Harpocrates and the Cult of Fertility: Iconography and Symbolism of Egyptian Graeco-Roman Terracotta Figurines from the Collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

Abstract

The article analyzes five Egyptian terracotta figurines of Graeco-Roman Period, depicting the child-god Harpocrates or his priests or attendants with different attributes associated with the cult of fertility. All objects are currently kept in storages of the Department of Ancient Orient of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow), and all come from the collection of Vladimir S. Golenischev, which entered the museum in 1911. This group of terracotta is practically unknown to the researchers, and some of them are published for the first time. Study of these figurines allows demonstrating the syncretic nature of the Egyptian pantheon of Graeco-Roman time. The evolution of divine iconography sets the problem of borrowing from Graeco-Roman culture some traits and attributes in the symbolism of terracotta figurines. In general terracotta figurines provides a lot of information on many aspects of life in Graeco-Roman Egypt, especially concerning the so called “popular” religion and its interaction with the official temple cult in Egypt during Ptolemaic and Roman Periods. The definition of the symbolic nature of terracotta figurines depicting Harpocrates raises the question of the purpose of these objects, which remains largely controversial due to the lack of information about their origin and location, i. e. about the archaeological context. This concerns most of the objects not only from the Moscow collection, but also from other museum collections in the world.