NEW KINGDOM, 18TH DYNASTY, AMARNA PERIOD, CIRCA 1351-1334 B.C.

Margret Burg was a notable art dealer, collector and art historian, receiving her doctorate in 1925 from the University of Bonn, a remarkable achievement for a woman in this period. She conducted her business alongside her husband, Dr Hermann Burg (1878-1947), who was also an art historian and dealer of antiquities; Dr Burg & Co. of Berlin and Galerie Dr Hermann Burg of Cologne traded from the 1920s onwards. As the Nazis gained supremacy in Germany, the Burgs fled, settling first in Holland, and then, in 1940, in England. They were an important presence on the art market, enjoying personal and professional relationships with many of the major names in antiquities collecting, including Royall Tyler, founder of the collection at Dumbarton Oaks, Heidi Vollmoeller, and the Kofler-Trunigers. The Burgs also acquired pieces for museums, notably the British Museum, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

This large fragment of an Amarna talatat block is carved in shallow sunk relief with an extremely unusual scene of four figures asleep, each contorted in a variety of poses. Their bodies are enveloped in linen sheets or bedcovers that form a zone around each sleeper. The indoor setting is indicated by a doorway topped by cornice and torus moulding. The exotic instruments placed alongside each figure - lutes, harps, and box lyres- are well-known from other scenes of music-making at el-Amarna, and here almost certainly indicate that the sleeping figures are musicians, mostly likely female (for extensive discussion of these instrument types and Amarna-period depictions of music-making, see L. Manniche, Music and Musicians in Ancient Egypt, London, 1991). Scenes of private quarters of Akhenaten’s palace depicted in tombs at el-Amarna feature female musicians in non-Egyptian garments playing precisely these same instruments of imported origin, while their quarters are guarded by male doorkeepers. Most likely this talatat block was part of a large-scale scene in one of the temples at Akhetaten depicting the inner workings of the palace, reminiscent of those reassembled from blocks reused at Karnak and now on display in the Luxor Museum (see A. Gräzer Ohara, “Inscrire l’action dans le temps et l’espace. Le détail comme indicateur de circonstance dans les scènes de vie domestiques profanes de l’époque amarnienne.” Ktèma 37, 2012, pp.161-190, esp. p.180).

The only other known fragments of Amarna talatat featuring sleepers seem to form part of an outdoor scene (perhaps of a camp), where sleeping men in similar poses are enveloped in the same way by sheets and warmed by nearby braziers (Boston MFA 67.921, Brooklyn 64.148.3, C. Aldred, Akhenaten and Nefertiti nos. 65 and 70, respectively, and G. Roeder, Amarna-Reliefs aus Hermopolis, Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1969, no. PC 153, pl. 193). The theme of sleep is not unknown in Egyptian art, though it is relatively rarely depicted (R. Schlichting, “Schlaf,” Lexikon der Ägyptologie V, pp. 642-644); non-elite figures such as doorkeepers or equine grooms in genre scenes in New Kingdom tombs are sometimes shown asleep or drowsing, at times with accompanying hieroglyphic captions indicating the apparently humorous aspect of some such scenes. As Aldred and other scholars have pointed out, however, sleep has religious resonance in the particular theology of Akhenaten’s solar cult, and the Hymn to the Aten mentions the time before sunrise, “when 'Men spend the night indoors with the head covered, the eye not seeing its fellow” (Aldred, Akhenaten and Nefertiti p. 145).