AN EGYPTIAN CARNELIAN AMULET OF A FLY NEW KINGDOM, DYNASTY XIX-XX, 1307-1070 B.C.

拍品描述

AN EGYPTIAN CARNELIAN AMULET OF A FLY, NEW KINGDOM, DYNASTY XIX-XX, 1307-1070 B.C. Carved in the round from a translucent carnelian ranging from deep orange-red at the head to a pale honey-yellow at the wingtips, the amulet takes the form of a fly seen from above. The rounded head is set off from the thorax by a shallow constriction, with a small notched incision at the crown indicating the frontal features of the insect. The thorax is marked by two horizontal grooves suggesting the segmentation of the body, and the paired wings extend downward in a broad inverted V, each wing worked with fine parallel striations that describe the venation. Traces of earthen encrustation remain in the recesses. The reverse is smoothly finished, and a transverse suspension perforation runs through the upper body. The fly is one of the recurring amuletic forms of pharaonic Egypt, and its meaning is bound up with the martial and honorific culture of the New Kingdom. Flies were associated with tenacity and persistence in the face of an enemy, qualities extolled in the military campaigns of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties. Gold flies of valour were awarded by the crown to soldiers for conspicuous courage, the best-known examples being those given to Queen Ahhotep. In smaller amuletic form, worn by the living and placed with the dead, the fly retained this protective and apotropaic charge, warding off harm with the same insistence the insect itself was thought to embody. Carnelian carried its own weight of meaning in the Egyptian amuletic repertoire. Its red tones were associated with blood, vitality, and the regenerative heat of the sun, and the stone was regularly specified in funerary texts for particular amulet forms. Sourced from the Eastern Desert and from Nubia, carnelian was worked in workshops attached to temple and palace, and its use for a fly amulet aligns the protective symbolism of the form with a material understood to carry life-giving power. The graduated colour of the present example, moving from saturated red at the head to translucent yellow at the wings, is a natural feature of the stone that the carver has exploited to lend the small object a considerable optical presence. This amulet exemplifies the Ramesside taste for compact, boldly modelled apotropaic forms in coloured hardstone, in which the symbolic language of the earlier martial fly-of-valour is distilled into a personal ornament for wear and burial. The confident handling of the wing striations and the exploitation of the stone's internal colour place it within the more accomplished output of New Kingdom lapidary workshops. Dimensions: Height: 2.5cm

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