There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.1
E. H. Gombrich (1950)
The European Renaissance introduced the West to the idea of the artist as an individual. Our sculptors and painters are respected because they have the mysterious, God-given ability to create ‘Art’: a word that, while often spoken in hushed tones, somehow manages to convey a capital ‘A’. They are independent beings, free to design and sell their work as they see fit, and, although their work may be commissioned by patrons who make explicit demands on their skills, that work remains a part of the artist’s catalogue.2
Under totalitarian regimes, where art is considered a necessary part of the official propaganda machine, there is likely to be far less freedom of expression. Nevertheless, personal skill may still be appreciated, and an individual artist may be celebrated for his or her works. Dynastic Egypt may be classed as a totalitarian regime. Here, the most talented sculptors were employed by kings and temples. They were expected to work to predetermined rules, and their completed works would be placed in specific locations to fulfil particular functions. It is this official art, primarily that carved in stone to ornament stone buildings, that has survived in the archaeological record and which, stripped from its original context and purpose, now decorates the sculpture halls of our Western museums and galleries. It does not take a great deal of imagination to see these galleries as the modern equivalent of the ancient palaces and temples they so often resemble, and the visitors who fill those galleries as a self-selecting elite who come to admire if not to worship. Thus, it can be argued that, 2,000 years after the end of the dynastic age, Egyptian sculpture has simply transferred from one sacred context to another.3
This very practical approach to the creating of official art explains why, although many royal statues were inscribed, none of the inscriptions included the name of the sculptor. Skill was appreciated, sought out and rewarded, but individuality was not a desirable attribute in a royal artist, and the name of the sculptor did not add the premium that it might in today’s commercial art world. As we saw when we considered Amenhotep’s 730 near-matching Sekhmet statues, a royal or divine statue would be equally effective, and so equally valuable, whether it was made by an apprentice, a master craftsmen or, as seems most likely, a team of specialist workers and trainees. The only important name was the name of the subject or the patron who commissioned the work; in the case of royal statues, these were usually one and the same.
The Egyptians had no word corresponding to our word ‘art’, although there was a word, hemet, used to denote skill or craft, and from this word came the noun hemuw, meaning ‘expert’ or ‘craftsman’. At Memphis, the high priest of Ptah bore the simple title wer kherep hemut, or ‘master craftsman’. This lack of a specific word, combined with the fact that all official Egyptian art had a function beyond the aesthetic, has led some Egyptologists to make the deliberately provocative statement that there is ‘no such thing as “Egyptian art”’,4 suggesting that Thutmose and his colleagues should perhaps be reclassified as artisans or craftsmen, as presumably should all European pre-Renaissance sculptors and painters, and many other artists from many other cultures too. This makes an interesting semantic argument, but it is unlikely that Thutmose would care overmuch how he was categorised by theorists living in a very different world from his own. He did the work that was required of him and he and his patrons understood its true value. ‘Art’ is in any case notoriously incapable of a rigid definition as its meaning varies both from community to community and within the same community through time, while the border between arts and crafts is always a fluid one. We are comfortable with the idea that sculpture and painting can be classified as art, or even ‘fine art’. But are we to classify Egypt’s beautiful jewellery, exquisitely embroidered robes and colourful decorated tiles as art, or craft? And, more importantly, how did their creators classify them?
The image of Thutmose the solitary genius, working alone in his studio to carve an image of his beautiful queen, is a seductive one. However, the evidence from his workshop – an industrial unit rather than a studio – shows that it is entirely wrong. Thutmose, ‘chief of works’, was an accomplished administrator who owned, or at least managed, a thriving business. He was an important link in a complex and expensive chain of transactions that started with stone blocks being cut in the quarry and ended with a finished product being delivered to the Main City. Did he also sculpt? Did he add a few final touches to the work done by his apprentices? Or did he simply manage the workshop? This is not clear, but we can perhaps get a better sense of Thutmose’s duties if we look at the evidence provided by his fellow Amarna sculptor Iuty, ‘chief sculptor of the King’s Great Wife Tiy’.
Iuty is featured with an unexpected prominence on the wall of Huya’s Amarna tomb.5 Huya is Iuty’s boss, and so we are left with the intriguing possibility that Iuty himself created this scene; this would certainly explain why he is so clearly labelled. By immortalising himself in Huya’s robust tomb, Iuty would have accrued many of the benefits of the tomb owner. His labelled image might even have been his personal route to a satisfactory afterlife. We see Iuty as he sits on a low stool in a columned hall, dressed in a pleated kilt and wig. He is bending forward to put the finishing touches to the face of a statue of Princess Baketaten, Tiy’s youngest daughter. In his left hand Iuty holds an artist’s palette, in his right a paintbrush. It is not clear whether the statue that he is working on is wooden or stone. Behind the statue stands a smaller – and therefore less important – anonymous workman, who bows slightly as he watches Iuty at work. The figure who once stood behind Iuty is now missing, but two small-scale workmen can be seen sitting on stools; one is carving a wooden chair leg and the other is using a chisel to work on what seems to be a small stone head. In a distant part of the room other seated craftsmen work on a wooden box and stone vessels.
The Overseer of Sculptors, Iuty, completing a statue of Princess Baketaten in his workshop. After Davies 1905, vol. III, Plate XVIII
What, exactly, is Iuty doing? Here we must turn to the Egyptian language for guidance. The Egyptians employed two words which we routinely translate as ‘sculptor’; as far as we can tell, these words were used interchangeably but, as we are chronologically and culturally far removed from ancient Egypt, it may be that we are failing to pick up on subtle differences in meaning. The first word, gnwt, carried no additional connotation. The second word, s’ankh, is the word used on Thutmose’s horse blinker; it translates as ‘the one who makes alive’. This reflects a crucial aspect of the Egyptian sculptor’s role. Sculptors, like gods, were creators. By releasing a shape from an amorphous stone block, they created a latent form capable of life. Performance of the correct rituals could then convert that form into a functioning entity which could, if necessary, serve as a substitute body capable of housing the soul of its subject. Akhenaten’s many statues were not only decorative but also an insurance policy. If his planned afterlife failed his stone bodies might, in extremis, serve as a home for his ka, or soul. Under a more orthodox regime, statues might also house the gods.
Iuty is painting Baketaten’s face. His touching of the eyes, ears, nose and mouth with his brush is reminiscent of the ‘opening-of-the-mouth ceremony’; a ritual said to have been devised by the creator god Ptah to convert mummies, statues and two-dimensional images into latent beings with a potential for life. By the Eighteenth Dynasty this was one of the most important parts of the funerary ritual, invariably performed at the entrance to the tomb. The mummy was propped upright as the sem-priest touched it with a series of sacred objects including a flint knife similar to that used to cut the umbilical cord at birth, an adze and the leg of an ox. Meanwhile, the lector-priest recited the spells that would reanimate the mummy, making it ready for the life to come. Is the application of the final layer of paint in the sculptor’s workshop, or perhaps in the temple, the way that a s’ankh added the potential for life to an already complete stone sculpture?
We can learn more about the religious aspect of the sculptor’s role by examining a slightly later piece; an inscribed stela belonging to the late Eighteenth or early Nineteenth Dynasty, ‘chief sculptor of the Lord of the Two Lands, Hatiay, son of the chief sculptor Ya’.6 Whether this Hatiay and the overseer of works Hatiay, whom we met as he supervised the evacuation of Amarna, are the same man is not clear, but they would have been contemporaries, and their titles are not mutually exclusive. Chief sculptor Hatiay modestly, and almost certainly misleadingly, given that he admits to being the son of a chief sculptor, tells us that he came from a humble background, yet he was allowed privileged access to the king, whom he saw ‘in his form of Re in the seclusion of his palace’. Furthermore:
He [the king] appointed me to direct the works when I was only a youngster, for he had found that I was someone he could count on. I was initiated into the House of Gold in order to fashion the cult statues and the sacred images of all the gods, without any of them being hidden from me. I was a master of secrets.7
Here we have a sculptor who has not been trained as a priest, yet who is allowed to enter the ‘House of Gold’, a restricted workshop within the temple where statues were created. Did Hatiay bring life to the temple statues in the House of Gold? How did he do this? Using spells, or paint, or both? As we have already seen, at Amarna the ‘cult statues and sacred images of all the gods’ that would be found in most state temples were replaced by multiple images of the king and his family. Did the age-old rituals continue to be performed on the Amarna royal statues, perhaps by Thutmose himself?
Their ability to both create and animate linked Hatiay, Iuty, Thutmose and all of Egypt’s sculptors to Ptah, patron deity of all masons, builders and sculptors. Ptah’s theology tell us that he had the ability to create life using his heart; as the heart was believed to be the centre of thought, this means that he planned and crafted his creations just as Thutmose may have planned his sculptures. First Ptah created the gods, then he created their shrines. Then: ‘He made their bodies according to their wishes. Thus the gods entered into their bodies, of every wood, every stone, every clay … Thus were gathered to him all the gods and their souls.’8
Ptah, of course, like Osiris, belonged to the traditional pantheon and so was not openly celebrated at Amarna. Nevertheless, a direct connection with the divine might explain Thutmose’s ownership of a chariot. The artist who had the power to release a royal image from a block of stone was likely to enjoy an unusually close bond with his patron, and might well be the recipient of generous gifts.
This link to the divine provides a second good reason why Egypt’s royal sculptors never signed their work. To add a non-royal name to a royal sculpture would have forged a permanent and unacceptable bond between the sculptor, his royal subject and his creation. As names, like images, could serve as a home for the soul, the addition of his name might have allowed the sculptor to share a part of the royal afterlife. That would have been unthinkable. We know of just one example where a commoner dared to add his name to a royal creation. Earlier in the Eighteenth Dynasty, the courtier Senenmut had carved over sixty small representations of himself within King Hatshepsut’s Deir el-Bahri mortuary temple. These images were added to walls that would usually be covered by the open doors of shrines and statue niches, so that they would have been completely hidden during the performance of the temple rituals. However, it is hard to imagine that such a blatant breach of etiquette would have gone unnoticed and unreported, and while it is possible that Hatshepsut approved of her favourite’s attempts to associate himself with her cult for all eternity, it is equally possible that this bold move contributed towards his downfall.9 Away from the court the situation was different, and the less exalted craftsmen who created statuettes and carved stelae to sell to their non-royal neighbours saw nothing wrong in adding their own name to the inscription so that they might benefit from any blessing accruing to the owner.
It is not surprising that we know few of Akhenaten’s sculptors by name. Thutmose is known because of an accidentally preserved inscription on a horse blinker. Iuty is known because he features in the Amarna tomb of Huya. Hatiay is known because he inscribed his autobiography on a stela. A second stela – this time a form of elite graffiti rather than an authorised memorial – carved in a granite quarry in the southern border-town of Aswan, introduces us to two more:
Giving adoration to the Lord of the Two Lands and kissing the ground to Waenre [Akhenaten] by the overseer of works projects in the Red Mountain, a disciple whom his majesty [Akhenaten] himself instructed, chief of sculptors in the big and important monuments of the king in the House of Aten, in Akhet-Aten, Bak, the son of the chief of sculptors Men, and born of the housewife Ry of Heliopolis.10
Here we have a father and son, Men and Bak, who worked for a father and son, Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. The carved scene shows the two sculptors standing before their respective kings. On the right Men stands, arms raised, before a table laden with ‘every good and pure thing, consisting of bread, beer, long-horned oxen [short horned cattle], fowl, and all sorts of fine vegetables’. He is offering this feast to a huge seated statue of Amenhotep III and, in so doing, raises the possibility that he was personally involved in the production of the colossi that sat outside Amenhotep’s mortuary temple. Amenhotep’s statue appears entirely conventional in design, and the stone king is both impassive and impressive.
Men must have been a busy man. Amenhotep’s unusually long and phenomenally wealthy reign allowed him to commission art and architecture on an almost unimaginable scale, and the numbers are startling. We have already considered his 730 Sekhmet statues. We must add to these many hundreds of monumental stone statues showing Amenhotep as a king or a god, with more than forty-five of these being built at a colossal – above life-sized – scale. We have no idea how many stone statues have been lost, destroyed or renamed, and no idea how many statues were created from the less durable wood or metal, but the total number of statues is likely to be considerably above a thousand. As a result, we have more life-sized and above life-sized statues of Amenhotep than of any other pharaoh.
To the left of their shared stela, Bak also stands, arms raised, before a loaded offering table. Opposite him stands his king, Akhenaten, his arms lifted in praise of the Aten, who shines down on the king (but not on the sculptor) from above. Akhenaten’s image has been vandalised, but we can see that, in contrast to his father, he does not present the appearance of a conventional, or even an impressive king. His body is softer and more feminine than Amenhotep’s, with heavy thighs and a rounded stomach. In the accompanying inscription, Bak tells us that he not only worked for Akhenaten but also was taught by him.
A quartzite naos, or sculpted stela, offers a second view of Bak.11 Here he stands next to his wife, Tahere, with both facing forward to look straight at the viewer. Tahere embraces her husband with her left arm. She wears a long wig and a simple, tight-fitting sheath dress that outlines her body. But the eye is drawn to Bak, whose elaborately pleated garment does nothing to detract from his unusually prominent, almost pregnant-looking stomach and heavy breasts. It was not unusual for elderly men to be depicted with rolls of fat – only the very successful could afford a lifestyle that would allow them to put on weight, and such success deserved to be celebrated – but this is unusually exaggerated. Again, the accompanying text emphasises the fact that Bak was a pupil or disciple of his king. This may, of course, be simple flattery. It seems to have been impossible to overpraise any pharaoh; subtlety was simply not appreciated at the Egyptian court. Akhenaten was particularly keen to be acknowledged as a teacher or leader, and so we find even the highly experienced courtier Tutu diplomatically acknowledging his king as his mentor on his Amarna tomb wall: ‘For every day he rises early to instruct me inasmuch as I execute his teaching, and no instance of any wickedness of mine can be found … the teaching of the Lord of the Two Lands.’12
But Bak’s words may also be read as an explanation, and maybe even an apology. For Bak, who has been taught by his master-sculptor father, and who knows full well what a proper Egyptian king should look like, has started to create a very different style of art on the orders of his king.
From the very start of the dynastic age it had been accepted that the king of Egypt should be depicted with appropriate decorum. He should be the dominant human in any scene; he should be shown with a calm face and a physically perfect body; he should wear specific clothes and accessories (including crowns and head-cloths), carry a range of diagnostic regalia (including the false beard, and the crook and flail), and perform a recognised range of actions designed to emphasise his role as the upholder of maat; he should stand, sit or kneel.
Sometimes the king’s pose would carry an immediate message. We have already encountered the ‘smiting scene’, a popular two-dimensional motif for exterior temple walls during the New Kingdom. More subtle was the image of the seated king which could be read as a rebus with the throne, or set, representing the goddess Isis (whose name literally means ‘throne’), and the king representing her son Horus, the divine representative of all of Egypt’s living kings. In a similar way, a standing statue with the legs close together allowed the king to mimic Osiris, the mummified god who represented all of Egypt’s dead kings. That Egypt’s kings used their art as a means of promoting differing versions of themselves should come as no surprise; we see a similar situation if we look at our own royalty, whose official art shows them wearing specific clothes and accessories (crowns, awards and uniforms), carrying diagnostic regalia (the orb and sceptre, for example), and performing a recognised range of actions designed to emphasise chosen aspects of their role. Today’s official images tend to be films and photographs rather than paintings or sculptures, and they are therefore accurate representations of people whom most of their subjects would recognise. But a glimpse at Britain’s coins, banknotes and postage stamps confirms that a royal image can be instantly recognisable without being an exact likeness.
In ancient Egypt, the conventional representation of the monarch served as a stone hieroglyph, to be read as the non gender-specific word ‘king’. Such was the power of the word that the image would reinforce its own message, transforming into the fearless upholder of maat every king who chose to be depicted as such. Few would ever see their king and few could read his name, but the city-dwellers at least would see multiple images, which would serve as confirmation that their king was the continuation of all who had gone before. So entrenched was the belief that there was only one way to represent a king, that the female pharaoh Hatshepsut had herself depicted in formal art with the traditional (male) king’s body and accessories. The intention was not to deceive anyone into thinking that she was a man. Rather, she wished to show her people and her gods that she was a proper king. Similarly, the Twentieth Dynasty king Siptah, a young man whose well-preserved mummy confirms that he had a twisted leg and foot, was depicted with two conventionally straight legs.13 Again, the aim was not to deceive, or to hide the fact that Siptah was different, but to show that Siptah was the correct king of Egypt in every sense of the word. We don’t have to look too hard to find other examples where the conventional image takes precedence over reality: elderly kings who appear eternally young; young kings who appear wise beyond their years; male kings whose buck-teeth and smallpox scars go unrecorded; a female king whose uncomfortable mixture of women’s and royal clothing was surely not worn on a daily basis.14
The Egyptians used the word tut, which translates as ‘likeness’, or even ‘perfect likeness’, to describe their statues, relief sculpture and paintings.15 This word was followed by a determinative (a sign indicating the meaning of the word) that took the form of either a statue or a mummy, reminding us that statues could substitute for mummies, with both functioning as likenesses of the subject. Following the opening-of-the-mouth ceremony, both the image and the mummy became a tut ankh, or a living image. So it was important that the statue was a recognisable ‘likeness’; this likeness, however, did not have to be exact. It was primarily the addition of the regalia that identified the statue as a king, and the addition of the name that identified it as a particular king or, indeed, a particular mummy. The same principle applied in the non-royal art world. Craftsmen working in the private market sold off-the-peg figures that could be customised with the addition of an inscription, then donated to the temple or included amongst grave goods. Tomb artists decorated walls with painted scenes showing near-identical, ageless men and women dressed in fashionable wigs, garments and jewellery. In all cases it was the addition of the name that converted the standard image into a specific person. This system was, of course, open to abuse. An unscrupulous man might steal a temple statue or usurp a painted tomb and make it his own, and it is no coincidence that many of the statues inscribed with the name of the Nineteenth Dynasty king Ramesses II bear an uncanny resemblance to the statues of Amenhotep III. In all cases, by adding the new name the image became that new person. The original owner, who may have been relying on the image to serve as a link between the living and the dead, was left bereft.
Egypt’s artists had list of long-established conventions to follow. Human figures had to be created according to a ‘canon of proportions’, and for most of the Eighteenth Dynasty a real or theoretical grid was used to ensure that, in any particular scene, seated figures consistently measured fourteen squares from the bottom of the foot to the brow while standing figures measured eighteen squares. During the Amarna Period, when the presence of the Aten shining high in the sky drew the eye upwards, these proportions were adjusted, with the body above the navel being lengthened so that the legs appeared short in comparison to the torso. The emphasised head and the hips initially appeared out of proportion but were quickly readjusted to give a more natural effect. At the same time the fingers were lengthened, and the artists started to differentiate between left and right hands.16
Artists were tasked with representing the three-dimensional world on a flat surface, and at a reduced scale. They did not use perspective, shadowing or foreshortening; instead, their conceptual art was designed to represent the exact nature of a thing or person in the simplest way possible, in the same way that young children’s art sets out to show the essential features of its subject.17 To achieve this, the subject was shown diagrammatically, with the head in profile, the shoulders and torso facing forward and the legs and feet again in profile. This uncomfortable pose ensured that the essential characteristics of the subject were obvious, so that if the reanimated image ever needed to serve as a home for the soul, both limbs and body parts could be utilised to maximum effect. However, it did cause some problems. Many ancient Egyptians faced the afterlife with two left feet, or two right hands, and everyone had just one eye and one nipple.
The rigid application of these rules caused the distinctive dynastic style which allows the non-expert to identify a carved or painted figure as an Egyptian king and which, perhaps, distracts that same non-expert from noticing subtle differences in presentation when they do creep in. At first glance, an image of a Ptolemaic king does not look too dissimilar to an image of an Old Kingdom king, even though the two may be separated by twenty-five centuries. So, writing in 1764 at a time when few of his readers would have had the opportunity to view any Egyptian image or artefact, the influential Prussian art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann felt comfortable in explaining to his readers that Egyptian art, although technically accomplished, was effectively stagnant:
The art of drawing amongst the Egyptians is to be compared to a tree which, though well cultivated, has been checked and arrested in its growth by a worm, or other casualties; for it remained unchanged, precisely the same, yet without attaining its perfection, until the period when Greek kings held sway over them.18
Winckelmann’s harsh analysis was completely in line with contemporary thinking. Dynastic Egypt has always fascinated Western observers, and its influence can be seen in art, architecture and design stretching from the days of ancient Rome to the present day. But in the eighteenth century, the origins of Western civilisation were believed to be firmly rooted in the classical world, while the sculptures of the classical world were regarded as perfection in stone. The more static Egyptian statues fell well short of this ideal. Winckelmann was writing in the hope that contemporary baroque artists might be persuaded to reach back to the excellence of ancient Greece, and develop a neo-classicism for his own age.19 For him, and for many others, Egypt was a cultural dead end, its quaint hieroglyphic texts unreadable and its art beautifully decorative but essentially meaningless. Museums reflected this view, displaying their sparse Egyptology collections as curiosities to entertain rather than educate.20
This attitude gradually started to change as, following Napoleon’s 1798 Egyptian campaign, illustrated books and expanding museum collections brought ancient Egypt to a wider Western audience. In 1822 the decoding of the hieroglyphic script made Egypt’s long history obvious, and kick-started Egyptology as the academic discipline that we know today. As the ancient Egyptians shed their undeserved reputation as an animal worshipping, incestuous and essentially primitive people, it became clear that their ‘expressionless’ sculpture incorporated a multitude of subtle messages, and that their ‘failure’ to employ perspective in two-dimensional art was an entirely valid choice. Occasional finds of non-royal sculptures executed in a lively manner showed that Egypt’s sculptors could compete with the best of the classical sculptors when they wanted to. Egyptian portraiture, far from suffering from Winckelmann’s ‘arrested growth’, is now accepted as exhibiting a surprising modernity. Egyptologist Jan Assmann sums up this new appreciation:
Egyptian portraiture ranks among the most enigmatic and amazing challenges which history has in store for us. The enigma does not lie in the fact of its remoteness and strangeness, but quite to the contrary in its very closeness, its seeming familiarity and modernity … The bust of queen Nefertiti from the Amarna Period … was, after its discovery, immediately welcomed into the world of Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden, where it decorates the windows of innumerable beauty salons.21
But the old attitudes lingered. When, in 1823 the British Museum acquired a colossal head believed to be of ‘Orus’, but later revealed to be Amenhotep III, Peter Patmore’s Guide to the Beauties of the British Museum classified it as beautiful, and undeniably well made, yet somehow lacking in true artistic merit:
It also [he has just described the Younger Memnon head of Ramesses II as lacking in life, character and expression ‘like a beautiful mask’] possesses the same characteristic want of character. It is, in fact, a block of granite cut into the representation of a human face, but without any individual expression whatever; and even without any sexual expression. It has a national character, but nothing more.22
This approach was to affect the development of the museum’s Egyptology collection, which in turn affected the public perception of Egyptian art. When, during his 1893/4 season of excavation at the site of Koptos (modern Quft), Flinders Petrie discovered three colossal limestone sculptures in the ancient temple of the fertility god Min, he recognised them as an important stage in the evolution of Egyptian cult statues.23 With an estimated date of 3300 BCE, the three Mins stood amongst the world’s earliest sculptures, but the British Museum was unimpressed and rejected his offer of two of the statues on the grounds that they were ‘unhistoric rather than prehistoric’. The Ashmolean Museum, in contrast, was very impressed, and gladly accepted them.24 They remain on display in Oxford today.
If we take a closer look at our stone pharaohs we see that, of course, in spite of the acceptance of an ideal royal form, Egypt’s kings were not identical. Over 3,000 years of images reveal subtle and cumulative variations on the basic theme caused by different workshop styles, different raw materials, different tools, different fashions and, most importantly, different expectations and beliefs. Broadly speaking, the pyramid-building monarchs of the Old Kingdom (c.2686–2160 BCE) were carved to resemble remote, god-like creatures while the Middle Kingdom pharaohs (c.2055–1650 BCE) retained the athletic bodies of their predecessors but were given careworn, almost gaunt faces, and were often equipped with large ears, which may have been a family trait but which are more likely to represent their willingness to listen to both their subjects and their gods. The kings of the earlier Eighteenth Dynasty, the first dynasty of the New Kingdom, display modest ears and the confident demeanour of successful warriors and builders. This is reflected in their broad shoulders, low waists and muscular yet elegant bodies, and in their calm, almost smiling faces. None of these kings is identical and, although we may be tempted to think that this is merely a reflection of different workshop styles, is interesting to note that Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III, who reigned alongside each other for twenty-two years when they presumably employed the same workshops, have similarly youthful faces but subtly different bodies, with Hatshepsut appearing more slender and having longer legs.
Returning to the ‘characterless’ British Museum head of Amenhotep so quickly dismissed by Patmore, our knowledge of ancient Egypt in general, and Egyptian art in particular, allows us to see a proud and successful king whose very ability to create such an impressive hard stone image reinforces the fact that he is ruling with the blessing of the gods. Beneath his blue crown, Amenhotep’s rounded face displays a wealth of personal features: almond-shaped eyes set at a slightly oblique angle, a broad-based snubbed nose and well-defined almost pursed full lips, the upper thicker than the lower, possibly concealing an overbite. Two-dimensional scenes in the Luxor Temple allow us to observe Amenhotep’s body as he grows from youth to maturity and old age.25 Initially his figure differs little from that of his father Tuthmosis IV, but gradually, differences start to creep in. His legs lengthen, his torso becomes shorter and thicker, and his ears are more detailed, allowing us to see that his heavy lobes have been pierced. After the celebration of his heb-sed jubilee, in his regnal year 30, his face develops a more youthful quality, with larger eyes. On the walls of his tomb, he appears surprisingly plump, with a thickened waist and youthful face. The heb-sed was an ancient ceremony designed to renew the powers of ageing kings. By the Eighteenth Dynasty it was officially celebrated after thirty years on the throne, and then every three or four years thereafter. This made it a rare celebration; few kings could hope to reign for thirty years, so surely those who did must be especially favoured by the gods? From this time onwards, we find Amenhotep increasingly drawn to the solar cults, and increasingly interested in exploring his own divinity. He now identifies himself with the sun god Re-Horakhty and, having adopted the title ‘the Dazzling Aten’, rules as a living manifestation of all the traditional gods.
Our final view of Amenhotep III is found on a carved stela, recovered from the Amarna house of a courtier named Panehsy.26 Panehsy had served the royal family for a long time, and it is not unreasonable that his devotions would be performed before the old king and queen rather than the new. His stela is not particularly well executed and it has suffered considerable damage, which makes the scene far from clear. It seems to show a listless Amenhotep slumped on his throne, with Queen Tiy seated, alert and entirely conventional, beside him. Those who have chosen to read the scene literally have insisted that it depicts a shift of power:
[T]here is every reason to suppose that queen Tiy possessed the ability to impress the claims of new thought upon her husband’s mind, and gradually to turn his eyes, and those of the court, away from the sombre worship of Amon [sic] into the direction of the brilliant cult of the sun … By the time that Amenophis III had reigned for thirty years or so, he had ceased to give much attention to state affairs, and the power had almost entirely passed into the capable hands of Tiy.27
It is, however, highly unlikely that any king would ever be depicted suffering or in pain; there was too great a danger that this might become an unpleasant and permanent reality in the afterlife. It is far more likely that this stela was carved at Amarna after Amenhotep’s death, and that the ‘ill’ king is simply a king being depicted, rather clumsily, by a mason struggling with a new art style.