A New Fragment of an Old Palette

Abstract

Walter Federn loved problems, puzzles and pixies, and no one who ever met him and engaged him in a discussion, will forget his puzzled, bright-eyed expression when he felt himself confronted with a problem which made him raise his bushy eyebrows. In a way he himself was a pixy, a problem, a puzzle to all of us. He could discourse on any complex question at a moment's notice, and this writer vividly retains the memory of Federn's learned discussions on subjects as disparate as the meaning of the biw iwnw or the origin of the back pillar in Old Kingdom statuary. A Privatgelehrter of the old school, he read every line published in the field of Egyptology and kept a running account of corrections, amendments and addenda to every major study that appeared — unfortunately in a minute script; and the maze of his original notes was intelligible to no one but himself. His vast knowledge, which he disclosed in a hesitating, modest and yet most engaging manner, brought forth — alas, mostly in conversation — a host of new ideas which, unendingly, he proposed as working hypotheses. His critical comments, so freely dispensed, deserved to be acknowledged in print far more than has actually been done.1 Here, in his memory, a problem is presented which deserves the scrutiny he himself used to lavish on all questions, large and small, in the quarter of a century from 1939 to 1964 during which he enlivened the Wilbour Library of Egyptology at The Brooklyn Museum with his weekly visits. In 1966 the Museum acquired a relief fragent2 which originally had been purchased by a traveler from one of those vendors of scarabs, s awab is, and unrecognizably corroded Roman coins who set upon tourists visiting the temples of Abydos. It is therefore more than likely that the relief fragment originally was found at Abydos.3 The fragment is decorated on both sides. The obverse, in raised relief (PL I, Fig. 1), shows a bearded man, facing right, who either has closecropped hair neatly outlined above his forehead and around the ear, or wears a tight-fitting cap of the kind later used by the god Ptah. Ear, eye, and nose are prominent and well defined. His left arm, the elbow close to the chest, is stretched out nearly horizontally and holds a vessel with flaring side, and a patterned cloth ( ? ) which hangs down from below the vessel nearly to his advanced left foot. The right arm is raised, and the ha d — palm down — either places some amorphous substance into the vessel or steadies the la ter by holding whatever is heaped up in or on it. The man is dressed in a belted loincloth