Historians today usually consider the Twenty-fifth Dynasty to be part of the Third Intermediate Period, while they assign the Twenty-sixth Dynasty to the Late Period. There are good reasons for this division; however, the sculpture of the two dynasties is so closely related that they will be considered together here.
Figure 41.2 Block statue of Harsiese; from the Karnak Cachette; Dynasty 23; granite, h. 42 m.; Cairo, Egyptian Museum, JE 36967. Photograph courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, Corpus of Late Egyptian Sculpture.
The Twenty-fifth Dynasty consisted of a family from Kush, a region sometimes called Nubia, in the northern part of present-day Sudan. For much of its ancient history, this area had been dominated by the Egyptians, who had built temples there to Amun and other Egyptian gods. Some of these were apparently still functioning in the eighth century BC, when Kush was ruled by a native dynasty. For these Kushite rulers, the worship of Egyptian Amun in their own land may have suggested, and certainly reinforced, their claim that this preeminent god had given them rulership over their northern neighbor. They asserted this claim by invading Egypt and conquering the local Libyan dynasts. We have no evidence of how, or even whether, the rulers of Kush were represented before they came to Egypt. Following their conquest, they were portrayed by Egyptian artists in the traditional manner of Egyptian kings, with youthful, muscular bodies and torsos divided by a vertical depression down the center, in the manner of Old Kingdom sculpture. The standing, seated, and kneeling poses of Kushite royal statues also imitated those of the Old Kingdom, as did their short, pleated kilts. Only their heads, rounder and fuller in the face than those of most Egyptian rulers, may have been intended to suggest their foreign origin (figurer 41.3) (Saleh and Sourouzian 1987: no. 245).
Figure 41.3 Head of Taharqa; probably from Thebes; Dynasty 25, reign of Taharqa; granite, h. 36.5 cm.; Cairo, Egyptian Museum, CG 560. Photograph courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, Corpus of Late Egyptian Sculpture (Saleh and Sourouzian 1987: no. 245).
The Kushite kings were usually shown bareheaded with close-cropped hair that was often patterned with small circular curls. Almost certainly, they brought this hairstyle from their homeland; but it may have been reinforced in Egypt by surviving images of some Old Kingdom kings with uncovered, close-cropped heads (Metropolitan Museum 1999: no. 70, 274-6). On their hair the Kushite rulers usually wore a diadem with a row of cobras along the top and a pair of cobras at the front (best preserved on bronze statuettes, for example Mysliwiec 1988: p1.44c). This double uraeus is unique to the kings from Kush. It is presumed to have symbolized their control over both Egypt and their homeland. It also appears on images that show them wearing the traditional Egyptian nemes headcloth and/or composite crowns (Russmann 2001: no. 120, pp. 223-5). They were never shown wearing the Blue Crown, which they apparently associated with their Libyan predecessors. Traces of gilding have been found on some of their crowns and also on their hair; the latter circumstance has led some commentators to presume that these kings were wearing some form of skull cap. In their homeland, however, close-cropped hair was represented on both male and female royalty during this time and later. In all cases, it follows the contours of the skull very closely and, on some female examples, at least, it was painted black.
Both in Egypt and in Kush, the Kushite kings were often shown wearing broad bracelets and anklets of Egyptian type. Their favorite jewelery, however, was an emblem of the god Amun in the form of a ram’s head that usually wore a double uraeus between its horns. The ram-headed amulets were suspended from the center of neck cords and often from the ends, which were brought forward. All of these features can be seen in Bonnet and Valbelle, for example, on two statues of the last king of the dynasty, Tanutamun (Bonnet and Valbelle 2006: 94-101). These details of style and dress appear not only on images of the Kushite kings from Egypt, but also on figures of Taharqa and his successor Tanutamun which have been found in Nubia, together with statues of subsequent kings of Kush. These statues, most of them colossal in size, were first found at Gebel Barkal early in the twentieth century by an expedition from Boston (Dunham 1970: 17-24, pls. 1-2, 7-20). Quite recently, another cache of large statues of Taharqa, Tanutamun, and their successors was discovered at the Kushite site of Kerma. Like the statues in the preceding group, these figures had all been broken; but they were carefully buried together and are substantially complete. In the recent publication by their discoverers (Bonnet and Valbelle 2006), one can clearly see how the Egyptian style of the statues of Taharqa and Tanutamun, which were undoubtedly the work of Egyptian sculptors, gave way, in the statues of their successors, to a different, and presumably a more Kushite, sensibility. However, the beginnings of a more indigenous style can already be seen on certain images of Taharqa in Kush. He is shown with a much fuller face and a sterner expression on a sphinx from Kawa, now in the British Museum (Bonnet and Valbelle 2006: 143; Welsby and Anderson 2004: 132, no. 98), and on a series of statues, also from Kawa, that show him standing in front of a ram (Leclant in Aldred et al. 1980: no. 223, 229). The many stone shabtis from Taharqa’s tomb in Kush also appear to be, at least in part, the work of local stone carvers (Wildung (ed.) 1997: 201-20, pp. 194-5).
When the kings of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty were driven back to Kush by an army of Assyrian invaders, a descendant of the short-lived Libyan Twenty-fourth Dynasty gained the throne, to found the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. The kings of this dynasty are often called Saite after their home city of Sais, in the Nile Delta. They rejected all of the Kushites’ distinctive accessories, including the ram’s head jewelery, the double uraeus, and the fillet worn on uncovered hair, but they resumed the use of the Blue Crown.
The remains of Saite royal sculpture show that it was of uniformly high quality. Statue types include sphinxes and standing and seated figures. Like Kushite royal figures - and unlike those of their Libyan predecessors of the Third Intermediate Period - the bodies of Saite royal statues were based on models earlier than the New Kingdom. Torsos were sometimes modeled with a vertical depression, like those of the Kushites, based on the style of the Old Kingdom; but they might also be divided horizontally into the breast, ribcage, and waist, in a manner more typical of the Middle Kingdom. Throughout the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, the workmanship of royal-statue bodies and of sphinxes is of consistently high quality. It is greatly to be regretted that only one of these statues, a sphinx, still has its head.
A number of heads from Saite royal statues have survived, but only two still bear inscriptions by which they can definitely be identified. The earlier example is a fine stone head in the Musee Jacquemart Andre in Paris, which represents the third king of the dynasty, Psamtik II. The king is shown wearing a Blue Crown. His face is long; his eyes, set high above prominent cheekbones, are small; his mouth is full but small, and slightly upturned (Aldred et al. 1980: no. 125, 143). A standing statue of Psamtik II in the Louvre has been too heavily reworked, especially in its head, to be of interest as a likeness (Bosse 1936: no. 137. 53, pl. 7b). The only other Saite royal head datable by its inscription is the head of a sphinx, which is inscribed for the penultimate king of the dynasty, Amasis (Mysliwiec 1988: 49-50, 63-64, pl. 63a-b). The face is long and rather fleshy; the nose has been completely removed, perhaps to prepare for a modern replacement. The eyes and full-lipped mouth are rather large, as they often are on sphinxes.
Several decades ago Anthony Leahy warned against assigning identities to Saite royal heads or other sculptural fragments that have lost their identifying inscriptions (Leahy 1984: especially 59-61). Even a partially preserved name might be interpreted in more than one way, as on a head in Bologna (Leahy 1984: 71-3). A small limestone sphinx found in the Karnak Cachette, with a broken inscription that bears only the name ‘‘Psamtik,’’ has been assigned to the first of the three Saite kings named Psamtik, apparently because the workmanship is rather clumsy (Josephson and Eldamaty 1999: 67-9, pl. 30A, B). That is clearly a most uncertain identification. Over the years, various authors have assigned most of the uninscribed Twenty-sixth Dynasty royal heads to one ruler or another on no real evidence. Most have tended to ascribe examples with a long, rather full face, almond-shaped, slightly slanted eyes, and a slightly smiling mouth to Apries (for example, Aldred et al. 1980: fig. 126, 144), while heads with even longer faces, narrower, more slanted eyes and a smaller mouth with a fuller lower lip are attributed to Amasis (figure 41.4) (Aldred et al. 1980: fig. 127, 145). However, the only inscribed likeness of Amasis, on the sphinx described above, is much closer to the faces commonly ascribed to Apries, whereas the face on a dark stone sphinx head in Toledo more nearly resembles those ascribed to Amasis (Mysliwiec 1984: 222-4, pls. 20, 22 a, c,d). One should also note that those making such attributions have completely ignored Psamtik I, whose fifty-four year reign was the longest in this dynasty and who, like the other Saite kings, is known to have had sizable statues, of which complete bodies, or fragments, have survived.
None of these objections renders the proposed attributions impossible, but they do raise doubts, especially when one considers that the long faces with slanting eyes, usually attributed to the end of the dynasty, are clearly the most deliberate attempts to render the characteristic features of Libyans as they had long been shown on Egyptian representations of Libyans (as on a faience tile of the New Kingdom: Friedman 1998: no. 54, 93, 197). This suggests the possibility that they were earlier, rather than later, images of the Libyan dynasts, especially since the features later borrowed for royal representations in the Thirtieth Dynasty were usually the blander versions, which thus may represent the last images of the Saite dynasts.
World History
