Woman's headdress (tantur)

The tantur is one of the most surprising Oriental women's headdresses. Cone-shaped and made of metal (gold, silver or copper) in heights varying from 35 to 70 cm, it was attached straight or sideways to a head-piece made of the same metal. A long silk or muslin veil attached to the tip covered the shoulders and back. The example at the Museum of Beiteddine is made of silver adorned with engravings and repoussé-work, and rests on a head-piece of the same metal.

The tantur was used by Lebanese mountain women; it was worn by the Christian Maronite, Muslim and Druze women. It was reserved for married women of all statuses, but young women of very high-ranking families could wear it on very rare occasions. The height and material used depended on the social rank and wealth of the wearer. Those made of gold, often set with precious stones or pearls, were therefore destined for the wealthiest, while women of lower rank wore silver or wooden tantur.

The descriptions by Occidental travellers who visited Lebanon from the end of the eighteenth century clarified certain customs related to the tantur. It was presented to the woman by her husband on their wedding day, and could be worn to the right, left, front or back of the head. The Maronite were the only ones to wear it on the forehead, but those who wore it over the ear could be either Druzes or Maronite. Lamartine and De Guys reported that women never took it off, even to sleep. The tantur custom continued in Lebanon until at least 1860, that being the last occurrence among the reports of travellers, by an anonymous Russian writer who, meeting a Druze woman at Majdal ‘Anjar, referred to her as the "unicorn woman" because of her tantur.

In his study of costumes in Lebanon, Maurice Chéhab states that the term "tantur" may be a distortion of the word "tartur", which refers to a high cone-shaped headdress worn in the fifteenth century. According to Dozy, the latter term was already in usage previously, as it is found in the One Thousand and One Nights (Mamluk period, thirteenth-fifteenth centuries) to describe a woman's headdress. The headdresses worn by Egyptian women were reported by several travellers such as Belon of Mans, who visited the region in the mid-sixteenth century. They may have given rise to the hennin. The latter, a rigid cone, the tip of which may have been truncated and to which was attached a long veil, appeared in France around 1420 and then spread to Italy and Germany. Reaching extravagant proportions, it was the object of restrictive ordinances, and disappeared around the end of the fifteenth century.

Several hypotheses have been put forward on the origins of the tantur. Some assert that the Crusaders introduced it in Lebanon, while others assume, on the contrary, that it was brought back to Europe by the Crusaders. For others, the tantur came from China or Mongolia. Some have also found similarities with hats worn by the Christian women of Urfa (Turkey) as well as the headdresses of Jewish women in Algeria.