95 Statue of the courtier and priest Meryrahashtef, one of a group of three showing him at different ages. Sidmant, near Heracleopolis. Painted ebony. 0.58 m (1 ft 9 in.) high with base. 6th Dynasty.
‘Stride Perfected on Perfect Paths’: The Noble Offering Cult |
Can a man or woman be worshipped after the manner of a god? In pharaonic Egypt the answer was yes, if he or she attained duat – literally, the state of ‘Adoration’ (see p. 38). Though some men, such as Amenhotep, son of Hapu (see Chapter 4), or the governor Pepynakht, whom we will meet later, were revered as exceptional even in life, the exceptional is not the issue here (see pp. 252–53). Rather, the Osiris myth allows that anyone may follow the mortal king into duat. Among Osiris’ alternative names was Khentyimentu, meaning ‘he who is ahead of the westerners’: as the first to die he has gone to the sunset before us all to open the paths beyond death. Among the prayers for Ptahshepses we find ‘an offering Khentyimentu, lord of Abydos, gives – bread and beer at the new month, the half-month, and every festival every day for all time that he [the deceased] may stride perfected on perfect paths, which revered ones stride before the great god, the lord of burial’ (see pp. 74–77). Consequently, ‘Adoration’ of the dead requires an appropriate space (the tomb chapel), appropriate acts (recitations and offerings), and a community of priests or officiants (the surviving family). Out of this requirement were born three of the characteristic media discussed in Part 2, namely the tomb statue, the offering stela and decorated tomb walls (the last of which we will return to in Chapter 11).
95 Statue of the courtier and priest Meryrahashtef, one of a group of three showing him at different ages. Sidmant, near Heracleopolis. Painted ebony. 0.58 m (1 ft 9 in.) high with base. 6th Dynasty.
The statue of Meryrahashtef is most revealing: as a man of dignity and authority, wearing a fashionable wig and cosmetics, he hardly expected to be displayed naked [95]. Rather, his acacia-wood image was designed to be clothed in a manner that emulated a ritual for the gods entitled ‘the business of the chapel of adoration’. An officiant entered the chapel speaking prescribed recitations, before introducing a light and kissing the ground. He or she purified the area with incense, then poured out a small mound of earth (‘the Risen Earth’). The statue was placed on the mound and purified in turn with incense, unguents, water and natron (using vessels of prescribed shapes), wrapped in linen cloths of different styles, colours and sizes, then adorned with a collar. Lastly the statue was touched with various tools or sceptres and returned to its shrine or niche, after which the officiant withdrew from the chapel, brushing away any footprints [98]. The same purification was applied every day to the statue of every god or goddess in the principal shrine of every temple. Even the morning toilet of the king is presented as a version of the same ‘business’, and an analogous rite called ‘opening the mouth’ was used to consecrate every new statue and enable it to receive offerings [96].
96 Statue representing the spirit of king Hor, with inlaid eyes and traces of a gilded collar, standing in its wooden shrine. Dahshur. Wood. 1.7 m (5 ft 7 in.) high. 13th Dynasty.
Wooden tomb statues are relatively uncommon in the surviving record but stone images showing the official dressed and carrying symbols of authority are absolutely typical of non-royal tombs at every period. Usually they were enshrined in a rock-cut niche or a simple stone box, known as a serdab after a modern Egyptian word for a cellar. As was the case when representing kings, artists developed archetypes for representing officials early in history, then used them through three millennia with variations only in details of dress, hairstyles, specific placement of hands and so on. For example, the statue of Ankhwa, a carpenter and shipwright (perhaps of the boats of the gods’ festivals) during the 3rd Dynasty, has been carved unfussily out of a granite block to form a cubic chair, whose shape is that of the hieroglyph for ‘place’ or ‘position’ [97]. Accordingly Ankhwa occupies an official ‘position’. Working in hard stone, the sculptor keeps the details simple but clear: the neck is abbreviated but the face well modelled, as are the powerful legs. There is no clothing other than a kilt, but the definitive tool of his trade – an adze – is slung over his shoulder, and his wig’s crimped pleats testify to elegance and grooming beyond that of a jobbing tradesman. A hieroglyphic inscription states his specific identity. Thus, Ankhwa awaits the ‘requested offerings’ brought by his family or by priests during the gods’ festivals.
The point is that an Egyptian tomb is not just a burial place – first and foremost it is a chapel for the adoration of an immortal presence. The officials’ standard tomb has a form derived directly from that of the kings’ tombs, based on three elements: (i) a stone-built offering chapel, which adjoins or penetrates (ii) a tumulus – usually a mastaba but, from the New Kingdom, sometimes a pyramid – raised over (iii) a burial chamber. Alternatively the offering chapel and burial chamber may be cut out of the living rock of the desert hills, especially in those areas where the hills sweep close to the Nile. In either case, the undecorated burial chamber sits at the bottom of a steep shaft, often 4 metres (13 feet) or more below the tomb floor, its mouth covered with a dressed slab or discreetly out of sight. On the other hand, the offering chapel is a public area, often decorated throughout with colourful, traditional scenes. Inscriptions round the door ask passers-by (specifically officiants attending other chapels) to say a prayer on behalf of the deceased. The largest chapels have the standard elements of a temple – a straight axis leading through the gateway to a Sun-court, then to one or more hypostyle halls beyond, and finally the offering chapel. In the chapel there may be one or more niches with statues, stelae or false doors, as well as an altar marked for the offerings.
98 What purports to be an image of Ramose in his tomb chapel actually shows the purification of his offering-cult statue, dressed in linen with staff and sceptre, standing on a raised base. West Thebes. Limestone. 18th Dynasty.
99 Detail from an offering panel in the form of a niched wall from the tomb chapel of Metjen (cf. [43]). Saqqara. 4th Dynasty.
The tomb of Metjen, a royal-estate manager in the 4th Dynasty, may be the earliest extant example of this phenomenon, his tomb chapel having survived in sufficiently good condition to be removed from Saqqara and displayed in Berlin [99]. However, tombs of this kind developed no later than the 1st Dynasty in areas of royal patronage including Hieraconpolis, Giza and Saqqara, before spreading from the 5th Dynasty onwards to include the king’s whole domain (see Chapter 10). They are distinct from the ‘satellite burials’ round the earliest kings’ tombs insofar as they are not aspects of another edifice. Rather, each is a place of worship in its own right, whose location usually overlooks the route of a festival procession. (In fact, the word we translate as ‘cemetery’ or ‘necropolis’ is apparently the phrase ‘horizon where the god is carried’.) Hence Metjen’s statue [100] is not a memorial of the living person but a functional aspect of a cult, whose subject is the adoration of his immortal spirit.
100 Statue of Metjen, who rose from obscurity to become one of the king’s companions and a member of his elite boat-crew. Like most of the earliest hard-stone statues, this example has no back pillar. Saqqara. Granite. 47 cm (1 ft 6½ in.) high. 4th Dynasty.
The 5th Dynasty tomb of Rawer at Giza is one of the largest from any period in Egyptian history, royal or otherwise [101]. The entrance is through a Sun-court beside the causeway of Khafra’s pyramid, and an exceptional complex of dark passages, hypostyle halls, further Sun-courts and offering chapels extends more than 100 metres (328 feet) to his burial shaft. There are some twenty-five serdabs, several of which have multiple statues or slots for viewing, cut from different angles. Until this time serdabs completely enclosed the offering statues, which could be seen but not reached; like false doors, they marked the line between the living and the dead (see p. 75). However, from this time on serdabs could be entered and some of Rawer’s even incorporate steps. (Another innovation is the choice of limestone for his statues, the use of granite and other hard stones having become exceptional for non-royal statues by the 4th Dynasty.) The excavator, Selim Hassan, estimated that there were originally more than a hundred statues of Rawer in the tomb, at least two of which show him in triplicate and perhaps relate to the contemporary triads of kings (see pp. 58–60) [102, 103].
101 View of an open Sun-court in the offering complex of Rawer. The ramp leads to the shrine in which his biographical inscription appeared. Giza. 5th Dynasty.
A sequence of biographical inscriptions also punctuated his tomb, though only one is sufficiently well preserved to be legible. This is a limestone block originally set high in a wall behind a chapel door, and facing a life-size statue of Rawer. Unusually the approach to this particular chapel doubles back on the main axis, almost forming a separate chapel with its own Sun-court, hypostyle hall and serdab. The inscription on it goes to the heart of the relationship between king and official, with a remarkable show of affection. It begins, ‘The sovereign king Neferirkara made an appearance as sovereign on a day when the god’s prow-rope gets taken.’ In other words, the king has arrived in procession at a sacred site – perhaps his own pyramid – by boat and must disembark. Of course, stepping off a boat is among the most awkward manoeuvres faced by any man, divine or otherwise. ‘Consequently the priest Rawer was at the feet of his person in his eminence as priest in order to manage the robes, when the staff which was in the grasp of his person struck the foot of the priest Rawer. Whereupon his person said, “Are you all right?” ’ The crux of the incident was the king’s concern for Rawer, and the inscription adds, ‘So his person said, “O, beloved of my person, he is fine, one I have not hurt”.’ As a final note, the account of the incident ‘was written beside the king himself at the palace’s lake-pavilion’. However, though the king checked the inscription’s accuracy at his leisure, and the block was positioned so Rawer’s statue would face it in perpetuity, probably no other audience read this text until modern times.
Rawer’s inscription is one of many emphasizing that the king was an active figure moving through his realm, while officials constantly attended him or travelled about on his business. To express the wide-ranging authority of these men, early artists developed the archetype of the official as a writer, emphasizing how letters and documents keep them close to the king (and his literate culture), even when separated from him in space. The official in a celebrated statue in the Louvre – tentatively identified as a king’s brother named Kai – is seated with extended knees stretching his kilt tight to support the scroll he is unrolling from his left hand [104]. The specific pose, showing the scribe as though his right hand were holding a brush, is typical of the 4th and 5th Dynasties, though the same ‘writing’ pose is used in a statue of Amenhotep, son of Hapu [39], a millennium later, and in one of Harwa 600 years after that (see p. 245).
104 Statue of an official shown as a scribe. Painted limestone with eyes of inlaid rock crystal. Saqqara. 0.54 m (1 ft 9 in.) high. 4th or 5th Dynasty.
Of course, the adoration of ancestors and the artistic paraphernalia of the offering cult remained fundamental to pharaonic religious belief until its demise (see Chapter 15). Thus, more than 2,000 years after Kai’s passing, an inscription from a statue of Senusheri, an artist and engineer, describes him as ‘one skilled in writing, to whom understanding came quickly, of whom his lord thought much’ (see p. 66). Later still, from the town of Karanis thriving under Roman government, comes an anonymous, unfinished statue of an official, perhaps a priest to judge from his shaven head [105]. At first glance he still wears no more than a kilt, though the cursory line across his chest may evoke a toga or the leopard skin of a cult-priest. His hands, which in the 5th Dynasty might have held the suggestion of a staff or a brush, have become so stylized they only seem to hold something, but he is still seated on the official’s cubic seat or ‘position’ to receive offerings. So much remains the same, it may be hard for us to fathom that the Karanis statue belongs far nearer in time to the reader of this book than to Ankhwa or Metjen.
105 Statue of an anonymous priest with prominent ears, from the vicinity of the temple of Pnepheros and Petesouchos. Basalt. 1st century AD.
Portraiture and the self
In a culture predisposed to celebrity, a modern reader may casually assume that any portrait is an attempt to record a physical identity forever or even conjure an imperishable form – ‘self-preservation’, to use one Egyptologist’s phrase. Is this a straightforward assumption? After all, who are you really? What do you really look like? Ancient Egyptian texts rarely use the word ‘to be’ meaning ‘exist’ (as in ‘to be or not to be – that is the question’), preferring the word ‘becomings’ (kheperu) in the sense that moments are constantly happening. This seems counter-intuitive because, in some sense, surely I am me, and you are you, from one moment to the next. However, look through photographs of yourself aged one, five, ten, twenty … thirty … sixty … and ask yourself what is there at every moment. Then ask which of your ideas, beliefs, values and expectations have remained constant. There are bound to be resemblances of course, but resemblances to what? Something permanent? In what sense are you a constant being, not a sequence of connected ‘becomings’, each of which immediately passes away? (To be sure, even a football season or a long, hot summer has its own biography.) More to the point, which moments or resemblances are ‘the real you’? As ever, in ancient Egyptian art what matters is not the ‘you’ apparent to the eye at any one specific moment. In this sense, a sculpture of ‘you’ is an artistic exercise every bit as abstract as sculpting the gods.
On the other hand, in ancient Egyptian funerary texts the verb ‘to be’ (wenen) is often used (see p. 277). In other words, in death we do ‘exist’. More than that, the dead are typically said to ‘exist perfected’; that is, in death we may become who we are meant to be or should be. As the philosopher Ptahhatp notes, ‘the wise man is the one who nurtures his soul by realizing on earth the perfection within him’. The Egyptian phrase ‘he who is and perfect’ (wenen nefer) happens to be another name of Osiris. So just as the shifting mortal frame becomes the true self only in death, following the lead of Osiris / Khentyimentu / Wenennefer, so too the archetype (the statue) represents the individual not in life but during the rituals of ‘Adoration’ and the mortuary offering cult. Much is made in Egyptology of the ‘ideal’ in art, which is to say that people may be shown ever young, ever beautiful, free from blemish or deformity, and so on. However, it is important to recognize that this is not the ‘perfection’ Ptahhatp is talking about. Today we may judge a photographic model or a film star against a phantasmic ‘ideal’ of beauty and even judge our own looks against an ‘ideal’ of youth, but Ptahhatp is talking about the relationship between any apple seed – and they all look more or less the same – and the mature, magnificent tree it may become to ‘exist perfected’.
107 Statue of the ‘overseer of all the king’s works’ Hemiunu. Giza. Painted limestone. 1.55 m (5 ft 1 in.) high. 4th Dynasty.
108 Dyad of the courtiers Memi and Sabu. Giza. Painted limestone. 0.62 m (2 ft ½ in.) high. 4th Dynasty.
For example, Hemiunu, cousin or nephew of king Khufu, has been identified as the overseer of the project to construct the Great Pyramid. Certainly he was one of the most dignified people of his day, but in his tomb statue it is impossible to ignore the pendulous breasts of a corpulent, older man – nor those appearing centuries later on the statue from Karanis [105, 106, 107]. Hemiunu’s rolls of abdominal flab and flaccid belly are as intrusive as Kai’s [104]. Seemingly the grandest folk of Old Kingdom Egypt, in the hands of the most accomplished artists, have statues that highlight the morbidity of flesh because physical decay may be the sign of maturity and increasing wisdom. Ptahhatp prefaces his great philosophical teaching with a moving description of his own extreme old age, lamenting that ‘what age does to people is unpleasant in every way’. Far from eternal youth, this is the radical opposite – spiritual growth. Of course, a statue is a physical object because it cannot be otherwise, but sculpture in a tomb chapel illustrates the authority of the spirit. Hence these statues defy modern expectations of physical perfection and ‘self-preservation’, which may demand cosmetic surgery and denial of mortality. But then what do we know of the meaning of life, if our only purpose is just to stay alive?
109 Anonymous ‘reserve head’ with its ears knocked off and a rough groove cut from the crown through the back of the head. Giza. Limestone. 30 cm (1 ft) high. 4th Dynasty.
Moreover, if we are moved to tears by something profound in art (or music or sport), we do not feel tied to that moment forever: rather we are moved by the momentary sense of something eternal – the sense of what ‘really means something’. Although ancient Egyptian officials did not rally to a flag or anthem, they rallied to their spiritual king, the ‘lord of Truth’. Ptahhatp had the following instruction for any official invited to the palace: ‘If you get to the Audience-hall, stand and sit at every step. The first day has been ordered for you. … The Audience-hall is set at the standard, all its conduct measured from plumb.’ In the presence of the king, Ptahhatp is saying, we see not what is (now) but what has always been – the standard against which the framework of the present state of affairs may be measured. In the statue of Memi and Sabu [108], a sculptor – albeit one less accomplished than the sculptor available to Hemiunu – has devised contortions to make their embrace visible from the front. Memi’s left arm reaches crudely over the shrunken Sabu, though typically their embrace need only be suggested – as it is where Sabu’s hand presses against Memi’s waist – or simply lost from sight at the back of the sculpture. Consequently their embrace is the most obvious feature of the statue, so what does this all-important gesture mean? A couple first in love may insist they will never be parted, while an old married couple might have grown accustomed to one another’s face; but these are only episodes, and Memi and Sabu are shown neither ardent nor aged. However, love itself – another spiritual virtue – is the relationship most often specified in the inscriptions of the temples and tombs. So to return to the start of the chapter, Memi and Sabu are not shown falling in love, nor getting married, nor together in the autumn of their years (this is not photography). Rather the statue is a function of the offering cult in which the two together are the subject of ‘Adoration’. If their statue refers to anything, it talks about who they are perfected in death and what ‘really means something’, not what they once were when alive. Who could extrapolate how they look now on the basis of their mortal forms, any more than we could extrapolate the form of the apple tree from the individual pip?
110 Undamaged ‘reserve head’ from the same tomb as [109]. Consequently this head has been described as the latter’s ‘wife’, though there was only a single burial in the tomb and no specific indication that this head even represents a woman. An alternative suggestion is that one or other of the heads was displaced from another tomb by robbers. Giza. Painted limestone. 30 cm (1 ft) high. 4th Dynasty.
111 King Tutankhamun shown emerging from a lotus flower. The artwork, whose purpose in his tomb is unknown, may evoke both an act of purification and the god Nefertem, associated with the moment of creation. His youthful appearance is consistent with such iconography and not necessarily, as has been claimed, with a portrait taken from childhood. West Thebes. Plastered and painted wood. 31 cm (1 ft) high. 18th Dynasty.
For the purpose of drafting such statues a simple canon of proportion may be sufficient to generate a standard human figure so, in fact, the only possibilities for personalizing or individualizing the figures may be the faces and the ubiquitous hieroglyphic inscriptions. There is obvious artistic utility in making Memi and Sabu’s faces different, and an obvious basis for doing so would be their respective appearances in life, at least if these were known to the artist. Of course, there might well have been times when artists ‘went through the motions’, adding a generic face to an archetypical body, though the cult statue would still be as useful. On the other hand, there are instances when actual portraiture seems the likeliest explanation including, of course, images of kings, which, we may assume, are the work of the finest artists adhering to some official model of the royal face (see p. 221). Other instances also tend to involve the highest strata of society, including the enigmatic ‘reserve heads’ (a modern designation) found among the tombs of the royal family in the Old Kingdom cemeteries [109, 110]. The enigma is precisely that they are only heads, shown with close-cropped hair or skullcaps and no body. Each has been modelled – from the same brilliant white limestone used to case the Giza pyramids – so precisely that George Reisner, who found most of the known examples, claimed he could identify family relationships among the subjects. Typically the heads have distinctive deep-cut eyes and nostrils, though even more characteristically the ears are often chipped away or carefully chiselled off, and at least half have grooves gouged more or less crudely down the back. All the known ‘reserve heads’ were found in obviously disturbed contexts or in the subterranean burial – in some instances on the floor beside the coffin – but never in a tomb chapel, so they were not the subjects of offerings like the statues discussed earlier. Indeed, any conclusions about portraiture drawn from ‘reserve heads’ must be qualified by the fact that their original use is entirely unknown. They are an exceptional phenomenon: only thirty-one have ever been discovered, all dating to the end of the 4th Dynasty. More than half come from a single cemetery at Giza, the rest from the immediate vicinity. Undoubtedly the actual faces of these royal individuals were relevant for some unknown purpose but there is no indication the sculptures had an intended audience following the interment – any more than, say, the astonishing mask of king Tutankhamun (c. 1332–c. 1323 BC) (see pp. 212–15).
Analogous examples of isolated human heads modelled above the miniature scale are likewise hard to come by. A wooden model of Tutankhamun’s head emerging out of a lotus [111] may be an artistic interpretation of a purification ritual, and as such offer a clue to interpreting the use of ‘reserve heads’. However, Tutankhamun is so far removed in time from the 4th Dynasty that the examples seem disconnected, or at best tenuously connected by some unsubstantiated factor. Other apparent analogies are the so-called ‘ancestor busts’ (another modern designation) known from the 18th and 19th Dynasties. These derive from slightly less elevated social circumstances than ‘reserve heads’, and most are no more than 25 centimetres (10 inches) tall, though a handful are near life-size. Formally ‘ancestor busts’ are individual heads modelled on top of a shapeless, vaguely anthropoid base, the latter occasionally decorated with a collar or a lotus flower. Each has a distinct face, but none is modelled so clearly and attractively as the ‘reserve heads’. Are their less specific faces the product of less able artists or a different intention? A handful of offering scenes show these ‘busts’ as the subject of a purification ritual, though several examples were found in houses and others might have come from temples rather than tombs. So they may have some uncertain association with the offering cult but, other than their form, they have no obvious connection to the much more ancient ‘reserve heads’. Moreover, ‘ancestor busts’ are a specific phenomenon: no more than 150 are known, half of them from the village at Deir el-Medina and, according to one interpretation, they represent only women. Are they intended as portraits? In fact some scholars suggest they are intentionally generic, intended for use when offering to any ancestor.
A great deal of ink was spilled during the 19th and 20th centuries regarding the first appearance of ‘portraiture’, ‘naturalism’ and ‘the individual’ in the art of the * (here insert your own preferred choice of Old Kingdom / Middle Kingdom / Amarna Period / Late Period / Greco-Roman Period). None the less, such discussions usually overlooked the fact that in pharaonic belief the true self – the real subject of the offering cult – is spiritual, not physical. Moreover, in discussing specific differences from one sculpted face to another, without careful study we can rarely be sure how far they are affected by matters such as the choice of material, or the work of a single workshop, or an artist of exceptional skill (or the reverse). In truth, even the specific lighting of a museum display or an influential photograph of a single statue may become part of telling the story of an artwork. Sad to say, on more than one occasion heads have been deliberately removed from statues in modern times, partly because they are then easier to transport but also because pharaonic torsos tend to make them look less modern – too ‘ancient Egyptian’ – and the modern eye can more easily see whichever ‘face’ it wishes to see without such inconvenience (see p. 288). After all, perhaps nothing is more credulous than the eye of the beholder.
113 Statue of the high priest Setkai. Abu Roash. Granite statue with painted limestone base. 30 cm (1 ft) high (without base). 4th Dynasty.
114 ‘Block statue’ of Senwosretsenebefni, shown as though with knees drawn up to create rectangular planes for inscription and a background to display the image of his wife. The composition may perhaps merge the image of the official with his seat of office (cf. [107]), or the disproportionately large head may emerge in analogous fashion to [111]. Unknown provenance. Quartzite. 0.68 m (2 ft 3 in.) high. 12th Dynasty.
Offering stelae
Returning to the functional character of a tomb statue, Idu’s false door [112] is a useful visual summary of the funerary context: the blatant request for offerings; the physical form of the offering shrine enclosing the image of the deceased; and the inscriptions, which specify the identity of the deceased and restate the required offerings. From the 5th Dynasty on, such inscriptions may develop into a specific biography, such as those of Ptahshepses or Rawer, but detailed accounts are few and far between at any era. Instead, most tomb inscriptions also adopt the ‘archetypal’ character of the statues. At the heart of the offering cult are the crucial relationships between the king and the tomb-owner, and the tomb-owner and his son or daughter, which expresses the integrity of the family and seeks to ensure the transmission of values across the generations, so these are the principal subjects of most inscriptions. The setting of the statue of Setkai, son of the 4th Dynasty king Radjedef, epitomizes the conjunction of the statue, inscription and offering slab [113]. The composition has been individualized only by stating his name and the offices he held in service of the king. Together these constitute his ‘spirit’ (ka) – the face of service he turned towards the world, embodied in the archetypes of the statue and inscription (see pp. 74–77). This archetypal aspect contrasts with his ‘soul’ (ba), the sense of self known only to Setkai and his Creator, which is rarely talked about in art and even then shown with wings, as though free of the earth.
115 Offering stela for the chamberlain Amenemhat. Unknown provenance. Painted limestone. 0.56 m (1 ft 10 in.) wide. 12th Dynasty.
116 Offering stela for the king’s daughter Nefertiabet, who makes a gesture of greeting, wearing a ‘dress’ incorporating or suggesting a feline pelt. Giza. Painted limestone. 0.52 m (1 ft 8½ in.) wide. 4th Dynasty.
The monuments of Idu and Setkai are suitably elaborate for the highest officials, but simpler forms were developed. For example, the inscriptions may appear on the statue itself. Before the end of the Old Kingdom, forms showing the deceased wrapped in a heavy cloak [126] or with the knees pulled under the chin (‘block statue’) become increasingly common, offering simple sculptural forms as well as large areas for inscribing [114]. Of course, once these new forms were established as archetypes themselves, they could be developed in more or less elaborate ways or used in specific contexts. The most straightforward reduction in the paraphernalia of the tomb chapel is the offering stela, where effectively the statue, offering slab and inscriptions are combined into a single two-dimensional relief [115]. Such stelae may stand as the centrepiece of an elaborate decorative scheme, as the lone decorated element in a humbler chapel, or occasionally be used to cover the mouth of a tomb shaft. The standard elements of the offering stela form a balanced composition, showing the tomb-owner seated to receive offerings presented in front of him, while the offerings are both illustrated and stated as hieroglyphs. For the offering scene of Nefertiabet, the statement of offerings is clearly itemized pictorially and linguistically [116]. She herself was the daughter of an unidentified 4th Dynasty king and is shown wearing the leopard skin of a cult-priest, so her stela is one of the earliest statements of the authority of a woman in her own right. The quality of the relief work is exquisite; an offering stela may be economical in form, yet of the highest-quality craftsmanship.
In fact, two-dimensional decoration was a feature of the finest decoration in tomb chapels from earliest history. The painted ‘Tomb 100’ at Hieraconpolis was discussed in Chapter 6 and relief work also appears in the earliest surviving tomb chapels, including that of Metjen. The beautiful wooden panels from the chapel of Hezyra [117] have become emblematic of the pyramid age and the artist has simply adapted the form of a tomb statue into two dimensions, following the usual principles for representing a two-dimensional human figure (see Chapter 7). The staff and sceptres in Hezyra’s hands clearly illustrate what is apparently grasped by a three-dimensional statue, which typically strides forward as though to balance its staff, though the actual staff and sceptre have been reduced to a mere ‘nub’ grasped in the hands [95, 96, 105, 107]. Likewise, the priest Ty’s stela simply elaborates in painted low relief the two basic forms of tomb statues. In two dimensions, the cubic seat is more obviously a chair, and once again the standing figure is clearly holding a staff and sceptre. In a sense both images signify earthly authority but in a more authentic sense they are the functional equivalents of statues in a chapel.
117 One of a group of wooden panels, each placed in one of eleven separate niches (cf. [43]) along a wall of the tomb chapel of the high priest and high official Hezyra. Saqqara. Wood, probably acacia. 1.14 m (3 ft 8 in.) high. 3rd Dynasty.
As an artistic medium the offering stela potentially makes the paraphernalia of the offering cult accessible beyond the confines of the royal family, and the growth of the cult through many centuries is part of our topic in the next chapter. In our own culture, where sacrifice and loyalty are liable to be explained as reproductive strategies, it may seem suspect to read about lives devoted to the service of a spiritual leader. Cynical minds may assume slavery or, worse still, servile submission on the part of the ‘ruled’ – though we may wonder what even a pharaonic farmer would make of the lifelong indebtedness, indentured employment and civil supervision that characterize ordinary life in the modern world. We should also recall that the tombs of officials emulate those of kings, which are likewise decorated using archetypes essentially devoid of specific personal information. Above all, tomb chapels are not records of the living but places of worship, where gifts of love and adoration are gathered in by the spirits. As the tomb inscription of Ineni, the overseer of works, tells us, ‘may you make the perfection that I have made, may you make the same’.
Masterpiece
Bust of the vizier Ankhhaf
118 ‘Bust’ of the vizier Ankhhaf (cf. [112]). Giza. Plastered and painted limestone. 0.51 m (1 ft 8 in.) high. 4th Dynasty.
Ankhhaf was a vizier for Khafra, and probably the person responsible for overseeing the creation of the Great Sphinx. His celebrated limestone ‘bust’ from Giza is the most accomplished and affecting example of sculpture illustrating the morbidity of flesh. The pronounced bone structure of his face contrasts with the flaccidity round his eyes and cheeks, or the lines round his nose and lips, to create a harsh account of ageing as well as a poignantly credible human face. As an isolated upper torso, the sculpture seems unique in ancient Egyptian art, though we may be inclined to compare it with the contemporary ‘reserve heads’. However, Ankhhaf’s statue, unlike any of the ‘reserve heads’, is from his tomb chapel. The flattened head may be designed to wear a wig or headdress, so perhaps the bust was made to be dressed after the manner of Meryrahashtef’s wooden statue. However, plastered and painted stone may well be too delicate a vehicle for such activity. More likely, perhaps, the ‘bust’ was originally provided with separate arms and posed on an offering altar, like the image of Idu [112].
