas where tribal identity was more important than other
cultural norms, and when religion excluded women enough that that
they didn't feel they needed to conform to the "no tattoo" rulings.
The best harquuses seem to have been simple soot collected on a bit of
clean ceramic from burning amber, frankinsense, myrrh, shells of
almonds, (that's to say a greasy, sticky, fragrant soot) mixed with a
little goat fat, and applied with a reed, bit of wood, or a feather.
(Preferred recipes from 1798, Persia) These, however, are the really
smeary ones. If you can be really careful heating your frankensense
so it's just useable(difficult!) , or mix it with pitch, or nearly
candied sugar syrup, these make it more stable on your skin than
just mixing it with goat fat.
Here's a recipe from Pliny and Discorides if you want to try it ...
enclose stibnite pounded with frankinsense and gum in dough or dung,
burn it in a furnace, quench it with milk or wine, beat that with
rainwater in a mortar, decant it from time to time, until the finest
powder settles, dry it under linen and divide it into tablets. Then
grind that fine and apply it. That's complicated, and it's STILL a
slightly sticky, oily soot.
Here's another .... charcoal and lampblack, charred almonds and
frankincense, the soot of the oily qurtum plant, ..... ,mixed,
pounded and applied. Again, a sticky, oily soot.
Another from North Africa ... pomegranite tree bark, iron sulphate,
gallnuts burned between two plates to produce soot. (Now that one
might also stain the skin ... )
Algeria: burnt sugar, lamp-black and oil, or burnt nut shells and oil.
Were they mixing the soot with spit? Maybe lemon juice and sugar
boiled together till syrupy and then mixed into the sticky soot to
stabilize it? Pitch was certainly used to stabilize tht soot. Boil
rosewater and sugar then mix a drop or two of that, hot, into the
soot? Anything that would stabilize the oily soot would be a good
thing!
Also there are a whole range of metal oxides burnt and mixed into
these paints ... which were available at the surface in desert regions
in little deposits from the Sinai to Kurdistan ... lead sulphate,
galena, antimony sulfate, magnese dioxide, copper oxide, magnetite,
lead, stibnite ( another sort of antimony) ... and these were used in
those cosmetic mixes back to 2000 BCE if not much earlier and they
were highly valued. (but may be toxic or dangerous!) Powdered black
iron oxide (from a ceramic supply) might be fairly harmless to try as
a harquus .....
Other things that might be used as a binder so the harquus doesn't
smear all over? The whey that you pour off yoghurt might work. Spit
might work, especially if you're a little dehydrated. Some sort of
syrup looks likely, either rosewater and sugar or lemon and sugar.
Maybe pomegranite juice or date wine would work.
Remember in the recent Mummy movie, that the lady had this complex
pattern painted on her, but it smeared when the guy touched