The expansion of statue types during the reigns of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III has been commented upon by several scholars, and this was true for both royal and elite sculpture. Yet, it was not only new types but also new uses of old ones that characterized the corpus. For example, kneeling royal statues had been produced since the Old Kingdom, but Hatshepsut’s sculptors created them in over life-sized form to line the processional path on the second terrace of Deir el-Bahri. Likewise new attributes appeared in the hands of Hatshepsut’s kneeling images, including nemset offering jars with djed pillars affixed; she also wore the khat headdress on those kneeling statues, perhaps referencing her own divine ka. (Keller 2005a) Her Osirid figures combined a cloaked upper body with mummiform legs, and they represented the ruler holding the ankh and flail in one hand and the heka and was sceptres in the other. The four attributes combined the powers of the royal jubilee with those of the eternal divine realm of Osiris. Hatshepsut or Thutmose III introduced additional statues of the ruler presenting a libation altar, standing as offerer, holding a standard, depicted as king-falcon in a mixed image, and presented before the image of the divine falcon in a group. Headdresses that had been known in two-dimensional art were introduced in statuary, including particularly the khepresh, or blue crown, a type that became very common (Laboury 1998). In the reigns of Amenhotep II and Thutmose IV these new statue types continued to be represented (Chadefaud 1982; Bryan 1987).
As mentioned in the introduction, the expansion of statue types during the New Kingdom allowed these three dimensional images to convey powerful ideological messages of religious and political significance even without the inscriptions that normally accompanied them. A renewed interest in compiling and communicating knowledge characterized the early New Kingdom, and, beyond the evidence of academic papyri, this is attested in obvious display by kings and elites: from the Instructions to the Vizier, the Opening of the Mouth, the Book of the Dead and the
Figure 40.6 Amenhotep II before Meretseger. Granodiorite. Temple of Karnak. JE 39394. Courtesy Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Amduat, tombs became locations for showing collective knowledge as details of cosmic order (Assmann 1996a). Temples had traditionally displayed elements of rituals, but now also the participants and their roles, as witness the Red Chapel of Hatshepsut. At the same time, royal achievements were presented as the exhibitions of worldly (Punt, obelisk transport) and divine (Divine Birth) organization in the Deir el-Bahri colonnades exemplify. The so-called Botanical Garden of Thutmose III at Karnak fulfilled a similar role by communicating visually the information gathered by the king, and the Annals of the king paraded the process of scribal documentation on the battlefield to make an accounting of the king’s offerings to Amun-Re. Within this environment that monumentalized knowledge and its ideological uses, statuary too had expanded functions (Lankowski 2006).
The multiplicity of royal offering statues in the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty demonstrated the variety of the kings’ gifts and devotional roles, while the new wigs, crowns, and attributes on other sculptures alluded to divine aspects. Even more illustrative of the royal and divine interactions were the group statues, including such esoteric ones as that of Amenhotep II before the cobra goddess Meretseger (JE 39394) (figure 40.6) whose body and head with Hathoric horns and disc surround the frontal image of the ruler (PM 1972: 282). The striding king in the white crown was shown with hands against the triangular aproned kilt, in prayerful pose, and his feet are at a lower level than the platform on which the snake’s body rests. An additional allusion to Hathor appears on both sides of Meretseger’s body which is flanked by papyrus stalks and flowers, in a manner very similar to Amenhotep Il’s Hathor statue from Thutmose Ill’s Deir el-Bahri temple that depicts the child king nursing from the Hathor cow. (Saleh and Sourouzian 1987). There too the striding image of the king in the same pose and kilt appeared at the front of the statue with the head, horns, and disc of the goddess showing above him. Since Meretseger was also connected with Hathor at Deir el-Bahri, the intentional similarities of the two group statues may have been designed to link the origin and destination of the Beautiful Feast of the Valley procession. When taken together with the Hathor image as cobra on the east and cow on the west one is reminded of Hathor’s multiple roles as solar accompaniment, and we are tempted to read the images as enactments of the king’s own prenomen, a3-hprw-ra, ‘‘Great of Transformations is Re.’’ At a minimum the various elements of both statues communicate much more than the simple protection of the king by a goddess, when one sees that the king is fused with both deities’ heads and, therefore, emerges from her.
World History
