Introduction

By the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty the Ancient Egyptians had been making statuary for more than two millennia. It would thus be naive to describe the sculpture of the New Kingdom as simply the result of iconographic and stylistic principles established at the dawn of civilization. Any serious student of Egyptology knows that the Egyptians utilized representational art in ways similar to all cultures, including modern ones, and, therefore, the choices made by artists reflected time-sensitive societal organization. The act of statue creation could compress erudition, current religious notions, elite fashion trends, chosen physical traits, and artistic style into a highly sophisticated image of a ruler or a non-royal person. Statues likewise could display the imagery of the past in style or fashion and thereby create associations between contemporary kings and elites and their forerunners. New Kingdom sculpture, therefore, acknowledged the art from which it was born and sought to update it for the needs of contemporary culture and taste.

The features of the reigning king adorned all elite statues during most centralized eras of ancient Egypt, and the New Kingdom was no exception (Seidel 1980; Wildung 1982). to the changes in royal images from reign to reign, a stylistic chronology of New Kingdom sculpture is largely possible and can also assist in sequencing statue types in the absence of texts. Sculpture, being the product of artisans who worked in contact with both priests and royal officers, was adorned with textual identifiers and short or long texts that would have been supplied to the artists by the patrons or their representatives. The combination of the statue with the inscriptions communicated a larger message than either did alone, and in the New Kingdom statues bore lengthy texts far more often than earlier. In the New Kingdom many new types of statuary were invented that added to the communicative aspect of sculpture, and the texts that they carried included commemorative and religious inscriptions in addition to offering invocations. As such, statuary often functioned in the manner that two-dimensional monuments had traditionally done, e. g., temple stelae and tomb and temple inscriptions. The function of individual statues within cultic settings was, however, extended even further through their poses and placement, such that statues might have interactive roles, both receptive and performative. Seated sculptures of both royal and non-royal personages might thus be fashioned to receive offerings, as in a tomb or temple sanctuary; likewise kneeling, standing, and striding statues might suggest eternal cult activity by the dedicant. The discussion below will provide a chronological overview of royal and elite New Kingdom statuary in its cultural context and will seek both to describe and interpret.