AN EGYPTIAN FAIENCE FIGURE OF A SLAVE IN THE FORM OF AN AMULET, PTOLEMAIC PERIOD, 304-30 B.C.

拍品描述

AN EGYPTIAN FAIENCE FIGURE OF A SLAVE IN THE FORM OF AN AMULET, PTOLEMAIC PERIOD, 304-30 B.C. Modelled in the round as a bound figure lying prone, the body compressed into a compact form suited to suspension or setting. The head rests forward with the hair or headcloth rendered in ribbed striations, the torso curves over drawn-up limbs, and the arms appear folded or pinioned beneath. The lower body tapers to the base, which is left flat. The glaze is pale turquoise to cream, worn in places to reveal the paler body beneath, with brown earth deposits caught in the recesses of the modelling. The subject belongs to a class of small figural amulets and pendants produced in Egyptian faience across the later dynastic and Ptolemaic periods, depicting bound captives, prisoners, or servile figures. Such representations descend from a much older pharaonic iconography in which the bound enemy, shown prone or kneeling with arms tied, served as a symbol of subdued foreign peoples and the ordered triumph of Egypt over chaos. By the Ptolemaic period this imagery had passed into the domain of small personal objects, where its apotropaic and talismanic force was preserved even as the political context receded. The medium is significant. Egyptian faience, a glazed non-clay ceramic of crushed quartz with an alkaline glaze, carried associations far beyond its physical properties. Its characteristic blue-green colour was linked to regeneration, the waters of the Nile, and the life-giving properties attributed to turquoise and lapis. Objects in faience were therefore not simply decorative but ritually charged, whether deposited in tombs, worn on the body, or offered at shrines. The choice of faience for an amulet of this type reinforces its protective function: the material itself was understood to participate in the object's efficacy. The Ptolemaic period saw the continuation and adaptation of pharaonic amuletic traditions under Greek rule, with faience workshops producing large quantities of small figures for personal wear, funerary deposit, and votive use. Bound-figure amulets from this period are less common than the standard deities and hieroglyphic signs, and their meaning is debated, whether protective through the ritual binding of hostile forces, or reflective of the older triumphal iconography reduced to talismanic scale. This amulet exemplifies the survival of pharaonic symbolic vocabulary in the miniature devotional objects of Ptolemaic Egypt, where the bound-captive motif, once monumental, was retained at the scale of the body and translated into the ritually charged medium of faience. Dimensions: Length: 2.1cm

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