AN EGYPTIAN CARNELIAN “JAR” BEAD New Kingdom, Dynasty XIX–XX, 1307–1070 B.C.

拍品描述

AN EGYPTIAN CARNELIAN "JAR" BEAD, NEW KINGDOM, DYNASTY XIX–XX, 1307–1070 B.C. Of miniature amphoriskos form, the body ovoid and tapering to a rounded point at the base, rising through a narrow shoulder to a short cylindrical neck set off by a broad flat collar or disc simulating the applied rim of a full-scale vessel. The neck is pierced horizontally for suspension, the perforation running through the shoulder of the miniature "jar." The stone is a pale, translucent carnelian of honey to milky tone, retaining traces of earthen deposit within the recesses of the collar and around the piercing, the surface otherwise polished to a soft lustre. The bead reproduces in miniature the form of a stoppered oil or unguent vessel of a type familiar from New Kingdom faience and stone production. Such amuletic jar-beads belong to a wider category of Egyptian personal ornaments in which everyday vessel forms, particularly those associated with the storage of precious oils, perfumes, and ritual substances, were translated into wearable form. The vessel-shape itself carried associations with provision, offering, and the perpetuation of substances required for both life and afterlife, and the miniature form served as a compressed, portable emblem of these ideas suitable for stringing within a broad collar, bracelet, or funerary necklace. Carnelian held a particular place among the hard stones favoured by Egyptian lapidaries. Its warm reddish-orange colour was associated with blood, vitality, the solar disc, and by extension with the regenerative powers required for the passage from life to death and rebirth. The stone appears frequently in royal and elite jewellery from the Middle Kingdom onward and was among the materials specified in funerary contexts for amuletic components addressed to the protection of the body. Its use for a miniature vessel-bead of this scale, worked with a defined collar and pierced neck, indicates work of some care within a well-established lapidary tradition centred on the royal workshops and their satellites during the Ramesside period. The reduction of a vessel form to the scale of a bead demanded skilled drilling and finishing in a stone that resists easy working, and the surviving examples are generally small in number relative to the more common carnelian poppy-seed, drop, and disc beads of the same period. This example exemplifies the New Kingdom taste for translating full-scale ritual objects into wearable amuletic form, preserving in miniature the symbolic charge of the vessel while making it available to the person of the wearer. Dimensions: Height: 2cm

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