ABSTRACT

Some years ago I published a comparison of two statuettes of seated scribes, one in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts for which I have been responsible, and the other in the Agyptisches Museum, Berlin (see fig. la).l I called attention to the similarity of the two pieces, so striking as to support the argument that they were produced in the same workshop, if not by the same hand. In that article I was able to document that the Berlin piece was excavated at EI-Amarna.2 Because it was in a style better associated with the reign of his father, this raised the question as to whether it was taken to Akhenaten's new capital from Thebes or produced at EI-Amarna by an artist who continued the tradition of sculpture from the time before Akhenaten's religious and artistic revolution. The implication for the Detroit statuette, so similar in style to the Berlin piece, was to date it more firmly to the time at the end of the reign of Amenhotep III and the beginning of that of Akhenaten. To this pair of statuettes I would like to add a third and similar statuette of the same quality and sensitivity. It is not a scribe, however, but a representation of Amenhotep III (see fig. IbV

The statuette is a small depiction of the king that was once described by William Hayes as representing 'a pathetically fat old man clad in a fringed and pleated overgarment of a type worn only by women'.4 It has, unfortunately, lost its head, but the characterization of the figure and the unusual garment are enough to have made it the subject of some interesting conjecture. The first published discussion concerning the statuette was part of the special supplement to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin which recorded the bequest of Theodore M. Davis, of which it was a part.s In the publication of the large collection which Davis left to the museum, Ambrose Lansing described the purchased objects separately from the excavated material. The figure of the king was part of the purchased material and only said to have come from Thebes. Lansing pointed out at that time the unusual costume, which he described as in a style which one would not hesitate to attribute to the reign of Akhenaten ' ... were it not for the fact that the prenomen Neb-maat-Re" is not erased. Only two conclusions are possible.