Kohl, galena and the chemistry of the painted eye

If you have seen an Egyptian coffin lid, a tomb painting or almost any surviving portrait from the dynastic period, you have seen the line. It runs along the upper lid, thickens at the outer corner and extends in a tapering stroke towards the temple, sometimes doubled below the eye. It is one of the most stable visual conventions in human history, recognisable across three thousand years and several changes of dynasty, religion and ruling language. It also survives in physical form, because the material used to draw it was mineral, and minerals keep.

What the stuff actually was

The dominant ingredient in Egyptian eye paint was galena: lead sulphide, a heavy grey mineral with a metallic lustre, which grinds to a dense black powder. It was mined in the Eastern Desert and near the Red Sea coast, ground on small palettes, and stored in tubes and pots, many of which survive in collections including the {BM_LABEL}. It was applied with a rounded stick of wood, bone or glass. Green eye paint from earlier periods used malachite, a copper carbonate, and the shift from green to black over time is one of the clearer fashion changes visible in the archaeological record.

That much has been understood for a long time. The interesting part came from the laboratory. Analyses of surviving cosmetic residues carried out on museum held Egyptian material identified, in addition to galena and cerussite, two lead chlorides: laurionite and phosgenite. Both occur in nature but not commonly, and not in the proportions found in the samples. The chemistry needed to produce them from natural lead ores is not difficult, but it is not accidental either: it involves repeated mixing and washing with salt over an extended period. Somebody was running a process.

The medical argument

Why go to the trouble? The most widely repeated explanation is that the paint was medicinal, that it protected the eye against infection and against glare, and that this was its primary purpose. There is real support for parts of this. Egyptian medical texts, including the material generally grouped under the Ebers papyrus, contain eye preparations, and eye disease was a serious and common problem in the Nile valley. The idea that a substance applied to the eye region was understood as therapeutic is entirely consistent with how the ancient world thought about the boundary between medicine and adornment, which is to say that it did not draw one.

A stronger version of the claim circulated after the lead chloride findings were published, proposing that these compounds stimulated an immune response in the surrounding skin and thereby conferred protection against bacterial eye infection. That was a laboratory result about cell behaviour, and it was presented in the coverage as an explanation of ancient intention, which it cannot be. The chemistry is interesting. The inference that Egyptians synthesised laurionite in order to obtain an immunological effect they had no means of observing is not supportable, and the more economical explanation is that the process produced a paint with better properties: a paler, more workable, more consistent material that behaved reliably.

Kohl, antimony and a persistent muddle

The word kohl covers a great deal of ground. In Arabic usage it names the preparation rather than a single mineral, and preparations across North Africa, the Levant, Persia and South Asia have used different bases: galena in some regions, stibnite, an antimony sulphide, in others, along with soot, charred plant material, camphor and various oils. The English word antimony and the Arabic al kuhl are entangled, and so, by a long etymological detour through distillation and purification, is the word alcohol. That detour is real, and it is one of the few pieces of received etymology in this field that survives scrutiny.

The muddle matters for a practical reason. Traditional kohl preparations are still made and sold, and lead based ones have repeatedly been found in circulation in Britain, Europe and North America with very high lead content. Public health authorities in several countries have issued warnings about imported kohl, surma and kajal, particularly where they are applied to infants. That is a present tense problem descended directly from an ancient practice, and it is one of the clearest cases in this magazine of the past not being safely over.

The ancient world did not have a category for cosmetics that excluded medicine. We do, and we keep reading it backwards into people who would not have recognised it.

What it was for, as far as anyone can tell

The most defensible reading is that Egyptian eye paint was doing several things simultaneously and that the culture felt no need to rank them. It marked the eye, which in Egyptian religious thought was heavily freighted: the eye of Horus is not a minor motif. It signalled status and preparedness. It probably did reduce glare, in the way that the dark under eye marks worn by athletes are supposed to. It may have deterred flies. It was applied to the living and to the dead, by men and by women, across class boundaries, which rules out any single explanation grounded in gender or in fashion.

The strongest evidence that it was not merely functional is the survival of the shape. A purely protective application does not need a tapering extension towards the temple. It does not need to be symmetrical. The line is a design, held stable for millennia by a culture that valued continuity of form in everything from statuary to hieroglyphs, and the persistence of that design is the part that belongs in a magazine about culture rather than one about pharmacology.

Afterlives

The Egyptian eye reappears constantly. It came back through nineteenth century Egyptology, again through the enormous public response to the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun in the 1920s, and again through cinema, which found in it a ready made visual shorthand for antiquity, sensuality and threat. Theatrical and film make up of the mid twentieth century took the line and exaggerated it, and the version most people picture when they hear the word kohl is closer to a film costume department than to anything excavated.

The material history runs the other way, into lead. Galena on the eye is the first appearance in this magazine of a substance that would not leave the human face for another three thousand years, and that eventually forced the invention of the regulation of colour.

Where to look

Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The British Museum, collection and the Science Museum Group both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.