AN EGYPTIAN BLUE FAIENCE BES THIRD INTERMEDIATE PERIOD, 20TH DYNASTY, 1196-1070 B.C.

拍品描述

AN EGYPTIAN BLUE FAIENCE AMULET OF BES, THIRD INTERMEDIATE PERIOD, 20TH DYNASTY, 1196-1070 B.C. Modelled in the round and standing frontally upon a small integral plinth, the dwarf god is shown in his canonical pose, bandy-legged with arms held to the sides and hands resting on the thighs. The leonine face is rendered with wide staring eyes, flattened nose, prominent cheeks, and a protruding tongue between bared teeth, framed by a full mane that falls to the shoulders. The body is squat and rounded, with a swollen belly, pronounced pectorals, and short thickset limbs. Above the head rises a tall crown of five vertically ribbed plumes, set upon a low circular base. The turquoise-blue glaze is well preserved across the surface, with earthen encrustations lodged in the recesses of the modelling and along the underside. A small pierced strut between the legs preserves the figure's structural integrity. The image is that of Bes, the apotropaic household deity whose grotesque leonine features were understood not as ugliness but as a protective mask, designed to repel malign forces by confronting them with their own likeness. His frontal presentation is exceptional within the Egyptian visual tradition, where deities are almost invariably shown in profile. This frontality is itself the mechanism of protection: the god meets the viewer, and any hostile presence approaching the viewer, face to face. The crown of plumes marks his elevated status among the minor deities and is a standard attribute of his mature iconographic type. Bes was invoked chiefly in the domestic sphere, guarding women in childbirth, infants, sleepers, and the intimate spaces of the home, and amulets of this form were worn on the person or placed within the household as active instruments of protection rather than as passive representations. Faience, the glazed non-clay ceramic composed of crushed quartz and natron with a soda-lime-silica glaze, carried its own symbolic weight in Egyptian thought quite apart from its practical qualities. The material was called tjehenet, meaning "that which is brilliant" or "dazzling," and its luminous blue-green colour associated it with the regenerative waters of the Nile, with fertility, and with rebirth. Its use for an amulet of Bes is thus doubly appropriate: the protective function of the deity is reinforced by the life-giving symbolism inherent in the medium itself. The 20th Dynasty saw a considerable expansion in the production of small-scale faience amulets for personal use, part of the broader democratisation of protective religion that would flourish in the Third Intermediate Period and beyond. This amulet exemplifies the mature Ramesside type of the Bes figure, in which the fully developed iconography, the frontal stance, plumed crown, leonine mask, and dwarfed proportions, is executed at a domestic scale in the material most closely associated with regeneration. It stands at the point where the deity's cult, long present in Egyptian religion, becomes fully established in the personal amuletic repertoire that would carry his image forward for another millennium. Dimensions: Height: 7cm

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