AN EGYPTIAN LAPIS LAZULI HIPPOPOTAMUS LATE PERIOD, DYNASTY XXVI, 664-525 B.C.

拍品描述

AN EGYPTIAN LAPIS LAZULI HIPPOPOTAMUS, LATE PERIOD, DYNASTY XXVI, 664-525 B.C. Carved in the round from a single piece of deep blue lapis lazuli shot through with pale calcite veining and golden pyrite inclusions, the hippopotamus stands foursquare on four short columnar legs, the body heavy and barrel-shaped, the flanks smoothly modelled without surface ornament. The head is turned slightly to the right, the muzzle blunt and broad, with the characteristic pronounced jowls and the small rounded ears set high on the crown. The eyes are indicated as small raised bosses, the nostrils and mouth marked by shallow incision. The stone has been worked to a soft polish that permits the natural mottling of the mineral to read as the wet, dappled hide of the animal itself. The hippopotamus occupied an ambivalent place in Egyptian thought. The living animal was feared as a destroyer of boats and crops along the Nile, and the wild male hippopotamus was associated with Seth, the god of disorder, whose ritual defeat was staged in temple ceremonies. The female hippopotamus, by contrast, was benevolent: the goddess Taweret, protector of women in childbirth and of the household, took her form. Small figures of the hippopotamus, whether in faience, stone, or other prestige materials, participated in this doubled meaning, serving as apotropaic objects whose power derived from mastery over the dangerous creature they depicted. The animal is a familiar subject of Egyptian minor sculpture from the Middle Kingdom onwards, most famously in the blue faience examples deposited in Middle Kingdom tombs, and the form persisted into the Late Period in a range of materials. Lapis lazuli, of all the stones available to Egyptian craftsmen, carried the most specific significance. It was not native to Egypt and was imported at considerable expense from the mines of Badakhshan in what is now northeastern Afghanistan, reaching the Nile Valley through long-established trade routes across the Near East. Its deep blue was understood as the colour of the night sky and of the hair of the gods, and Egyptian texts describe divine flesh and celestial bodies in terms of lapis. Its use was reserved for objects of the highest status: royal jewellery, temple inlays, amuletic figures, and votive deposits. A figure of this scale worked from a solid piece of lapis, rather than from inlay fragments, represents a substantial commission, and the material itself signals that the object was made either for the person of a high-ranking individual or as a temple offering. The choice of lapis for a hippopotamus in particular reinforces the object's protective function. The blue of the stone approximates the blue of the Nile water from which the animal emerges, and the material's divine associations align it with the goddess Taweret and her role as a household guardian. The animal is here rendered not as a threat but as a controlled and beneficent presence, its bulk domesticated by the stillness of the pose and the preciousness of the medium. This figure exemplifies the persistence of the Middle Kingdom hippopotamus type into the Saite revival of Dynasty XXVI, when Egyptian workshops consciously returned to earlier models while working in the prestige materials that characterised the period's court production. Its interest lies in the meeting of an ancient iconographic subject with the imported blue stone that carried the deepest cosmological weight in Egyptian material culture. Dimensions: Length: 6cm

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