4613346871

83

THREE ROYAL SCULPTURES

is unknown in Egyptian royal sculpture of any other period and the similarity of the Freer head to this type clearly indicates that they were produced under the same cir-cumstances. One other detail which bolsters a Dynasty IV attribution is the marked concavity of the ears of the Freer sculpture. This is conspicuously shared by the Leipzig head and is an intermittent characteristic of royal work in this period.

Indeed, it is completely consistent with surviving evidence to assert that the Freer head could only have been produced lale in Dynasty IV and at no other period of Egyptian art. Once the Old Kingdom attribution is accepted (and I think there can be no doubt of that) the datę of the sculpture is evident. Its relationship to the products of the Mycerinus workshops has already been outlincd and so close is that relationship that a later datę is hardly possible. It is often asserted that we have a very inadequate representation of royal seulptures of Dynasties V and VI, a satetement that is based on the assumption that these periods continued to produce fine royal representations only slightly inferior to thosc of Dynasty IV. In fact we havc, numerically at least, a fair representation of royal statues of the later Old Kingdom. From the very First reign of Dynasty V there survive the colossal granite head of Weserkaf from his Sakkara pyramid, the recently discovered head of him or the goddess Neith in schist from Abu Ghurab and the littlc known, life-size alabaster mouth of beautiful workmanship also from his Sun Tempie at Abu Ghurab. These threc splendid pieces, as Fine as anything Dynasty IV produced, are abundanl evidence that the great technical mastery of stonc achicved by the royal sculptors of the greatest dynasty of the Old Kingdom retained sufficient impetus to continuc the tradition into the first part of Dynasty V. After that one suspects that royal sculpture took a nose dive that was not revcrsed until late Dynasty XI or early Dynasty XII.

Whether we have a representative selection of royal works of the last two dynasties of the Old Kingdom is perhaps debatable, but certainly we have enough to claim a probable reprcsentative survcy. After Weserkaf there is the Chephren diorite dyad of Sahure and a nonie god now in the Metropolitan. The figures are squat and the faces duli, but the błock of stone, the costliest and hardest known to the Egyptians, would certainly have been turned over to the best studio of the time. It speaks ill for the standards of the reign. The following three kings have left no seulptures. But from the reign of Nyuserre we havc two sizable statues in granite. The finer of them, a standing figurę clasping the //eAY7-sceptcr, has only recently been assembled from the lower half of a statuę found in the sacrcd lakę at Karnak and the head and torso for many years in the museum at Rochester, New York, and prcsumably found in the Karnak cachette¹⁰. It is barely comptetent with littlc or no aesthetic merit. The

¹⁰ Legrain. Statues et statuettes ... (CCC), no. 42003.