Robert Mond Bequest to the British Museum

Abstract

A FURTHER instalment of descriptive notes on outstanding objects in the collection of antiquities bequeathed to the British Museum by the late Sir Robert Mond (Brit. Mus. Quarterly,14, 1; 1940) deals with funerary portraits of the Roman period from the Fayyum, an example of a theriomorphic vase possibly of the middle predynastic period in the form of a frog and two small granite heads, of which the smaller presents the remarkable and unusual feature that the eyes are shut, so that the effect is that of the portrait of a dead person, while the contour of the main features resembles that of a skeleton. It seems to be without parallel, and no opinion can be expressed as to its age without the greatest reserve. Much interest is attached to a small hollow cylinder of black and white porphyritic rock, which belongs to a class of objects of which the use has not yet been determined satisfactorily. At one time they were thought to be mace heads, though secure hafting seems an impossibility; but recent discoveries at Wadi Haifa, in which they were found in association with other weapons and in some burials with two fingers of the right hand, have led to the suggestion that they were archers' looses, and in their use resembled the Mongolian ring. All datable examples are from sites occupied by the people to whom archseologists apply the term the X-group, who occupied Upper and Lower Nubia from the third to the sixth centuries A.D., variously identified with the Blemmyer of the Eastern Desert, the Noubades, a mixed race of negroid and Meroitic elements, and the Nobatae, who are alleged by Procopius to have formed a buffer State between the Roman frontier at the First Cataract and the southern barbarian tribes.