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拍品专文
This impressive fragment preserves the left-side jamb of a tomb door. It is sculpted on two sides in sharply-executed relief, and retains the extensive original red pigment on the main figures and so-called Egyptian blue pigment in the hieroglyphs.
The outward-facing side of the door depicts the tomb owner-- an unnamed official-- carved in sunk relief, in profile to the right. He wears a broad collar and a triangular kilt, with his arms down at his sides. The echeloned wig, large eye, and sharply outlined lips, as well as the man’s elongated torso, exemplifies the ”Second Style” of the Egyptian relief corpus, which developed toward the end of the Old Kingdom, during the 6th Dynasty. A single vertical column of a hieroglyphic inscription, reads “[Khentyamen]tiu, Lord of Abydos: invocation-offerings of bread and beer, li[nen?], …in(?)…”. A horizontal band of hieroglyphs preserved above the man’s head is too broken to allow a clear reading. On the shallow, inner side of the doorway, an offering table is shown in raised relief. Below, a smaller male figure, carved in the same technique, faces right and carries a papyrus plant and a tray of offerings. To the left, below the offering table is written the standard phrase meaning “food requirements,” while offerings of “a thousand of bread, a thousand of beer, (and) a thousand of fowl” are enumerated above the offering table.
This tomb door fragment belongs to a small group of finely-carved reliefs that can be confidently assigned to one artist or workshop from the 6th Dynasty. Other examples from the group include a closely-related relief, once in the Norbert Schimmel Collection and now in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (Inv. No. 91.71.263), which once possibly formed the right side of the same doorway as the present relief. Here, the tomb owner faces right, with an inscription naming a priestess of Hathor called Irty (probably the wife of the tomb owner), whose name is not given on any of the surviving fragments yet known (see no. 169 in. O.W. Muscarella, ed., Ancient Art: The Norbert Schimmel Collection). A third closely related relief now in the Princeton University Art Museum (Inv. no. 1954-45) depicts the tomb owner in sunk relief, carved in the identical style, facing left with his hands raised in adoration. The bottom traces of a few lines of vertical inscription above the standing man indicate that this fragment most likely derives from the lower part of a false door (see no. B10 in E. Brovarski, “A Second Style in Egyptian Relief of the Old Kingdom,” in S. E. Thompson and P. der Manuelian, eds., Egypt and Beyond: Essays Presented to Leonard H. Lesko Upon His Retirement from the Wilbour Chair in Egyptology at Brown University, June 2005).
All three blocks were on the market in the 1950s and likely derive from the same tomb, now lost, perhaps to be located at Saqqara. A false door belonging to a priestess of Hathor named Irty is now in the University of Saskatchewan, Museum of Antiquities, has been suggested to derive from the same tomb as the Jerusalem and Princeton fragments, though the style of this false door is of lesser quality than that of the other reliefs (see R.J. Leprohon, “The Sixth Dynasty False Door of the Priestess of Hathor Irty” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, vol. 31, 1994, pp. 41-47).
For a discussion of the “Second Style” of Egyptian reliefs, see E. Brovarski, op. cit.
The outward-facing side of the door depicts the tomb owner-- an unnamed official-- carved in sunk relief, in profile to the right. He wears a broad collar and a triangular kilt, with his arms down at his sides. The echeloned wig, large eye, and sharply outlined lips, as well as the man’s elongated torso, exemplifies the ”Second Style” of the Egyptian relief corpus, which developed toward the end of the Old Kingdom, during the 6th Dynasty. A single vertical column of a hieroglyphic inscription, reads “[Khentyamen]tiu, Lord of Abydos: invocation-offerings of bread and beer, li[nen?], …in(?)…”. A horizontal band of hieroglyphs preserved above the man’s head is too broken to allow a clear reading. On the shallow, inner side of the doorway, an offering table is shown in raised relief. Below, a smaller male figure, carved in the same technique, faces right and carries a papyrus plant and a tray of offerings. To the left, below the offering table is written the standard phrase meaning “food requirements,” while offerings of “a thousand of bread, a thousand of beer, (and) a thousand of fowl” are enumerated above the offering table.
This tomb door fragment belongs to a small group of finely-carved reliefs that can be confidently assigned to one artist or workshop from the 6th Dynasty. Other examples from the group include a closely-related relief, once in the Norbert Schimmel Collection and now in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (Inv. No. 91.71.263), which once possibly formed the right side of the same doorway as the present relief. Here, the tomb owner faces right, with an inscription naming a priestess of Hathor called Irty (probably the wife of the tomb owner), whose name is not given on any of the surviving fragments yet known (see no. 169 in. O.W. Muscarella, ed., Ancient Art: The Norbert Schimmel Collection). A third closely related relief now in the Princeton University Art Museum (Inv. no. 1954-45) depicts the tomb owner in sunk relief, carved in the identical style, facing left with his hands raised in adoration. The bottom traces of a few lines of vertical inscription above the standing man indicate that this fragment most likely derives from the lower part of a false door (see no. B10 in E. Brovarski, “A Second Style in Egyptian Relief of the Old Kingdom,” in S. E. Thompson and P. der Manuelian, eds., Egypt and Beyond: Essays Presented to Leonard H. Lesko Upon His Retirement from the Wilbour Chair in Egyptology at Brown University, June 2005).
All three blocks were on the market in the 1950s and likely derive from the same tomb, now lost, perhaps to be located at Saqqara. A false door belonging to a priestess of Hathor named Irty is now in the University of Saskatchewan, Museum of Antiquities, has been suggested to derive from the same tomb as the Jerusalem and Princeton fragments, though the style of this false door is of lesser quality than that of the other reliefs (see R.J. Leprohon, “The Sixth Dynasty False Door of the Priestess of Hathor Irty” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, vol. 31, 1994, pp. 41-47).
For a discussion of the “Second Style” of Egyptian reliefs, see E. Brovarski, op. cit.