This is truly one of the more remarkable ancient
Egyptian pharaonic portraits to have appeared on
the art market in recent years. The
representation is that of a young, nude male,
originally seated on either a throne, or quite
possibly the lap of a goddess. His legs are bent
at the knees with his feet placed together and
resting on an integral base. His arms are held
along the sides of his body and bent at the
elbows in order to follow the contour of his
seated posture. To that end, his hands, palms
open and facing down, at held at the sides of his
thighs.
Our bronze can be securely dated to Dynasty
XXV, the Kushite Period, because of the unique
combination of accessories with which our child
god is adorned. These include a ram headed
necklace, an insignia reserved exclusively for
pharaohs of that dynasty of which actual
examples in both gold and semi-precious stones
are known. The two horizontal bands across the
forehead of our pharaoh would suggest that he
is wearing a tightly-fitting cap crown to which is
attached the side lock of youth. The cap crown is
fronted by two uraei, or sacred cobras, which
were created in the round and project upward
into space. The proper left uraeus wears the
White Crown of Upper Egypt on its head, and one
can cogently argue that there was a
corresponding Red Crown of Lower Egypt on the
head of the proper right uraeus. The double
uraeus, which is virtually reserved for depictions
of Nubian pharaohs, would seem to indicate that
the Kushites are proclaiming their legitimacy as
pharaohs of Upper and Lower Egypt.
Among the known corpus of royal
representations of pharaohs of the Kushite
Period, our portrait is virtually the only known
sculpture showing the king as a child god,
although this motif is well-attested in royal,
two-
dimensional relief representations, as a vignette
of a king in the lap of a goddess in the
collections of the Brooklyn Museum
demonstrates. Without any accompanying
inscriptions, it is difficult to suggest an
identification of the particular Kushite pharaoh
represented by our bronze figure, and that
difficulty is compounded by the idealizing
features of the face which lack distinctive
features. One may, nevertheless, cautiously
associate our portrait with images of Pharaoh
Taharqa, the Kushite pharaoh with the
statistically greatest number of known bronze
representations. He was, perhaps, the most
celebrated of all Kushite rulers of Egypt and is
commemorated by two mentions in the Old
Testament as a champion of the Children of
Israel against the aggression of the Assyrians.
References:
On the Kushites in general and Taharqa in
particular, see, Robert Steven Bianchi, Daily Life
of the Nubians (Westport, Ct., 2004), pages 147
-212, especially pages 167-175, and page 203,
for an illustration of the relief in Brooklyn
ostensibly depicting Taharqa as a child god in
the lap of a goddess. For Nubian regalia, see, S.
Wenig, Africa in Antiquity II (Brooklyn 1978),
pages 166, catalogue number 75, and pages
182-184, catalogue numbers 97-100, for four
of
these ram-headed pendants. Consult, Marsha
Hill, Royal Bronze Statuary from Ancient Egypt
(Leiden 2004), plates 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36,
38, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, and 48, for a large
selection of bronze depictions of Kushite
pharaohs, none of which depict the pharaoh as a
child god, and only a very few of which approach
the quality of our portrait.
-Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi
