Introduction

There is a display-case somewhere towards the end of every museum’s Egyptian collection in which ten or twenty terracotta figurines are displayed. Many are nude or display genitalia; their crudely sculpted faces grimace, while their bodies are mottled with the remains of red and white paint. These are the images of the gods that Egyptians of the Graeco-Roman Period bought at temple festivals and kept in their houses and buried with their dead: Isis, voluptuous as Aphrodite or demurely robed as Demeter; Horus as Harpokrates, a pudgy infant with a pot or a goose at his side; Bes, a grimacing dwarf with a sword or a torch; the proudly bearded bust of Sarapis. Museum-goers generally have little idea what to do with these popular interpretations of the great gods, the same ones that in prior galleries had been displayed in monumental scale on thrones or reliefs. And yet each terracotta, studied carefully, reveals the earnest engagement of a local artisan in the meaning and function of the temple gods for everyday life. What is more, each reveals the multiple uses to which Hellenistic style - the approach to the human figure inherited from Greek and Roman tradition - was put in every workshop to draw out the meanings of gods.

Let us take three examples: the child Harpokrates stands, nude, holding a pot, his finger to his mouth, his hair shaved but for a sidelock. If the finger position and sidelock were traditional features in the iconography of the child, visible in relief on most temples that celebrated child gods, here his body stands naturally, casually, and most importantly in a frontal position. Hellenistic style contributes an infantile fleshiness to his body and a sexuality, signified in the clearly visible penis between his legs. He is child and masculinity in combination. He is also, apparently, celebration, for the pot holds something sweet and delicious - a festival food that children enjoy at the Harpokrateia each year? The figure beckons the viewer to taste and participate, to behold and enjoy the many aspects and powers of his body. He is Harpokrates the child sprung off the temple relief, and he is a real child in the round;

Figure 28.1 Harpokrates figurine (Dunand 1990: no. 134). © Musee du Louvre/Pierre et Maurice Chuzeville.

He is male potency, and he is the child born of male potency. Some workshop brought together both Egyptian and Greek conceptualizations of divinity to make an image that conveyed the fullness of Harpokrates’ meaning.

The goddess Isis, in traditional crown and holding the traditional accoutrements of uraeus and situlus, stands looking at us from a pedestal, her centrally gathered Egyptian dress open on one side to expose her right breast. In this frontal pose what impresses us are the roundness of her body - belly and face - and the directness of her gaze, a powerful iconographic strategy once reserved almost exclusively for the protective deities Hathor and Bes. This is Isis as radiating protector, as watcher, but what immediately draws the modern museum-goer’s eyes is not Isis’s woman’s body; it is the snake’s tail that coils demurely from beneath her dress. This striking elision of Isis and serpent - in some related terracottas the snake’s body dominates, with only a crowned bust of Isis appearing on top - would immediately have marked this image as a combination of Isis and Thermouthis, the Fayumic goddess Renenutet, commonly portrayed in serpentine form. In three-dimensional terracottas, then, Thermouthis becomes Isis, and Isis - great goddess of kingship and borders, of cosmos and fortune - becomes localized as Thermouthis. A foreign technique allows the identification of a regional goddess and a national, even cosmic goddess.

Figure 28.2 Isis-Thermouthis figurine (Dunand 1990: no. 388). © Musee du Louvre/Pierre et Maurice Chuzeville.

With his traditional grimace, beard, and feathered crown, the god Bes stands on a pedestal holding a shield and raised sword. His origins obscure, his status peripheral to official temples, Bes pertained to sleep and dreams, to sexuality and fertility, and to protection of children and home. Here we see him in his protective guise, but, if once he could repel the forces of danger simply through his grimacing face and squat, nude posture (suggesting a lion), here his ancient features have been augmented with sword, shield, warrior costume, and a helmet beneath his feather crown. He is Bes the soldier, reflecting a new Egyptian image of protective power developed through the centuries of Greek and Roman rule, but also an image of Bes rendered familiar to people of Greek or Roman heritage living and seeking protection for their homes in an Egyptian environment. His shield is Galatian, however, not Roman, suggesting a Barbarian from the Roman perspective instead of the southern tribes that Bes had traditionally recalled. His strength comes from this new frontier.

Much like Internet, billboards, and the English language in the contemporary third world, Hellenism was not so much a new culture in Egypt as a way for Egypt and Egyptians to understand their culture. In the case of the terracottas, Hellenism’s representational technologies and idioms allowed new ways of interpreting and directing the powers of the gods. While temples adhered - through the Roman Period - to archaic traditions of representing gods and rulers on their walls, the

Figure 28.3 Bes Militant figurine (Dunand 1990: no. 31). © Mus{;e du Louvre/Pierre et Maurice Chuzeville.

Religious world beyond those walls, the workshops and markets, festivals and processions, and village and urban cultures increasingly imagined their gods through the multiple dimensions and poses that Hellenism provided. Local deities came to assume the guise of cosmic rulers, and that cosmos embraced the whole Mediterranean world and the stars. National deities assumed imperial guise, radiating the authority of rulership that Roman military hegemony articulated. The mysteriously archaic iconographies cultivated by local temples and craftsmen assumed an updated, familiar guise, available and relevant for the increasingly multicultural society of the GraecoRoman era.

It is for these reasons that any attempt to understand Egyptian religion in the Graeco-Roman Period, especially that beyond the temple walls, must take Hellenism as part of the picture. From the use of Greek to communicate with gods to the depictions of the gods themselves, Egyptian was a bilingual and multicultural society in which the use of Greek words or iconographic forms gave traditional forms of worship an expanded authority and meaning. Yet at the same time it was an Egyptian society, in which traditional temples, gods, processions, conceptions ofdeath, and the Nile itself dominated the landscape and the people’s lived experience. The excitement of this period for the scholar, reader, and museum-goer lies in the discovery of both elements at play (see Bowersock 1990).