Like their Libyan predecessors, the Kushite and Saite kings appointed royal princesses to be Divine Consorts of the god Amun at Thebes, thus maintaining the royal presence in this most important religious center while they governed from the north. The careers of two Kushite Divine Consorts, Amenirdis I and
Figure 41.4 Head of a king; said to be from Sais; Dynasty 26; greywacke, h. 35.7 cm.:Berlin, jAgyptisches Museum 11864. Photograph courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, Corpus of Late Egyptian Sculpture (Aldred 1980: 145, fig. 127).
Shepenwepet II, spanned most of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. Although the Kushites, like the Libyans, seem to have valued plumpness as a sign of feminine beauty, statues of the Kushite Divine Consorts imitate the form of Egyptian female figures during the Middle Kingdom, with long, narrow waists and slightly swelling hips, set off by the traditional tight-fitting dresses and long straight wigs. Like the Kushite kings, these women wore a double uraeus, sometimes with a vulture head between the two snakes, as on an alabaster standing figure of Amenirdis I in Cairo (figure 41.5) (Saleh and Sourouzian 1987: no. 244). Their faces were often somewhat more plump than on their predecessors, but their features do not seem to emphasize a foreign origin.
A most unusual small figure ofAmenirdis I in faience shows her seated on the lap of the enthroned god Amun. He is shown on a slightly larger scale, with his arms around his earthly wife (Leclant 1965: 105-6, pl. 66). Unfortunately, the heads of both figures have been broken off, so that it is impossible to tell whether they were kissing, as are the couple on the only parallel known to me, an unfinished statuette from Amarna that shows Akhenaten seated, kissing a wife or a daughter, who sits on his lap (Aldred et al. 1979: fig. 161, 174).
Figure 41.5 Standing figure of the Divine Consort ofAmun Amenirdis I; from Karnak; Dynasty 25, reign of Shabaqa; alabaster, h. 170 cm.; Cairo, Egyptian Museum, CG 565. Photograph courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, Corpus of Late Egyptian Sculpture (Saleh and Sourouzian 1987: no. 244).
During the Twenty-sixth Dynasty two Saite princesses filled the role of Divine Consort. Of the first, Nitocris, only fragments of three statues are known. The best of them, the hips and thighs of a standing figure with her right arm at her side, resembles the relatively slender figures of her Kushite predecessors (Russmann 2002: 1037-8, pl. lA-D). The only known statue of Nitocris’s successor, Ankhnesneferibre, is a standing figure, which is virtually complete (Russmann 1989: 182-5, 221). Her right arm hangs at her side and her left hand, posed beneath and between her breasts, holds a fly whisk, in a manner found on standing statues of the Kushite Divine Consorts and probably on the fragmentary statue of Nitocris. Unlike those figures, however, Ankhnesneferibre is shown wearing her hair in a short, round bob, and her figure is decidedly plump. Since similar features of hair and form can be found on some female figures of the earlier Libyan Tweny-first to Twenty-third Dynasties, one may suspect that Ankhnesneferibre’s statue represented a return to the traditional Libyan ideal of feminine beauty.
World History
