The first represents a Pharaoh, as is proved by the serpent that rises
above his forehead and the hawk’s head that terminates the dagger
passed through his belt. He is standing, and walking quickly, the head
erect on his shoulders, and slightly bent forward in the attitude of a
man who is looking attentively at the point towards which he is going;
the arms are not detached from the body, and hang down along the bust
and the thigh. The composition is excellent, highly finished in spite
of the hardness of the material, and the detail is rendered as freely
as on the colossi of the Theban Period.
The face has a particular character which struck Egyptologists long
since; it is short, wide at the height of the eyes, rounded at the
bottom. The eye is long, prominent, surmounted by strong curved
eyebrows, marked where they join on the forehead by two deep vertical
furrows. The nose is aquiline, short, thick at the end, flanked by
two nostrils the outside walls of which seem to be somewhat thin. The
mouth is widely opened and protrudes; full lips, short chin receding
a little under the shadow of the lips. On his return from his journey
in Egypt, M. de Rougé was struck by the resemblance of this statuette,
till then lying forgotten in the corner of a cupboard, with the
portraits of the Shepherd Kings discovered at Sân by Mariette. Dévéria
cleverly reproduced it in two plates in the _Revue archéologique_.[88]
He asserted what M. de Rougé had admitted as a mere hypothesis: that
it was the portrait of a Shepherd King, and that it belonged to the
disturbed period which immediately preceded the XVIIIth Dynasty. I
must confess that these conclusions do not appear to me to be sound.
The long list of Pharaohs includes many sovereigns whose faces present
characteristics very different from those usually attributed to the
Egyptian race, and yet who, all the same, were Egyptians born and bred.
Without entering into the discussion, I will content myself with saying
that several of those who reigned at periods relatively late, Taharqa
(XXVth Dynasty) or Hakori (XXIXth Dynasty) for example, bear a singular
likeness to the sovereign of our statuette in the structure and
expression of the face. I cannot be certain here that it is a question
of one of them, but the general composition reminds me of the style of
the Saïte Period more than of that of the Theban. Without asserting
anything, I am inclined to believe that our Pharaoh lived in the last
centuries of Egyptian independence.
[Illustration: GREEN BASALT STATUETTES OF THE SAÏTE PERIOD.
The Louvre.]
The second fragment is evidently Saïte; the somewhat harsh precision
of the modelling, the heaviness of the head-dress, the roundness
of shoulders and chest, sufficiently prove it. It is broken too high
up for us to determine if it belonged to a standing statue like the
Pharaoh, or a crouching figure like the third monument. It is a perfect
type of the middle-class Egyptian, developed in width rather than in
height.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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