abstract: The article discusses the decoration of wedding rooms in Egyptian Nubia before the resettlement of the population due to the construction of the Aswan High Dam in 1964. In the former Nubian villages, it was the task of a bride to decorate a special place, the so-called bride’s room, before the marriage. This activity was part of the extensive house-decoration, consisting foremost of wall paintings, which the women painted with earth colors on their home’s outer and inner walls. Their rich and often opulent adornment with three-dimensional objects made the Nubian bridal rooms particular. Homemade handiwork hung up on the walls or suspended from the ceilings formed the main feature of the room’s design. On top of this, a mixture of peculiar items was displayed. These could be anything the brides considered valuable and composed inventively into an artistic design, whether as an assemblage or as “objets trouvés”. The custom to furnish a bridal room in this manner was discontinued after the Nubians were moved to the new villages north of Aswan. The article is a part of my forthcoming publication “Colors of Nubia, the lost art of women’s house decoration.”.
stretches of agricultural land. The result was the forfeiture of
livelihood. Consequently, since the beginning of the 20th century,
Nubian men had been obliged to migrate to the Egyptian cities where they
worked mostly in the service sector. Their remittances supported the
families back in the villages. They themselves could return home only
rarely - usually once a year.
Due to the extensive male labor migration many of the isolated Nubian
villages, especially those in the northern Kunuzi region, were populated
predominantly by women. They were the ones who carried the full
responsibility for the household routine, raising the children, and
caring for the elderly as well as tending the few remaining fields and
livestock. Also, they crafted furnishings and utensils of Nile mud,
weaves, and basketry. Their creativity found foremost expression in the
outstanding Nubian house decoration.
**~~Figure 1. Nubian women in front of a decorated entry. Koshtammne, W. Neja Hamadaab/ Katabaab, 1963 (Photographed by the author).~~**
**~~Figure 2. House entry, decoration with lime and washblue. Toshke, W. Neja Seidaab qibli, 1964 (Photographed by the author).~~**
Women pursued fantasies in the design of their bridal rooms. These
accomplishments contributed significantly to a female Nubian
identity.[^1] Women also followed traditional practices of folk
religion, perpetuated a rich oral literature, maintaining and passing on
the Nubian language, and achieved generally a remarkable degree of
self-determination, especially in comparison to the peasant women of
Upper Egypt.
**~~Figure 3. Decoration with baskets in a barrel-vaulted bridal room. Shellaal, Bijje island, 1964 (Photographed by the author).~~**
While men constructed the Nubian houses there was one chamber in all
houses, which -- though not built by women -- carried female
handwriting. This chamber was the so-called bridal room, *aruusana
**~~Figure 4. Young girl, Wadi el Arab, E. Neja Salahaab, 1963 (Photographed by the author).~~**
The bride had in the time preceding the wedding the task of decorating
this room in her paternal house or compound, which would be the couple's
private quarters and bedroom for a while. They lived there for at least
forty days or until the first child was born. Sometimes this arrangement
lasted for years. The husband\'s income determined if and when he could
install a living space for the young family at or near his parents's
compound. While staying with the in-laws, the bridegroom was considered
a guest of the bride's parents.
The bride was eager to decorate the *aruusana kaa* and to show her
inventiveness and creativity. For an outsider who had the opportunity to
visit a Nubian bridal room in the1960s, this proved a remarkable
experience. One was transported into a fantastic realm of colors and
forms. The experience had a mysterious character because very little
light entered the room through the narrow ventilation slots -- *tagaa*
-- high on the walls just below the ceiling. The place was confined, as
a bridal room in the Kenzi area rarely exceeded ten square meters.
Especially so since the two obligatory furniture pieces of any Nubian
house -- the marital bed and the bridal chest -- were placed in the
bridal room and took up a good portion of the floor space, leaving the
walls and the ceiling as the main loci for the overwhelmingly abundant
decoration. Bridal rooms could have larger dimensions in the Fadija
area, where houses generally were more spacious.
In contrast to the two-dimensional wall paintings, the bridal room
decoration is probably best termed as an assemblage, bringing to mind
the realizations associated with this term in the visual arts of the
works famously created by Picasso, Duchamp, and Dubuffet. A Nubian bride
worked on these assemblages for weeks, if not months, before the wedding
feast. They included a wide range of objects which she prized as
valuable and of individual significance, ranging from items of artful
**~~Figure 5. Bridal room with pleated mats, baskets, a gun, photos, and various small plastic objects, from the ceiling suspended slings with enamel bowls. Umbarakaab, W. Neja Siukutti, 1963 (Photographed by the author).~~**
In the 1960s, when Nubian men were predominantly absent as labor
migrants, this room was, in effect, the wife's private domain, her
sanctuary, so to speak, serving as the reception place for female guests
to whom the place was proudly presented. Male visitors and outsiders had
no access to it. Though the rich decoration all over the room suggested
an impression of plenty, the fitments of the bridal room consisted
mainly of the two furniture pieces -- a bed and a chest -- installed at
the wedding.
The traditional bed was a locally-made *angaree*, a kind of divan, but
it could also be an imported iron bedstead, even a four-poster.
Commonly, Nubians slept on home-made mats placed on the ground -- these
could also be laid on top of the *angaree*. Sometimes a cotton mattress
was used. The *angaree* beds had a frame from acacia wood and a covering
with a taut mesh of palm fibers or palm bast: *ashmaan*. When the mesh
wore out, it could be easily renewed or replaced with wooden boards.
Bigger households would have several of these *angarees*, which were
brought during the daytime into the courtyard to be used for sitting.
Yet, the usually decorated marital bed always remained inside the
bride's room.
**~~Figure 6. Angaree beds with mesh. Abu Hoor, E. Neja Khor Rahma, 1962 (Photographed by the author).~~**
The second furniture item in the bridal room, a wooden chest, housed the
since it formerly came from there, it served as a lockable storage space
for personal belongings such as jewelry, clothes, blankets, and
treasured possessions. Things needed for the wife's daily grooming, such
as homemade massaging ointment (*dilka*) and the antimony eye makeup
(*nidmee*), were also kept in the chest or on a little wall shelf.
The chests always featured some carved decorations with symmetrically
arranged motifs, such as stars, stylized flowers, and pairs of animals,
often lions facing each other. Wooden dowry chests were customary
throughout the Islamic world from Pakistan to Morocco and from the
Arabian Peninsula to Zanzibar. As likely prototypes for these chests,
the wooden boxes of early Portuguese sailors have been suggested.[^5]
**~~Figure 7. Wooden chest: *sanduug*. Shellaal, Seheel Island, 2013 (Photographed by the author).~~**
While the bridal room assemblages were a central feature of all Nubian
houses, they were especially exuberant in the Kenuzi region.
At large, the room's walls were first covered with handcrafted braided
mats, to which flat round basket*s* were attached. These two formed the
main artisanal product all over Nubia.[^6]
**~~Figure 8. Mats, round baskets, and hanging slings in a bridal room, under the ceiling rolled up mats, stored on pegs. Mediig, W. Neja Sebue, 1963 (Photographed by the author).~~**
They both played an important role during wedding feasts, being
fabricated in advance by the bride and her female relatives. The mats
would be spread on the ground for guests to sit on as they paid their
respects during the week-long celebrations. A mat might also be placed
on an *angaree*, serving as a bench for the bridal pair. The
shield-shaped baskets were primarily used as lids to cover the food
served on large trays but formed also a popular wedding gift. Following
the wedding, the mats would be removed from the ground, rolled up, and
hung on pegs right below the ceiling in the bridal room. As all the
decorations of the bridal room, they likely had some symbolic
significance because it was customary in some areas for the wife to
remove them when her husband died.[^7]
Also, colorful flag-shaped hand fans were hung on top of the mats and
amongst the baskets.
**~~Figure 9. Hand fan, cotton and palm material, Kenuzi region, 1962 (Photographed by the author).~~**
Primarily, objects which the bride considered as special and worthy of
being shown were displayed in this room. These comprised a bizarre
collection of objects peculiar in Nubia, sometimes stranded goods washed
up along the banks of the river or things brought back by the men from
their workplaces. Though the latter items had had some utility in the
Egyptian towns, they were of no use in the Nubian households. Here the
women to whom these things appeared wondrous subjected them to a kind of
recycling as they hung them on the walls as decorations.
Sometimes an object would be left unchanged in its original form, but
sometimes it would be skillfully altered. Electric bulbs -- inoperable
in Nubia, which had no electricity -- and burned-out batteries were
carefully embedded into a mesh of colored glass beads. The empty
cigarette packs from the heavily smoking men were cut open and sewed
with needle and thread into multi-faceted cardboard stars. Old tin cans
showing their labels were flattened and nailed to the wall next to
discarded parts of transistor radios or other appliances. Colorful
photos from magazines were galleried like precious images. Thus, the
picture of a white chicken could be hung beside that of a sparsely-clad
cinema star, which seemed odd in the Nubian context, considering the
widely-held norms of female decency. Some items came actually from the
trash left behind by the international archaeological missions sent to
Nubia in the late 1950s and early 1960s to rescue the monuments
threatened by the High Dam.
Together with this mixture of decorative and, in the Nubian context,
seemingly exotic items appeared a multitude of miniature handmade
objects intended as good luck charms. They were no larger than
five-to-fifteen centimeters and hung either on the walls or suspended
from the marital bed's coverlet.
**~~Figure 10. Bed coverlet decorated with small handmade objects. Magazine clippings and photos are displayed on the wall above the bed. Toshke, W. Neja Dukki Daur, 1964 (Photographed by the author).~~**
Handcrafted in needlework, these items were made of leather or colorful
plastic sheeting, available in Egypt since the 1950s. They could
represent scorpions, human hands, flowers, *aruusa* dolls, or
small-scale replicas of household equipment, such as mats, bags,
baskets, and water containers. There were miniaturized fly swatters,
purses, boxes for eye makeup, and triangular stuffed cushions, termed
*sambuska*.
Other items could be small geometrical forms such as rings, circles, and
squares, some of which were considered to have special protective
powers.
**~~Figure 11. Small aruusa figure, plastic material. Toshke, W. Neja Dukki Daur, 1964 (Photographed by the author).~~**
**~~Figure 12. Bird, plastic material, Toshke, W. Neja Dukki Daur, 1964 (Photographed by the author).~~**
**~~Figure 13. Protective sign, sambuska, plastic material. Toshke, W. Neja Dukki Daur, 1964 (Photographed by the author).~~**
**~~Figure 14. Star sewn from flattened cigarette boxes. Toshke, W. Neja Dukki Daur, 1964 (Photographed by the author).~~**
**~~Figure 15. Protective sign, busug, cotton material, ornamented with cowry shells. Toshke, W. Neja Dukki Daur, 1964 (Photographed by the author).~~**
**~~Figure 17. A dismantled bride's room with painted praying mats. Dehemiit, E. Neja Kogge, 1964 (Photographed by the author).~~**
Whereas the walls of most bride's rooms were decorated with objects and
not painted, there existed some exceptions, two of which are shown. The
**~~Figure 18. The same protective objects, which adorned in real the bride's room, appear here as painted motifs in a guest room. Gurte, W. Neja Affedunya, 1963 (Photographed by the author).~~**
The impression of abundance in a bridal room was intensified by the way
that the space overhead was also filled. Hanging down from the ceiling
were slings made of braided wool (s*haaloog*) or leather (*soleddi*),
the cords strung with snail shells and cowries (*nerre*)*.*[^8]
Suspended in these slings were dozens of empty enamel bowls, porcelain
plates, or gourds (figures 19 and 20). Although food and utensils were
stored in the cooking area in the same manner, the sole intention here
was decoration.
**~~Figure 19. Enamel bowls in slings suspended from the ceiling, on the four posters a lace curtain to which protective small plastic objects are pinned. Shellaal, Bijje island, 1964 (Photographed by the author).~~**
**~~Figure 20. Double hanging slings, made from wool, with enamel bowls in a barrel-vaulted bridal room. Kalaabshe, 1963 (Photographed by the author).~~**
At times ostrich eggs imported from Sudan -- to which magical powers
were ascribed -- could be seen in such a sling. In addition to the
room's decoration and simultaneously crowding it even more were wooden
bars (*waawir*) suspended horizontally by ropes from the ceiling and
used as racks to store and display the bright clothes and scarfs of the
women.
Even though the bride's room was distinctly the domain of females, men
had at least a symbolic presence here in the form of their swords and
guns, which were presented on the walls, complete with their rows of
cartridges. The swords used in the men's ceremonial dances and carried
at a wedding, and guns cherished for occasional hunts in the desert or
for shooting in the air at festivals. They had often been in the
family's possession for generations. The guns usually dated back to the
time of the Mahdi at the end of the nineteenth century.
But besides their weapons, men were present moreover in black and white
photos on the walls (Figure 21). These photos had been taken by street
photographers in the Egyptian towns where the men worked, showing them
dressed either in European fashion or with the local long shirt-like
gown, *galabieh.* Some of these shots dated from the 1930s and 40s.
Street photographers offered their services in Aswan since World War I
and could still be seen on the Corniche in the 1960s. They were equipped
with huge cameras mounted on wooden tripods in front of which the
customer would pose on a stool, usually sitting stiffly with both hands
on the knees and presenting an earnest and dignified facial expression,
while the photographer disappeared behind his camera under a huge black
cloth to take the shot.
**~~Figure 21. Photos of male family members on the wall of a bridal room. Shellaal, Bijje island, 1964 (Photographed by the author).~~**
The phenomenon of the design and decoration of the former bridal rooms,
where Nubian women transformed foreign objects into new creations, might
be understood as an example of how the Nubians, since distant times,
have adopted outside influences into their culture, appropriating these
impacts to such an extent that they seemed to be characteristic for
Nubia, a feature reappearing also in other realms of Nubian culture.
After the exodus of the people to the new settlements near Kom Ombo, the
tradition of decorating the bridal room was given up.
In the new villages the everyday experience was totally different from
the one before and life proceeded under changed premises: running water,
roads, electricity, refrigerators, schools, telephones, and eventually
TV --- all unknown in Old Nubia --- became matters of fact. In addition,
many consumer goods became available and money started to play a more
significant role than before.
Many of the former customs were given up. And the skill of how to
fabricate craft articles were lost because the material for it was no
longer available. For example, the handmade mats, previously an
essential item of Nubian houses, were replaced by plastic items. The two
traditional pieces of furniture, the *sanduug* chest and the *angaree*
bed, were considered old fashioned and not used anymore. Instead,
heavily upholstered armchairs, massive sofas, buffets, tables, and other
items of modern-day furniture were used. These pieces are ornately
adorned, often with gold trimmings, as was popular throughout Egypt. The
often-oversized items narrow down the small rooms, where relatively low
ceilings enhance the impression of confined space.
The reason for the abandonment of the bridal room decoration might
partially have been the absence of adequate space, but also and probably
more so due to the now changed female state of mind. This mental change
can be attributed to girls' education. The strong cultural influences of
the Egyptian mainstream must also be considered.
**References**
Burckhardt, John Lewis. *Travels in Nubia*. London: John Murray, 1819.
Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock, Robert Alan Fernea, and Aleya Rouchdy.
