3513660151

118

l.t£ S. EDWARDS

It is not difficult to understand Mile Werbrouck 's apprehension about the correctncss of the provenance. Porter and Moss, Topographical Bibliography, IV, does not record a single instanee of a funeral scene on the monuments found at Abydos. In the catalogue of Athanasfs exhibition, the piece is included among a number of items which are described as coming from «the interior of the tombs at Abydos and Thebes», without specifying which was the provenancc of this piece¹. The great majority of known cxamples of funerary scenes in tombs dating from the period beginning with the XVIIIth Dynasty and ending with the XXVlth Dynasty have been discovered at Thebes². Several have, however, been found at Saqqara and the remainder belong to various sites in Upper Egypt and Nubia. Ninety per cent of the Thcban scenes are simply painted on plaster, whereas most of those in other places, and all those at Saqqara, are carved in relief on stone. If Saqqara should prove to be the provenance of this piece, it would not be the only examplc of a sculpture in the Athanasi collection which had been attributed to Abydos when there are strong reasons for believing that it came from Saqqara³.

Being uninscribed, the piece can only be dated by its stylistic features. Budge was of the opinion that it should be ascribed to Saite times⁴ and Mile Werbrouck seems to concur, though she points out that it is rcminiscent of the work of the post-Amarna period. It is perhaps strange that she is willing to countenance the later datę because, as she herself remarks subsequently in her book⁵, scenes of funerals are rarely given any prominence in Saite tombs, the only noteworthy instanee of women mourners being in the tomb of Pabasa at Thebes (No. 279)^{6 7}. It is a scene carved in relief, but the style and technique are so different from the piece in the British Muscum that contemporaneity seems out of the question. In the opinion of the present writer it can only be dated to the late XVI11th Dynasty or the carly XlXth Dynasty.

What are the features which point to this datę? One is the closc-fitting dresses of the mourning women and the arrangement of their hair so that it falls to the shoulders and is then gathered in a taił at the back. The earliest examples of mourning women in this kind of dress, which covers the shoulders and is not suspended on shoulder-straps, dates back to Tuthmosis IV ^,0, but it is still found in the XIXth Dynasty, although by that time fullcr dresses, sometimes pleated, were morę common. The gestures of the women, with one cxeeption, are conventional and not indicativc. The exception is the standing woman

1

   O.c. Ilems 544-618.

2

   Werbrouck. o.c., p. 75-95 and 110-4.

3

   Sce James. Hieroglyphic Text$, Part 9, p. 28 (B.M. 149); p. 32, n. 3 (B.M. 156). 1 am indebted to Mr. James for these references.

4

   See n. 1 abovc.

5

* Werbrouck, o.c., p. 141.

6

   O.c., pl. 48.

7

   Ibid., p. 136.