AN EGYPTIAN CARNELIAN “JAR” BEAD New Kingdom, Dynasty XIX–XX, 1307–1070 B.C.

拍品描述

AN EGYPTIAN CARNELIAN "JAR" BEAD, NEW KINGDOM, DYNASTY XIX-XX, 1307-1070 B.C. Of miniature vessel-form, carved in the round from a single piece of translucent carnelian of deep orange-red tone, the body swelling from a short flaring foot to a rounded shoulder and tapering neck. The upper section is pierced laterally through the neck for suspension, the drill-hole running transversely below a small rounded terminal. The surface retains a soft polish, with faint accretions and light pitting attesting to burial, and the stone displays the characteristic gradation from paler yellow-orange at the extremities to a saturated red through the body when transmitted light passes through it. The form imitates in miniature a stone or ceramic storage jar, one of a repertoire of amuletic bead-types that reproduced everyday and ritual vessels at wearable scale. Such jar-beads were strung as elements of broad collars, girdles, and funerary bead-nets, either singly as pendants or in repeated series alternating with other amuletic forms. The vessel shape carried associations of containment, provision, and offering, extending to the wearer the sustenance and protection that full-scale jars provided in temple and tomb contexts. Carnelian held a particular place among the hardstones favoured by Egyptian lapidaries. Its warm red colour associated it with the sun, with blood, and with the regenerative heat of life, and it appears throughout the Book of the Dead among the stones prescribed for specific amulets, notably the tyet-knot of Isis. The material was worked from pebbles sourced in the Eastern Desert and Nubia, and its hardness required abrasive drilling and polishing with quartz sand, techniques that had reached a high degree of refinement by the Ramesside period. The choice of carnelian for a small personal ornament of this kind signals both the symbolic weight assigned to the stone and the sustained demand for hardstone jewellery in élite and sub-élite burial assemblages of the later New Kingdom. This bead exemplifies the reduction of a vessel form to amuletic scale that characterises New Kingdom lapidary production, where the properties of the stone and the shape of the object work together to concentrate a protective idea into a wearable ornament. Its clarity of form and the quality of the carnelian place it within the standard élite jewellery repertoire of Dynasties XIX and XX. Dimensions: Height: 1.9cm

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