AN EGYPTIAN ALABASTER JAR EARLY DYNASTIC PERIOD, 1ST-3RD DYNASTY, 3000-2613 B.C.

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AN EGYPTIAN ALABASTER JAR, EARLY DYNASTIC PERIOD, 1ST-3RD DYNASTY, 3000-2613 B.C. Of tall waisted form, the vessel rises from a flat base with gently flaring lower body, drawing inward through a smoothly concave profile before opening at the shoulder into a short cylindrical neck and a broad, everted rim. The interior of the mouth is hollowed to receive a stopper or lid, its inner face defined by a clean lip. The stone is banded in translucent honey and cream, the natural strata of the calcite drawing horizontal ribbons across the belly and rising through the neck, where a deeper amber vein passes obliquely beneath the rim. The exterior is finished to a soft lustrous polish, the walls even in thickness, the profile symmetrical about the vertical axis. The form belongs to the family of tall, waisted stone jars produced in Egypt during the formative centuries of the pharaonic state. Such vessels were laboriously hollowed with tubular drills and shaped by abrasion, a technique that required sustained investment of skilled labour and which was concentrated in royal and elite workshops. The absence of applied decoration is characteristic of the period: meaning is carried by proportion, by the disciplined turning of the profile, and above all by the stone itself. The material the Egyptians called shes, and which Egyptology conventionally terms alabaster (properly a banded travertine or calcite), was quarried principally at Hatnub in Middle Egypt and at sites in the Eastern Desert. Its translucency and its association with light and purity gave it a particular standing in ritual and funerary use, and its extraction under royal control from the earliest dynasties tied its supply to court patronage. Stone vessels of this quality are recovered above all from tombs and temple deposits of the First to Third Dynasties, where they accompanied the burials of kings, officials, and members of the royal household at Abydos, Saqqara, and Helwan. Very large quantities were laid up in the subterranean galleries beneath the Step Pyramid of Djoser, a measure of the prestige the medium retained into the Third Dynasty. The waisted profile, with its narrow midsection and broad flaring rim, is a distinctive shape of the Archaic repertoire and is associated with the storage of unguents, oils, and cosmetic preparations essential to the funerary economy. The generous rim was designed to be sealed, most often with a disc of stone or a bound linen cover, preserving the contents for use in the eternal ritual sustenance of the deceased. The jar exemplifies the austere confidence of Early Dynastic stone-working, in which the significance of the object lies wholly in the mastery of a difficult medium and the calm authority of its silhouette. It belongs to a tradition in which the vessel itself, cut from a stone reserved for the elite dead, was already a statement of status and of ritual purpose. Dimensions: 35cm

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