and calf, conform to the æsthetics of the time; the foot and ankle
are particularized with the virtuosity of a craftsman skilled in all
the subtleties of his calling. So, now, returning to the statuette
of Mît-Rahineh, the technique of which shows it to proceed not from
a different school but from a different studio, we shall find a
difficulty in imagining that two sculptors would each have fallen
into so great an error, if they had not seen it themselves in their
model. Since their statues are microcephalous, Mycerinus must have been
microcephalous almost to deformity.
[Illustration: ALABASTER STATUE OF MYCERINUS.
Cairo Museum.]
The search among the beds of fragments of stone was continued. A few
weeks before it was finished, at the end of May, 1908, it produced
four groups in schist, the testimony of which fully confirmed that
of the alabaster statues. The disposition is the same, with very
slight divergences, which do not sensibly modify the aspect of the
pieces. Three persons stand side by side against a slab 17 to 23
inches high. Mycerinus is in the middle, his left foot advanced, the
waist-cloth fluted on the loins, and on his forehead the white cap of
the kingdom of Upper Egypt. He always has a goddess on his right, a
Hathor moulded in the sleeveless smock open on the chest, and on her
hair the short wig and the _coufieh_. On the top of this head-dress
she wears her two cow’s horns and the solar disk. In one of the groups
she is walking, her arms hanging down and her hands laid flat on her
thighs; in the second, she embraces him with her left arm and presses
against him; in the third she holds his right hand in her left. The
last of the figures is sometimes a woman, sometimes a man: the man, who
is shorter by a third than his companions, walks forward swinging his
arms; the two women are at rest, and one of them puts her right arm
round the king’s waist, in symmetry with the Hathor on the left. They
are geographical entities, nomes, and the standards on their heads tell
us their names: the two women personify the nomes of Sistrum and the
Dog, the man that of Oxyrrhinchus. The fragments of schist under which
they were buried assuredly belong to other groups now destroyed, but
how many of them were there in the beginning? The decorative theme of
which they formed part is one of which the intention is grasped at the
first glance, but if we needed a commentary to explain it, the brief
legends at the base would provide the material. They inform us, in
fact, that our Hathor is the lady of the Canton of the Sycomore, and
that the nome of the Dog, that of the Sistrum, that of Oxyrrhinchus,
bring the sovereign all the good things of their territory. Mycerinus,
in his quality of king of the Saîd and of the delta, had a right to
tribute during his life, and to offerings after his death from the
whole country, and on the other hand, Hathor, lady of the Sycomore, is
the patron of dead Osirians in the Memphian province where the palaces
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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