AN EGYPTIAN FAIENCE CROCADILE AMULET, PTOLEMAIC PERIOD, 304-30 B.C.

拍品描述

AN EGYPTIAN FAIENCE CROCODILE AMULET, PTOLEMAIC PERIOD, 304-30 B.C. Modelled in the round and resting on an integral rectangular base, the crocodile lies in a couchant posture with limbs drawn close to the body and tail extended along the length of the plinth. The head is raised and turned slightly forward, the jaws parted to reveal the line of the snout, with the eyes rendered as small applied bosses and the dorsal ridge picked out in a series of transverse grooves running from the nape to the tail. The flanks are modelled with the ribbed articulation of the reptile's body, and a suspension loop is pierced transversely through the raised withers behind the head. The moulded faience carries a bright turquoise glaze pooling to a deeper tone in the recesses, with earthen encrustation adhering across the base and along the dorsal surface. The crocodile in Egyptian religious thought is principally associated with Sobek, the reptile-headed god of the Nile waters, of fecundity and of pharaonic power, whose principal cult centres lay at Shedet in the Fayum (known to the Greeks as Krokodilopolis) and at Kom Ombo in Upper Egypt. Amulets in this form drew on the ambivalent nature of the crocodile, both feared as a predator of the river and revered as the manifestation of a protective deity who commanded the waters on which Egyptian life depended. Worn in life and placed among the wrappings of the dead, such amulets invoked Sobek's protection over the wearer and, in a funerary context, secured passage through the aquatic dangers of the underworld. The pierced suspension behind the head confirms its use as a personal ornament, strung and worn against the body. Faience, the glazed non-clay ceramic of siliceous paste characteristic of Egyptian production from the Predynastic period onward, carried meaning beyond its physical properties. Its brilliant blue-green colour was understood to evoke the waters of the Nile, the vegetation of the inundated fields, and by extension the regenerative forces of life and rebirth. The material was called by the Egyptians tjehnet, a word connoting that which shines or gleams, and its use for amuletic and funerary objects was inseparable from these associations. A crocodile amulet in turquoise faience thus united form, subject and medium in a single expression of aquatic and regenerative power, the colour of the glaze reinforcing the watery domain over which Sobek presided. By the Ptolemaic period, faience workshops had refined the mould-made production of small amulets to a high level of standardisation, serving both the domestic amuletic market and the temple economies of the great cult centres. The persistence of Sobek's worship into the Hellenistic period, and its accommodation within Greek and later Roman religious life at sites such as Tebtunis and the Fayum, ensured a continuing demand for crocodile amulets of exactly this type. This amulet exemplifies the sustained production of Sobek amulets in glazed faience during the last centuries of pharaonic religion, when older iconographic conventions were maintained under Ptolemaic patronage with undiminished technical assurance. The clarity of the modelling and the vivid retention of the glaze mark it as a characteristic survival of a devotional tradition that bound the Egyptian wearer to the protective power of the Nile itself. Dimensions: Length: 3.7cm

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