Historically Accurate Tzipporah

Being the history geek that I am, I guess it is kind of surprising that I haven't really done a "historically accurate" animation series before, but after seeing that awesome Buzzfeed Disney Princess video, and of course all the amazing art on here, I was inspired to make my own.  I guess it is better late than never!

As I've said before elsewhere, from an artistic standpoint, I'm not at all bothered by the animated designs of the characters in Disney and Dreamworks films. They weren't documentaries after all so in most cases they didn't need to be accurate, and in animation in particular, it is more important to convey character and style in the designs.  I am not trying to "fix" anything because I don't think there is anything to fix!  That being said, it can still be fun to learn how your favorite characters might have looked if they had existed in real life.    

For my series, I am trying to be as accurate as I possibly can.  I'm taking the country of origin, the social class, the culture, and the specific decade into mind (instead of just a general sweep of multiple decades), and also adapting the colors and styles to fit what was available and worn everyday.  I will try to keep the characters recognizable where I can, but I want to make my pictures realistic and so some elements of the original designs might be altered in the process.

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I know I said I was going to draw Gaston, but after drawing Anya last week I decided to continue my streak of non-Disney ladies instead!  One of the best characters from The Prince of Egypt in my opinion is Tzipporah, but we never get to see enough fanart for her!  I really wanted to include her in this series, but it took a LOT of digging to find the kind of clothing she would have really worn, since it is hard to find depictions of Biblical-era clothing that is not fictionalized or European in style.  As it turned out, the best place to start was in the art of Ancient Egypt.

Egypt classed its surrounding regions by their ethnicities, so you get fairly regular depictions of Egyptians, Nubians, Libyans, and Semitic peoples who came from the “Near East” which included most of the Arabian Peninsula up into Mesopotamia.  As a resident of Midian and part of Abraham’s lineage, Tzipporah would be considered a Semite.  Although there are plenty of depictions of Semitic men in Egyptian art, there is only one major depiction of women, from the Beni Hasan tomb paintings.  But the mural is from the 18^th century BC, about 500 years before Ramses’ II reign, so I kept looking until I found a closer match in the 13^th century Canaanite ivories of Tel Meggido.  This carving of a woman  shows her clothes are longer than those in the earlier mural, although it is tough to tell how it is draped.  At this point in time men from the Near East were wearing a patterned mantle wrapped several times around the body without any apparent tunic, so women’s clothing was probably similar.  The carved woman’s clothes also resembled artwork of garments from Mesopotamia and Assyria, which makes sense considering they were neighbors and Midianite women likely imitated their fashions if they could.

So for Tzipporah, I used some deductive reasoning and interpreted her draped garment based on the Canaanite carving and Assyrian women’s clothing, while incorporating the pattern from the Beni Hasan mural.  She is wearing thonged sandals since going without shoes was a sign of poverty or piety – they are also based on the Beni Hassan and Assyrian art.  In the movie, Tzipporah has an interesting hairstyle which is a combination of locks and microbraids.   Since Semitic peoples would have been influenced by the Egyptians (and seemed to share similar hairstyles in the mural and carving) I drew Tzipporah with her hair in a 13^th century Egyptian style I saw on a statue and a painting of Hathor. As a daughter of a high priest I’m guessing Tzipporah would have some prestige, so she is wearing jewelry based off of the Tel Meggido finds.  Like most people of this period, she is also wearing cosmetics including kohl on her eyes and ochre for her lips and cheeks.

It’s weird that with so much Biblical art in history so little of it is actually accurate! And even though it’s probably impossible to know exactly what Tzipporah would have worn, after a ton of obsessing, I hope I got pretty close!  Next week we will be doing a major makeover to Marina from Dreamworks’ Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas.  

Also if you'd like to see what Greeks were wearing at the same time as Tzipporah, check out my drawings of Hercules and Megara!

Other Non-Disney characters: