Early Israelite Women Ahead of Modern Beauty Stylists

Early Israelite women put one over in extreme styles on the modern beauty parlors, according to excavations made by Dr. W. F. Albright, Spence professor of Semitic languages at the Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Albright who gave an illustrated lecture here before the Churchmen’s Club in the Emerson Hotel, telling of excavations of hidden cities this past summer at Tell Beit, Mirsim, near Jerusalem, said carved stone palettes which were employed for pulverizing minerals to paint women’s faces were unearthed.

These Israelite women, whom the prophet Isaiah scorned for their love of finery, used powdered manganese to paint black their eyelashes and eye brows, and with powdered malachite painted their lower eyelids green, explained Dr. Albight. Haematite clay or red ochre was used presumably for their cheeks, he added.

Directing a joint expedition of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem and the Pittsburgh Xenia Theological Seminary, Dr. Albright said this past summer the expedition reached the rock bottom of ten successive layers, each representing a city. He said each was separated from the other by a layer of ashes showing where each time the city had been destroyed by fire.

Of the ten successive layers, eight were Canaanite cities and the upper two were Israelite cities. For three years the expedition has been at work on the site, which is about seventy miles by road from Jerusalem. The total duration of the ten cities, Dr. Albright said, represented about 1,700 years, dating from about 2,300 B. C. to Babylonian captivity.

Toys were discovered in the Israelite period, toy clay animals and dogs, rattles and whistles. No toys were discovered in the Canaanite layer.