sculpture, skulptur

EE 306 (Figs. 7-10)

The material is wood with traces of red paint on the legs. The max. height is 24.5 cm, the max. width 9 cm and the max. depth 7 cm. The figure is headless® and the left leg is broken off at knee-level, the nght one at the ankle. The left hand is missing. There are also some minor fissures and breaks.

The man stands with the left leg well ahead of the body, the preserved right hand is fisted. He is dressed in the so-called military kilt.’ It is three-partite with a pointed middle part. At the front the plaits of the linen cloth are rendered in relief. The belt is very broad at the back becoming successively narrower towards the front. The buckle is rendered in the shape of a resting double-loop in relief. From the buckle plaited ends of the cloth hang down, a longer one with a straight end on the right, a shorter with a pointed end to the left. This type of kilt is no secure criterion for any finer dating; it seems to have been worn in the eighteenth dynasty by men of all kinds, but could possibly have had a military origin.

The execution of the statuette is a graceful synthesis of the “‘athletic” type, as to the very skeleton, and a joyful rendering of the fleshy parts. The posture is confident in the vigorous striding position; the left leg put well ahead of the mght one and the arms moved slightly forwards. The straight shoulders are broad, the torso rather short and rapidly decreasing in width to-

wards the waist. The stomach is rounded with the navel clearly indicated by a rather deep drop-shaped depression. The pectoral muscles are slightly rounded and the nipples marked by a faint incized circles. The collarbone is plastically modelled in a delicate fashion. The powerful torso is very well balanced by the equally powerful volume of the thighs, further stressed by the specific design of the kilt. This is also where the maximum width, next to the shoulders, is found and thus the surface touched by the pendant arms.

On the whole, this statuette foreshadows the ‘‘feminine” voluptuous shapes as realized in the sculpture of Achenaton. A formal language that subsequently made the so organically convincing statues found in the tomb of Tuthankhamun possible (for example the harpooner), almost a millenium before the Greek ‘“‘revolution’’.

The time of origin of this statuette of a superb workmanship should therefore be the reign of Amenhotep III. In addition to a statuette representing Amenhotep III, with more or less the same proportions of the body,'° there are a number of related objects dated to this period.'! Due to the high quality of the piece, the represented person could very well be a notability of the time. (Lindgren 1988:7)