Egyptian Statue Research Articles

“Egyptian Statue”, Revealed in the South-Eastern Region of Azerbaijan, in the system of Ancient Cultural and Trade Relations

Ancient Egypt, being one of the developed centers of the East, had close ties with Western Asia and the South Caucasus, both from a political and commercial point of view. This country, which had not been conquered until the VII century BC, was in the forefront as a political and military power of the period. It was from this viewpoint that many countries sought to establish political union with it, as well as the trade relations. As a result of this relationship, various works of art related to Ancient Egypt also spread to the South Caucasus through the Western Asia. No doubt that Egyptian art items found in Egypt itself are more than samples from other countries where similar finds are common. The paper deals with the archaeological finding – an Egyptian figurine. This artifact, which is so far the only example, found in Azerbaijan, testifies to the existence of ties between the South Caucasus and Egypt. The discovery also contributes to the creation of certain ideas about the small plastic art of that period. It is possible that complex archaeological studies in the region will reveal new artifacts of such art

Biodeterioration Assessment of a Unique Old Pharaonic Kingdom Wooden Statue Using Advanced Diagnostic Techniques

A recently discovered Egyptian wooden statue of King Djedefre was studied together with some surrounding burial soil samples for assessing the statue biodeterioration. The wooden morphological characterisation identified the hardwood Acacia nilotica as the wood type. X-ray diffraction, micro-FT-IR spectroscopy, and scanning electron microscopy with an X-ray spectrometer were used to evaluate the wood deterioration degree and the soil contribution in wood biodeterioration. Microbiological analyses (fluorescent in situ hybridisation and polymerase chain reaction) were also performed to detect the microbial attack on the statue. The prolonged interaction of the statue with the burial environment caused a strong wood decay due to biotic (fungi and bacteria) and abiotic factors (e.g., humidity fluctuations of the burial environment), which caused the severe cracking and collapsing of the wood structures. The analyses of the burial soil mineral composition were relevant for obtaining an overall picture of the statue deterioration. The results are useful for planning the right conservation procedures for this very particular and important wooden statue. Furthermore, analysis of the woody cell wall will help in the selection of appropriate consolidation and recovery treatments. Because the statue is a unique single piece of wood, and the morphological observations indicated that it is a bald woman in a sitting position, this statue will provide new and interesting knowledge of Egyptian culture.

Byblos in the Late Bronze Age: Interactions between the Levantine and Egyptian Worlds

Byblos in the Late Bronze Age: Interactions between the Levantine and Egyptian Worlds

African Arts — Global Conversations

African Arts — Global Conversations

The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus

The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus

Building 7050 at the Acropolis of Late Bronze Hazor: A Palace After All

Building 7050, located at the centre of the acropolis of Hazor, was constructed in the mid-14th century BCE and, like the rest of the city, was ravaged by fire sometime in the middle of the 13th century. Was this building a temple, as suggested by some, or a ceremonial palace, as advocated by the author? The plan of Building 7050 is clearly different from that of contemporaneous temples in the region and very similar to that of Niqmepah’s palace at Alalakh. Details of the plans of the two structures place them as forerunners of the Bit-Hilani type of palace, typical of Iron Age edifices in Syria, such as at Zinjirli and Tell Tayinat. A large number of pithoi was found in Building 7050, as well as in the administrative palace located nearby, yet none was found in any of the four temples uncovered at Hazor. Storage facilities containing a large number of pithoi and storage jars are typical of palaces all over the ancient Near East. Other finds, such as inscribed clay tablets and Egyptian statue fragments, originated from Building 7050 and the administrative palace, but none was found in any of the four Hazor temples. It is suggested here that one of the main functions of Building 7050 was to stage banquets for the local elite where profuse food and drink were offered. Such feasts were an important part of the political, religious and social life of the palaces of Canaan in the second millennium BCE.

‘Black obsidian Diana’: Moore, Pound, and the Curation of Race

This essay concerns the entangled relationship between modernist experiment and race in the late teens and early 1920s. Taking its focus from an exchange of letters between Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore in 1918-19, it argues that Pound's urge to access pure thought conceives racial embodiment as a thickened medium that intrudes between ‘intelligences’ in conversation. Moore's indirect response, the essay suggests, is a citational practice that attends to the provenance and curation of textual objects, and especially to the cultural and commercial traffic between ‘orient’ and ‘occident’. This case is made in a new reading of Moore's 1923 poem, ‘Marriage‘, which identifies, along the way, Sarojini Naidu, John Cournos, and a five-inch Egyptian statue as mediators between Moore and Pound.

MICHAŁ TYSZKIEWICZ (1828–1897): AN ILLUSTRIOUS COLLECTOR OF ANTIQUITIES

Michał Tyszkiewicz was an outstanding collector of antiquities and a pioneer of Polish archaeological excavations in Egypt conducted in late 1861 and early 1862, which yielded a generous donation of 194 Egyptian antiquities to the Paris Louvre. Today Tyszkiewicz’s name features engraved on the Rotunda of Apollo among the major Museum’s donors. Having settled in Rome for good in 1865, Tyszkiewicz conducted archaeological excavations there until 1870. He collected ancient intaglios, old coins, ceramics, silverware, golden jewellery, and sculptures in bronze and marble. His collection ranked among the most valuable European ones created in the 2nd half of the 19th century. Today, its elements are scattered among over 30 major museums worldwide, e.g. London’s British Museum, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The latest investigation of M. Tyszkiewicz’s correspondence to the German scholar Wilhelm Froehner demonstrated that Tyszkiewicz widely promoted the development of archaeology and epigraphy; unique pieces from his collections were presented at conferences at Rome’s Academia dei Lincei or at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, and published by Italian, French, Austrian, and German scholars. He was considered an expert in glyptic, and today’s specialists, in recognition of his merits, have called a certain group of ancient cylinder seals the ‘Tyszkiewicz Seals’, an Egyptian statue in black basalt has been named the ‘Tyszkiewicz Statue’, whereas an unknown painter of Greek vases from the 5th century BC has been referred to as the ‘Painter Tyszkiewicz’.

The Importance of Oriental Cults in Antium

Summary This paper discusses the preliminary results of a research project, concerning Egyptian statues and Mithraic monuments, which were probably discovered in Antium and obtained by chance by local collectors or sold by antiquarians after scarcely documented excavations through the 17th–18th centuries.

Pedon the Mercenary’s Votive Dedication

In the Ionian city of Priene, in the first half of the 6th century BC, Pedon, son of Amphinneos, Greek mercenary at the service of the pharaohs of the 26th dynasty, dedicated an Egyptian block statue. It is not known if this statue was placed in a specific sanctuary, as it was found, in the late ’80s, in a cave near the same Priene. This block statue, headless and without feet and the base, according to some stylistic peculiarities, can be dated to the reign of Psammetichus I (664-610 BC), who hired Greek and Carian men, as mercenaries, to join and make his own kingdom stable. The inscription, which is on the front of the statue, is bustrophedic and consists of nine lines containing the typical formula of dedication and autobiographical references, as was typical in the use of this kind of sculpture by the Egyptians; on the last part of the inscription, Pedon mentions the pharaoh under whom he served as a mercenary, Psammetichus (Ψαμμήτιχος), and the particular gifts given to him by the pharaoh, a gold bracelet (ψίλιον τε χρύσεογ) and a city (πόλιν), attributable to some peculiarities of both Egyptian and Persian royal culture. A comparison of the paleographic characters dates instead this inscription to the reign of Psammetichus II (595-589 BC), fourth ruler of this dynasty, who also made great use of Greek mercenaries in his army, especially during an expedition in Nubia, which is known from the historical work of Herodotus and from the graffiti left by these Greeks to Abu Simbel. About the identity of the pharaoh mentioned in the inscription and the consequent dating of the same, numerous studies have been spent that have supported one or the other pharaoh, up to a final hypothesis that puts both theories in agreement: the mercenary Pedon would have served Psammetichus I and, after buying this block statue, would have returned to Ionia, where he would have engraved the inscription and where centuries later the statue was found.

The afterlife of Egyptian statues: a cache of religious objects in the temple of Ptah at Karnak

Abstract

Egyptian sculptures from Imperial Rome. Non-destructive characterization of granitoid statues through macroscopic methodologies and in situ XRF analysis

Aegyptiaca-like Domitian’s obelisk is now decorating Bernini’s fountain on Piazza Navona or the Egyptian lions flanking Michelangelo’s stairs towards the Capitol figure prominently amidst Rome’s cultural heritage. Motivations for the import, contextualization, and copying of these objects during the Imperial Roman period are as heavily debated as they are ill understood. Provenance determination plays an important role in these discussions in terms of a (supposed) dichotomy between Egyptian (real) versus egyptianising (copy) but has only been applied stylistically and never been tested analytically. A scientific characterization of the materials themselves is even lacking altogether, as is an investigation into the cultural and symbolic meaning of the materials used. This paper is a first attempt to address these important lacunae on the basis of an explorative study of a selected sample of Egyptian statues from Rome. The identification and provenance attribution of the materials used for these statues are often problematic due to their relatively fine-grained nature and dark color. Therefore, a full non-destructive analysis of Egyptian statues in dark-colored rocks is presented in this study, with the stones evaluated by macroscopic examination and handheld X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis. The implemented methodology has allowed a distinction between greywacke and several varieties of granitoid rocks. In order to evaluate the potential for source attribution, a comparison was made between the results of our analyses and geochemical data for several granitoid rocks from Egypt. This has suggested Aswan as most likely source. The results presented here indicate that handheld XRF analysis can be used for the assessment of compositional variability in and potentially for the provenance of granitoid rocks, provided that a fine-grained area of the material can be measured on multiple locations, and if these values can be assessed on (in)consistencies with other published reference materials.

Sound Animation, or on the Singing Stone

Abstract The starting point for the author’s reflection on sound animation is the Egyptian statue of Memnon, the stone that sang at dawn; at first sight, this appears to be an oxymoron, for stone is an allegory of the inanimate, and yet immortal, while voice is the exact opposite, the fleeting sign of life. This opposition has triggered thinking about the life of stone and about the question of whether stone – not unlike musical instruments – has its own soul or if another life sounds through it. The author touches upon cosmological theories and world mythologies, which describe the world and its origin with musical metaphors, as well as the superstring theory in contemporary physics, according to which the vibrations of superstrings determine the properties of particles and forces in nature. Oscillation, then, is an innate property of all things; hence, man is not only a constructor and animator, but must also listen to things and become an echo of their own sounds. In this relationship, the author finds the line separating classical, mainly industrial, instruments from original musical instruments that originate from the “animation” of materials: in the first case, it is the musician who expresses him- or herself, while in the latter case, it is the object that does so; the former instruments are played by musicians, the latter are animated by them. The writer is the author of musical puppet plays in which set design elements, props and puppets enable visual and theatrical expressiveness as well as the performance of music; therefore, his performances are an indivisible blend of puppet animation and music concerts.

Roman collecting and the biographies of Egyptian Late Period statues

ABSTRACTStudies of Egyptian Late Period statuary often assume that the extant corpus is a representative sample of the artistic output of the Twenty-Sixth to Thirty-First Dynasties (c. 664–332 bce). This assumption ignores the various human processes that affect the survival of statues after their initial dedication. In particular, the Roman practice of collecting Egyptian naophorous statues for reuse in cult spaces of Egyptian gods in Italy has skewed the chronological distribution of the corpus in favour of statues of Twenty-Sixth Dynasty date. This in turn informs perceptions of the Twenty-Seventh Dynasty, the period of Achaemenid rule in Egypt, as being a time of artistic poverty. This paper examines the biographies of Egyptian statues in order to better distinguish between the products of ancient agency and modern scholarly constructs.

A Moabite-Inscribed Statue Fragment from Kerak: Egyptian Parallels

The focus of this study is the Kerak fragment (Kemoshyat inscription) from Moab. Since its discovery and initial publication, most studies of this piece have focused primarily on its inscribed text, and a critical art-historical analysis of it is long overdue. Our recent reanalysis of the piece, with new photographs, has revealed additional information to aid in that task. Based on this, the designation of this piece as a statue is appropriate, and the closest stylistic parallels to it suggest that it is Egyptian. The addition of inscriptions to Egyptian statues by non-Egyptian rulers has a precedent, and the ninth-century Moabite royal inscription on the Kerak fragment is likely another example of this phenomenon.

Storage

Storage Brenda Peynado (bio) Fall has arrived, a chill brushing my bones when I wake. I watch the sun crawl out from the earth on the security cameras, where I can stand its brightness through the black-and-white. The sun hunches on the horizon between storage units 8 and 9, in the space where the renters enter through the gates. Sometimes I can hear the tvs mutter and hum between their cycling, and they whisper to me of loss. They tell me about the whole world outside my storage unit that my husband and I converted into a small office and apartment, that my husband and I used to share. I watch a professor and his new wife move their house into unit 35 for a year’s trip to France. They carry giant photographs of their dog, which they had to give up for the move, boxes of old papers, Egyptian statues, hundreds of shoes in see-through plastic bins. I’ve stopped being surprised by what people leave behind. I wonder if their storing is an act of love while the rest of the world lives, changes, dies around us, or if everything has come here to a well-organized junkyard, left to rot away to the end. The little bell clatters in the front office. I wrench my pants up around my waist in the back apartment while whoever it is waits. It’s best to be prepared: one day, one of the storage units caught on fire; once, a roof caved in; once, a woman thought she was being followed to her unit; once, someone’s back gave out, and an ambulance had to be called. Once, my husband, Evander, disappeared, and I had to go on renting out empty spaces and signing contracts for useless junk to fill them. I open the door to Mrs. Hendrix, her face red, wrinkles drawn in pinched hysterics, arms crossed in front of her chest like the living dead—the look she gets when my job is about to get harder. “I swear they’ve got a dead body in there this time,” she croaks. “Really, Mrs. Hendrix?” I say. Mrs. Hendrix, my bird on her skinny, knobbed legs, my serial complainer, my old woman who [End Page 58] cried wolf. Her kids packed her out of the large house filled with all her things and stuffed her inside a retirement community. Anything that she couldn’t fit, she put inside a unit, which she now visits every day. She considers herself the watchdog of the storage complex, parked in her beach chair, the remnants of her former life behind her, binoculars glued to her roaming eyes. I say, “Is it the fraternity again? Or the pot smokers? Or the squirrels stealing your buttons?” “I saw a coffin,” she insists. “Those boys were carrying it on their shoulders. And do you think someone as old as me hasn’t seen coffins before?” She grabs my hand. Her flesh, scaly with patches of age, rubs rough and cold underneath my fingertips like ice cracked from remnants of the last mammoth age. “Are you okay? Any news about Evander?” Normally I would offer her coffee, but today watching the sun come up has left me trapped inside myself. “I’ll look into the coffin,” I say, having no intention of doing so. Stranger things have happened in our storage center, where love, junk, and disappointments are hidden away. I walk my morning rounds from the office to the end of the winding lot, at unit 173. The ratcheting slide of a door slams down. Clearly something they didn’t want me to see. I try to stay out of it. Mockingbirds and thrashers mimic what’s just happened; all around me echoes the sound of doors closing from the throats of birds. Number 17’s door looms open, which means Javier is in his unit and awake. He sprawls on his couch, a portable tv on a table near the back of the unit. I pretend I don’t know he sleeps here after his wife kicked him out and his job fell through. Javier waves and watches me walk...

That Little Room Which They Have Taken For Her

That Little Room Which They Have Taken For Her Rachel Hadas (bio) Early last summer, I had occasion to consult the episode in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in which the narrator revisits Balbec after the death of his grandmother. This well-known passage describes a rush of tears to the narrator’s eyes—tears whose source he has to search his memory to find. What he realizes is that he has just been belatedly mourning the grandmother whose death hadn’t really hit him until now. Even after I’d found the specific passage I’d been looking for, it wasn’t easy to close the book and (as a phrase nearly as annoying as the word “closure” would have it) move on. Soon, in the vicinity of the account of these tears, I came upon a longer passage I hadn’t remembered as well. In a haunting sequence, the narrator, still reeling from the shock of his belated grasp of the fact that his grandmother has died, dreams about her. In his dream she is both dead and not dead. This unsettlingly apt description (I’ll quote it soon) of the way a dream presents an indigestible reality was still much in my mind a few weeks later, when I found myself in my country house rummaging through papers. I was sifting through some folders of work I’d discarded or left unfinished—poems twenty years old, from the late 1980s and early 1990s. One short poem stopped me. It had neither title nor date, but I could easily tell more or less when I had written it, for the poem recorded a dream that had clearly presaged my mother’s death. Her cancer had been diagnosed in November 1990, and my dream preceded the diagnosis by only a few days or weeks. Indeed, the dream’s timing may well have been occasioned by some tests my mother was undergoing. I remember that when, after the last of these tests, the doctor informed me that my mother had a tumor, I told him I’d dreamed she was dying of cancer. As I recall, he seemed more interested than surprised or skeptical. Perhaps such prescient dreams are not so uncommon. Somehow, brought to light about twenty years after I had first written it, my little poem seemed more worth preserving than some of the others I’d turned up in the same folder. I gave it a title and tightened its original eleven lines to nine. Subterranean A gate that had been open closed behind me. Light was streaming into a low-ceilinged bedroom bare but for the bed and a sort of throne [End Page 70] on which I sat to hear the news from the recumbent figure calm in the face of oblivion, hands folded. She told the end herself. The gate, the tunnel, the dark dais, all had been leading toward the one conclusion. All her life, my mother was a composed, reticent, and dignified person. The dream, as preserved in the amber of the poem, has a static, formal, almost hieratic quality; emblematic or heraldic are other adjectives that come to mind. The recumbent figure recalls funerary sculpture—knights and their ladies lying in effigy, or Greek grave steles, or Egyptian statues. In keeping with the paradoxical pairing of feelings that such representations of the dead all seem to evoke—feelings about death that all people probably share—my mother, in the poem as in the dream, is somehow both alive and not alive. In order to reach her, I have to go underground, passing through a tunnel (not mentioned in the poem) and then a gate to reach the dim, low-ceilinged chamber where she is lying. Yet lying as if entombed, she is also able to receive me as a visitor and talk to me calmly and cogently—which was precisely how my mother nearly always talked. Her hands are folded heraldically across her chest; she seems almost like a statue of herself—and yet she is still my (barely) living mother. Here now is the Proust passage: But as soon as I had succeeded in falling asleep...

The Treatment of an Unbaked Mud Statue from Ancient Egypt

Unbaked mud can be problematic because of its fragility and its extreme sensitivity to moisture. This paper describes a treatment that was carried out on an ancient Egyptian statue in the Fitzwilliam Museum. The statue was found in Abydos in 1901, and shortly afterwards was reconstructed using animal glue and cotton wool gap fills. These repairs were unsightly and the object was also very unstable and friable. The old repairs were reversed after first masking areas of vulnerable mud with cyclododecane to prevent water damage. Water was applied in the form of a Laponite poultice, through a separating layer of Bondina polyester sheet. Cyclododecane was also used to reduce staining of the porous substrate during subsequent consolidation with polyvinyl butyral and as a temporary support during intervention. The treatment significantly improved the stability and appearance of the statue, making it suitable for long-term display.

Message in the Deodorant Bottle: Inventing Time

I have on my desk an artifact of wonderful contrivance. Though its outer skin is of flimsy cardboard standing over half a foot high, it is squarely based, making it nearly untippable on shelves. It is a deodorant product called ban-a box containing a bottle containing a liquid. But this simple division of the artifact into three components gives no idea of the complex relationships sustained between part and part, or within each part taken separately. Study, first, the bottle. It emerges from the box a tall and shapely miracle of ballast. Its most prominent feature, the revolving-ball applicator on top, is airy enough not to destabilize the three-and-one-half ounces of liquid in the bottle's pyramidal base. It looks like one of those skirted Egyptian statues with no waist to speak of-bulbous of headdress or hairstyle above, firm-footed below, pinched in the middle. The box, despite artfully cutout windows, gives little suggestion of this Nefertiti-like interior. On the contrary: the box suggests that the bottle is bulkier than, unclothed, it turns out to be. Still, one could argue that the box is almost suicidally candid. It not only confesses but proclaims how much of the interior is taken up by the applicator (leaving, obviously, less space for the stuff that is to be applied). The upper window space on the bottle is intruded on by a semicircle of cardboard-the lower half of a full yellow circle boldly marked off from the green and white product

The mechanisms of the physicochemical reactions in diorite used in the construction of ancient royal Egyptian statues

During the heights of ancient Egyptian civilization, statues of deities and pharaohs were often constructed of hard and colourful igneous rocks, such as granite and diorite. Most of these statues remain in an excellent state of preservation. However, others have unexpectedly fragmented, in some cases only a few years after having been excavated in near-perfect condition. In the present work it is shown that two interrelated physicochemical processes contribute to this degradation: (1) the infiltration of saline H2O and (2) subsequent alteration of the constituent minerals. Conclusions were reached on the basis of neutron activation and atomic absorption analyses of rock samples from two sites in Upper Egypt and leached soluble salts therefrom. These samples were identified as quartz diorites on the basis of petrographic and X-ray spectroscopic examination. The chemical significance of the geological nature of the stone is discussed. Possible precautions to be observed in the field are presented.