Ancient Egyptian Painted Textile from the collection of R. de Rustafjaell

Abstract

The paper represents the first detailed publication of the Ancient Egyptian painted textile of the New Kingdom from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (I,1а 6113). Formerly it belonged to the R. de Rustafjaell Collection. The purpose of the paper is to introduce a museum object, which was previously known only from a brief description and an early 20th-century black-and-white photograph, into scholarly discourse. The textile belongs to a group of painted cloths (about 30 in total) of the late 18th and early 19th Dynasty (14–13 centuries B.C.). They all have scenes of worship of the goddess Hathor. These cloths were brought as votive offerings to Hathor into her shrine in Deir el-Bahri. On the Pushkin Museum textile, the goddess is depicted as a sacred cow. Seven donators face her: three men and four women. These persons were most likely the members of a single family (parents and their children). Technological analysis shows that the painted textiles from Deir el-Bahri were both of professional and domestic production. The rather low quality of the threads as well as poor workmanship (the tension of the warp and weft threads was poorly regulated, the end of the right edge was not even, the density of the cloth was not uniform, there were other weaving errors as well) suggest that the manufacture of the Pushkin Museum textile was not the work of a professional weaver. The painting, on the other hand, was obviously done in a workshop by professional artists.