Artworks

A religious servant leads a procession, the hieroglyphs for 'priest of ka' either side of him. He wears a short wig and plain kilt, striding forward, two cymbals in his outstretched hands. A leg and an arm of another figure holding a jar behind. A border of banded rectangles, typical of the Old Kingdom, runs vertically on the right hand side. Some polychromy remaining. Minor surface abrasions, particularly to the top left corner, and some dendritic staining. The ka is the spirit or soul of an individual, represented in hieroglyphs as two adjoining arms bent at the elbow, usually raised upwards but in the present relief they point down to more easily incorporate the 'club' hieroglyph.

Provenance

Michel E. Abemayor (d.1975), New York, USA
Dr. Malcolm Hardy, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA; acquired 21st December 1964 from the above, accompanied by a copy of the 1964 invoice
Abemayor was a prominent New York City dealer and scholar. Many of his objects can be found in the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, The Royal Ontario Museum and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
North Carolina Museum of Art, USA; acquired from Charles Ede in 2015, object number 2015.41

Literature

For the hieroglyphs see A.H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs, 3rd Edition (Oxford, 1957), D32 and U36
For the figure with cymbals compare A. Eggebrecht, Antike Welt im Pelizaeus-Museum Hildesheim: Die Ägyptische Sammlung (Mainz, 1993), p.32, abb.24