Another Pithemorphic Vessel of the Sixth Dynasty

Abstract

The earliest and most conspicuous evidence for the ancient Egyptians' sense of humor is surely to be found in the antics of apes, a favorite motif of the scenes of daily life in tomb chapels of the Old Kingdom, dating from the Fourth Dynasty onward. Considering how very few three-dimensional representations of animals are known from that period, apart from amulets, one is also struck by the fact that apes have lent their form to as many as fifteen theriomorphic vessels that have survived in whole or in part, mostly carved in alabaster, i.e., calcite, and several of them bearing the names of Sixth Dynasty kings. One of them represents a baboon, another a monkey spread-eagled on the underside of a spouted dish, while virtually all the rest display a female monkey and her offspring, clasped in mutual embrace, readapting a motif that was already exploited in the Archaic Period.2 As in the example that has just been mentioned, the animal is one of the dozen species of the genus Cercopithecus, commonly known as guenons, which are native to the more southern regions of Africa. A recent acquisition of the Metropolitan Museum adds a particularly fine example to this group (fig. 1), and one that bears an exceptionally complete series of inscriptions. Before this is described in detail, it will be useful to provide a very summary list of the others for convenient reference. They will be mentioned by number in the following pages, with brackets placed around the numbers of those that do not show