Famous Ancient Egyptian Statues | Middle East And North Africa

THE SPHINX

The Sphinx (near the Pyramids in Giza) is the famous colossal statue with the body of a lion and head of a Pharaoh-god. Situated in a pit on the Nile side of the Pyramids, it is 242 feet long and 66 feet high and is reached by walking through a temple made of massive rectangular blocks of stone. The Sphinx faces east towards the Nile and guards the entrance to the Pyramid complex. Although it is a massive statue it is dwarfed by the Pyramids and barely visible in front of them from a distance.

The face of the Sphinx is believed to be a likeness of Chephren, the builder of the second largest pyramid of Giza, and was intended to represent the pharaoh reborn as the sun god. There was once a false beard, a sign of virility, and a royal headdress with a cobra. In the 2000s it was discovered that there is a solar alignment between the sphinx and a temple built by Chephren (Khafre). When the setting winter solstice sun is observed from doorway of an 18th dynasty temple built a thousand years later than the Sphinx, it traces the outline of the head of the sphinx.

Some think the sphinx may be a modified yardang — an unusual, aerodynamically-stable rock formation that looks like an upside-down boat hull, with its prow end pointed into the wind. Sculpted smooth and streamlined by desert winds and sand carried by the winds, yardangs are up to tens of meters high and kilometers long. [Main Source: Mark Lehner, National Geographic , April 1991].

Portraits of Menkaura

Menkaura Triad

Dimitri Laboury of the University of Liège in Belgium wrote: “The portraits of Menkaura are very consistent since his physiognomy can easily be recognized throughout his various statues and because, at the same time, they display a face clearly different and distinguishable from the one given to his father, Khafra, or the one of his uncle, Radjedef, his two immediate predecessors. This indicates without any doubt an intended and coherent individualization, even if the rendering of the eyes, the ears, the mouth, etc., that is, the stylistic vocabulary of his physiognomy is definitely characteristic of the artistic standards of Dynasty 4. [Source: Dimitri Laboury, University of Liège, Belgium, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology 2010, escholarship.org ]

“The famous triads of the king, from his mortuary temple at Giza, are especially interesting because they were part of a series and each of them displayed three faces: the face of Menkaura, of the goddess Hathor, and of the depicted nome, the latter two precisely replicating the features of the royal visage. As

Their discoverer noticed, every preserved triad is characterized by slight stylistic variations, which allow differentiating each of them, but are also perfectly consistent on the three faces of the same sculpture, denoting a single individual hand (or sculptor) behind each piece. The nature and distribution of these stylistic differences and, at the same time, the strong coherence of the royal physiognomy point to a very well controlled facial model of the king, which was dispatched among the workshops and faithfully copied, in spite of a few inevitable faint alterations caused by the technical and human circumstances of such artistic productions . So in addition to the research of physiognomic consistency, this unavoidable variability has to be taken into account in any portrait analysis of ancient Egyptian art.

“Menkaura’s portraiture is also of particular interest because, with its specific nose and facial proportions, it has deeply influenced the official depiction of later kings, like Userkaf, first king of Dynasty 5, or Pepy I, second king of Dynasty 6, who reigned almost two centuries later.

Statues of Senusret III and Amenemhat III

Laboury of the University of Liège in Belgium wrote: “Senusret III and Amenemhat III. The statuary of Senusret III and his son and direct successor Amenemhat III is one of the most central issues in the debate about portraiture in ancient Egyptian art. Since the nineteenth century, the extraordinary individualization that seems to characterize their statues impressed beholders and induced the well- established conviction that the ancient Egyptian sculptors of the late 12th Dynasty intended to portray these two kings in a hyperrealistic manner. This interpretation legitimated psychological readings of these effigies, which were thought to express the royal lassitude after a long wearying reign or even kingly sorrow. According to this widely accepted hypothesis, the stylistic variability attested in Senusret III’s and Amenemhat III’s portraits—as in the iconography of any other pharaoh—could be explained by the ageing of the kings, translated step by step into sculptures, and by the local traditions of sculptor’s workshops, which again is a long- lived assumption in ancient Egyptian art history that has never been convincingly demonstrated. [Source: Dimitri Laboury, University of Liège, Belgium, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology 2010, escholarship.org ]

Sensuret III

“This traditional interpretation is highly questionable. Even without mentioning its striking incompatibility with what we know about the historical personalities of Senusret III and Amenemhat III, probably two of the strongest kings who ever ruled Egypt, such a culturally induced reasoning can be invalidated by pure art historical evidence. As Roland Tefnin underlined, the unmistakable contrast between a supposedly old face and a perfectly firm, young, and powerful body is difficult to explain, especially for a hyperrealistic representation. In her thorough analysis of the entire corpus of the statuary of Senusret III and his son, Felicitas Polz was able to demonstrate that the latest datable statues of Amenemhat III—namely those from his mortuary complex at Hawara and from the small temple at Medinet Madi, which was completed by his successor—show the least aged physiognomy, as if the king were getting younger with the passing of time. Although not a single typological or physiognomic peculiarity can be exclusively linked to a specific site or region, both kings’ statues from one and the same series display stylistic variations in the reproduction of the king’s facial model, just like Menkaura’s triads. Furthermore, the emancipation from the traditional hieroglyphic abstraction and the very marked physiognomy that truly characterize Senusret III’s and Amenemhat III’s portraiture actually appeared one generation earlier in private statuary, which, at least this time, influenced royal art.

“Even if one acknowledges Junge’s idea of a “borrowed personality”—a concept that, once again, blurs the theoretical opposition between portrait and ideal image—the effigies of Senusret III and Amenemhat III cannot be considered the expression of “a love of realism,” which, to quote J. Vandier, would have justified “that new official portraits were executed every time the king physically changed, in a sense that could only be unpleasant for the ruler’s self-esteem”. They obviously convey a message about the nature of kingship as it was conceived at that time— in keeping with an important contemporary textual production on the same subject (cf. the royal hymns on both royal and private monuments and the corpus of literature studied by G. Posener in his famous book “Littérature et politique”)—notably through the use of some reality effects, which were able to suggest special qualities relating to the mouth, eyes, and ears, but have nothing to do with the modern western concept of hyperrealism. In this context, without the mummies of these two kings, it is impossible to evaluate the plausible resemblance between pharaoh’s real face and his sculptured portraits. However, a physiognomic convergence seems rather likely—simply because the same stylistic formula was actualized differently for Senusret and for Amenemhat. [Source: Dimitri Laboury, University of Liège, Belgium, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology 2010, escholarship.org ]

Hatshepsut’s Official Image

20120216-Queen HatshephutSphinx.jpg
Queen Hatshephut Sphinx Laboury wrote: “Hatshepsut. The evolution of Hatshepsut’s official image is probably the best illustration of how ancient Egyptian portraiture could deviate from the model’s actual appearance. As Tefnin has demonstrated, it occurred in three phases. When the regent queen Hatshepsut assumed full kingship, she was depicted with royal titulary as well as traditional regalia, but still as a woman with female dress and anatomy. Her face was a feminine version of the official physiognomy of her three direct predecessors, which was itself inspired by the iconography of Senusret I, who had reigned five centuries earlier. Shortly into her reign, this genealogical mask started to change into a previously unattested and very personalized triangular face, with more elongated feline eyes under curved eyebrows, a small mouth, which was narrow at the corners, and an ostensibly hooked nose. At the same time, the queen emphasized her royal insignia, wearing a broader nemes- headgear and exchanging her female dress for the shendyt-loincloth of male pharaohs, while her anatomy was only allusively feminine, with orange-painted skin—a tone halfway between the yellow of women and the red of men. [Source: Dimitri Laboury, University of Liège, Belgium, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology 2010, escholarship.org ]

“As Tefnin stressed, this second stage in the evolution of Hatshepsut’s iconography clearly expresses the queen’s desire to assert her own personality as a king. Nevertheless, the metamorphosis resumed rather quickly and ended in a definitely male royal image, for which Hatshepsut completely waived her femininity. Even if a few epithets or pronouns relating to the queen sporadically remained feminine in the inscriptions from her reign, her images are absolutely masculine from that phase on. They exhibit an explicitly virile musculature, red skin, and a physiognomy that appears as a synthesis of her two first official faces, i.e., a compromise between her very individualized previous portrait, plausibly inspired by her own facial appearance, and the iconography common to her three male predecessors, including young king Thutmose III with whom she decided to share the throne.

“This evolution, indubitably motivated by Hatshepsut’s will and need for legitimation, is of course a very extreme case, due to very exceptional political circumstances. However, it demonstrates that even the sexual identity could be remodeled in ancient Egyptian portraiture according to an ideal image, here the one of the traditional legitimate king. Hatshepsut was the only reigning queen in ancient Egypt who felt the need for such iconographic fiction, i.e., to depict herself as a male pharaoh. In regard to the rendering of the physiognomy, the reigning queen offered a very good case if not of a borrowed personality, at least of a partly borrowed identity. As the heir of specific predecessors, she integrated into her own official visage some of their recognized facial Portrait versus Ideal features to emphasize her legitimacy—like a physiognomic signature accentuating her lineage.

“A similar phenomenon seems to have linked royal portraiture and portrayals of the elite or high officials, which often imitated the former closely. Good examples of this kind of allegiance portraits from the time of Hatshepsut are the numerous statues of Senenmut—most of them, if not all, made in royal workshops—which followed the evolution of the queen’s physiognomy, whereas a few two-dimensional sketches provide a much more individualized face of he same person.”

Thutmose III’s Portraiture

Thutmose III

Laboury wrote: “ The issue of Thutmose III’s portraiture is very similar and parallel to the one of Hatshepsut, involving different successive phases induced by political claims and reorientations. But Thutmose’s mummy is well preserved and allows comparison between the actual face of the king and his sculpted portraits. [Source: Dimitri Laboury, University of Liège, Belgium, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology 2010, escholarship.org ]

“On the one hand, despite a rather important evolution through different chronological types, the iconography of Thutmose III is characterized by a few absolutely constant physiognomic features, i.e., an S- shaped chin when seen in profile, a significant squared maxillary, and low, protruding cheekbones that create a horizontal depression under the eyes. These are the same features that distinguish his mummy’s face, denoting an undeniable inspiration from the actual appearance of the king. However, on the other hand, other physiognomic details varied a lot, sometimes being in obvious contradiction to the mummy: for instance, at the end of his reign, during the proscription of Hatshepsut, Thutmose III decided to straighten his nose—ostensibly hooked on his mummy—in order to look like his father and grandfather, his true and then unique legitimating ancestors. This variability and the revival of his predecessors’ iconography show that the evolution of the king’s statuary cannot be explained solely by aesthetic orientations toward portrait or ideal image, or toward realism or idealization. There is a clear and conscious departure from the model’s outer appearance that allows the introduction of meaning and physiognomically signifies the ideological identity of the depicted person. The same is true for private portraiture.

“Just like his aunt Hatshepsut, Thutmose III instigated modifications and thus evolution in his portraits because his identity, his political self-definition as the legitimate king of Egypt, changed throughout his reign. Obviously, in the eyes of the ancient Egyptians, portraiture was more than a simple artistic transposition of the physical appearances; it was a pictorial definition of an individual and recognizable identity, beyond appearances and even despite them, if needed.

“Amarna royal portraits at Thutmose’s workshop. The excavation of the sculpture workshop in the estate of “the favorite of the perfect god, the chief artist and sculptor Thutmose” at Akhetaten/Amarna provides an exceptional opportunity to understand the practical modalities of conceiving a royal portrait.”

Bust of Nefertiti

Queen Nefertiti is well-known to us today because a life-size bust that shows her wearing a crown. It was found by a German team led by Ludwig Borchardt in 1912 during excavations of a workshop belonging to an Egyptian sculptor named Thutmose and is now in the Neues Museum (New Museum) in Berlin. [Source: Owen Jarus, Live Science, February 1, 2023]

Nefertiti's bust

Owen Jarus wrote in Live Science: The bust is mostly intact, but part of the left eye is missing, leading to a debate as to whether the missing piece fell out or was never put in, according to Tyldesley in her book "Nefertiti's Face: The Creation of an Icon". It's been speculated the missing eye is indicative of a health condition, such as a cataract, Tyldesley writes. There is also disagreement about whether this bust was intended to be a sculptor's model used for teaching or intended for display.

In the first known description of the bust of Nefertiti, Ludwig Borchardt wrote in his 1912 excavation diary: “Life-sized painted bust of the queen, 47 cm high. With the flat-cut blue wig, which also has a ribbon wrapped around it halfway up. Colours as if paint was just applied. Work absolutely exceptional. Description is useless, must be seen...

The preservation is astoundingly good. The erect portion of the cobra is broken off, as are two small pieces of the sharp upper edge of the wig on the right and left; on the left side a larger section of the plaster coating has flaked off; both ears are damaged, on the right some fragments have now been reattached. The inlay is missing from the left eye; since however no traces of a binding agent were detected in the eye socket, and the background is smooth and not in any way recessed so as to accommodate an inlay, it is certain that the left eye was never filled with an inlay. On the right shoulder as well a small piece chipped off; additionally, here and there scarcely noticeable scratches on the face, nose, etc. In several places traces of impure moisture, probably from rain water, which flowed contaminated through the already leaky roof and fell on the bust still standing on its shelf...

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons, The Louvre, The British Museum, The Egyptian Museum in Cairo

Text Sources: UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, escholarship.org ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Egypt sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Tour Egypt, Minnesota State University, Mankato, ethanholman.com; Mark Millmore, discoveringegypt.com discoveringegypt.com; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated August 2024