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Description. This nude
figure stands against a pillar with locked knees, her plump left leg slightly
forward. Her cupped right hand holds a pomegranate to her breasts while
her relaxed left arm hangs at her side. She smiles serenely.
Traces of paint remain. Red paint enlivens
her lips, and black paint appears on her pupils, eyelids, and eyebrows.
Traces of black are also found in her navel, around her neck, along the
back of her left arm, behind her right thigh, and up along the bottom
of her right buttock. Straight black guidelines include: a vertical in
the center of the front of base, a vertical along the back of the pillar
and base, and six horizontals on the pillar. Guidelines also outline the
base in back, and one lies along the top of the base’s true right
side. Aldred (1973, 131) suggests that the presence of the guidelines
indicates that finishing touches had yet to be completed.
Iconography. During
the Amarna Period, some females are portrayed holding fruit, small animals,
or birds. The pomegranate, a symbol of love and fertility, may indicate
that women of the royal family replaced goddesses associated with love
and fertility, who were prohibited under the Aten religion (Aldred 1973,
131). Therefore, the statuette possibly replaced a temple’s cult
statue (Spanel 1988, 97).
Style and dating. During
Akhenaten’s reign, several features of the royal family were portrayed
in an exaggerated fashion (see Boundary stela
with Queen Nefertiti and Princess Maketaten). The statuette’s
elongated skull, plump body, and large sidelock identify her as an Amarna
princess. Amarna artists portrayed children as children and not as miniature
adults—another reason for the plump, childlike figure of the princess
(Aldred 1973, 55). Spanel (1988, 96) dates the statuette to the middle
of Akhenaten’s reign; Aldred (1973, 131) dates it later.
Scholars
have explained the figure’s elongated skull in different ways without
resolution. Arnold (52-3) notes that according to some viewers the heads
of Amarna princesses were misshaped by hydrocephalus. According to others
(Aldred 1968, 135), head binding in early infancy was responsible (refuted
in the 1960s by Kurt Gerhardt). Because the back of the head mimics an
egg’s shape, Arnold (55-6) attributes the distortion both to traditional
Egyptian theology and the new Aten religion, in which the egg symbolizes
the divine creation of the universe and the divine origin of life. She
asserts that the princesses served as symbolic embodiments of the divine
creation. Aldred (1973, 55) notes that the elongated head may merely express
the new artistic style; under Tutankhamun, portraits of Akhenaten’s
daughter, Ankhesenpaaten, display a normal, not a deformed, cranium.
The
shaved head and sidelock, an attribute of youth, often occur on representations
of Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s daughters, who frequently appear in
royal art with both parents, one parent, or by themselves. Sometimes thin
linen garments cover their bodies, but most sculptures depict the daughters
nude.
Identity. This is one
of the few surviving complete sculptures of an Amarna princess (Aldred
1973, 131; Spanel 1988, 96-7; and Arnold 60). Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s
chief wife, bore six of the nine “Beloved King’s Daughters of
His Flesh.” The eldest, Meretaten, “the Aten’s Beloved,”
married Smenkhkare, Akhenaten’s successor. Maketaten, “She Whom
the Aten Protects,” probably died in childbirth and was buried in
the Royal Tombs of Amarna (see Boundary stela
with Queen Nefertiti and Princess Maketaten). Ankhesenpaaten, “May
She Live for the Aten,” became Tutankhamun’s wife, changing
her name to Ankhesenamun during his reign. The fourth daughter, Nefernefruaten-Tasherit,
or Nefernefruaten the Younger, took her name from her mother. Born in
about Year 9 of Akhenaten’s reign, Nefernefrure’s name means
“the Perfect One of the Sun’s Perfection.” The death of
Nefertiti’s last daughter, Setepenre, “She Whom the Sun Has
Chosen,” perhaps resulted from an epidemic (Arnold 10-4). Without
inscriptions on either the base or pillar, the Nelson-Atkins figure cannot
be positively identified.
Published: Handbook
1949, 16; Handbook
1959, 20; Emma Hall, “Some Ancient Egyptian Sculpture in American
Museums,” Apollo 88 (July 1968), 4-17; Aldred
1973, 131; Handbook
1973, 28; Spanel 1988, 96-7;
Handbook
1993, 113; Dorothea Arnold, The Royal Women of Amarna (New
York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), 60.
Other cited sources:
Cyril Aldred, Akhenaten: Pharaoh of Egypt—a New Study (New
York: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1968).
Other useful sources: Jack
Phillips, “Sculpture Ateliers of Akhenaten: An examination of two
studio-complexes in the City of the Sun-Disk,” in Amarna Letters:
Essays on Ancient Egypt, ca. 1390-1310 B.C. I (San Francisco: KMT
Communications, 1991), 31-40.
(CS)
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