"Her face is as white as the day on which friends meet again. If I look on it at the time of the full moon I see two moons at once.
"Her cheeks are formed of an anemone divided into two corollas; they have the purple tinge of wine, and her nose is straighter and more delicate than the finest sword-blade.
"Her lips are colored agate and coral; her tongue secretes eloquence; her saliva is more desirable than the juice of grapes.
"But her bosom, blessed be the Creator, is a living seduction. It bears twin breasts of the purest ivory, rounded, and that may be held within the five fingers of one hand.
"Her belly has dimples full of shade and arranged with the harmony of the Arabic characters on the seal of a Coptic scribe in Egypt. And the belly gives origin to her finely modeled and elastic waist.
"At the thought of her flanks I shudder, for thence depends a mass so weighty that it obliges its owner to sit down when she has risen and to rise when she lies.
"Such are her flanks, and from them descend, like white marble, her glorious thighs, solid and straight, united above beneath their crown. Then come the legs and the slender feet, so small that I am astounded they can bear so great a weight."
An Egyptian stela in the Louvre sings the praise of a beautiful woman, a queen who died about 700 B.C., as follows: "The beloved before all women, the king's daughter who is sweet in love, the fairest among women, a maid whose like none has seen. Blacker is her hair than the darkness of night, blacker than the berries of the blackberry bush (?). Harder are her teeth (?) than the flints on the sickle. A wreath of flowers is each of her breasts, close nestling on her arms." Wiedemann, who quotes this, adds: "During the whole classic period of Egyptian history with few exceptions (such, for example, as the reign of that great innovator, Amenophis IV) the ideal alike for the male and the female body was a slender and but slightly developed form. Under the Ethiopian rule and during the Ptolemaic period in Egypt itself we find, for the first time, that the goddesses are represented with plump and well-developed outlines. Examination of the mummies shows that the earlier ideal was based upon actual facts, and that in ancient Egypt slender, sinewy forms distinguished both men and women. Intermarriage with other races and harem life may have combined in later times to alter the physical type, and with it to change also the ideal of beauty." (A. Wiedemann, _Popular Literature in Ancient Egypt_, p. 7.)