A body for the spirit
The Egyptians believed that every person had a ka, a life force that survived death and needed a body and food. The mummy was its first home; a statue was a spare one. If the body was destroyed, the ka could still live in an image that bore the person’s name. Before being placed, important statues went through the same ritual as the mummy, the Opening of the Mouth, which “woke up” their eyes, mouth and ears.
The clearest example is at Saqqara. In a small sealed chamber against the Step Pyramid, called a serdab (Arabic for “cellar”), a life-size statue of King Djoser sat in the dark, looking out through two holes in the wall towards the offerings brought to him. The original is now in Cairo; a copy sits in its place, and you can still look it in the eye through the holes.
Why so stiff?
Egyptian statues look frozen to us because they were not supposed to move. They face straight ahead, with the body arranged as if on two planes, front and side, a habit that comes from the way sculptors worked: they drew the figure on the front and the sides of a block, following the same rules as painting, and cut inwards until the drawings met. The result is a body that reads perfectly from the front, made for an eternity of looking at the offerings or at the god.
Most standing figures have the left foot forward, a convention so constant that a right foot forward is rare enough to be noticed. Many statues also keep a slab of stone at their back, the back pillar, often inscribed with the owner’s name and titles. It strengthened the stone and anchored the figure, like a wall behind a person.
Four poses, four jobs
A few poses cover almost all Egyptian statues, and each says something:
- standing and striding, for kings and officials ready to act;
- seated on a throne or block, for rulers and gods in their permanent role;
- kneeling, often holding jars or a shrine, for a king or official making offerings to a god;
- the block statue, from the Middle Kingdom onward, a figure squatting with knees drawn up and wrapped in a cloak, so that the body becomes a cube covered in inscriptions.
Kings also appear as Osiris, mummiform with arms crossed, along temple porticoes and as the colossi at temple gates. The size and setting changed the message: a giant at the gate spoke to crowds, a small statue in a shrine spoke to the god.
Stones with meanings
The hardest stones were reserved for kings and gods. Khafre’s seated statue in Cairo is carved from anorthosite gneiss, a speckled stone from the desert quarries west of Abu Simbel, more than a thousand kilometres from Giza. Hard stones like this, granite or greywacke can only be shaped by pounding with even harder stone and polishing with sand, which took months. They also last almost forever, and that was the point. Limestone, softer and easier to carve, was often painted in bright, lifelike colours, as in the statues of Prince Rahotep and his wife Nofret, found at Meidum in 1871, whose inlaid eyes still look startlingly alive.
A king and a queen, side by side
One statue shows almost everything at once. The pair statue of King Menkaure and a queen, found by the American archaeologist George Reisner on 18 January 1910 in the valley temple of Menkaure’s pyramid, is carved from a single block of greywacke, 142 cm high. The king strides forward with his left foot, fists clenched, wearing the royal headcloth; the queen stands beside him, one arm around his waist, the other hand on his arm. Both look straight ahead, beyond us. The surface of the lower part was never fully polished, probably because the king died before the work was finished.
Why are so many noses broken?
Walk through any Egyptian gallery and you will notice how many statues have lost their noses. Is it just wear and tear? Partly, since a nose sticks out and breaks when a statue falls. But in a 2019 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, “Striking Power”, the curator Edward Bleiberg showed that very often the damage was deliberate. If a statue was alive, breaking its nose stopped it from breathing; cutting off the hands stopped it from receiving offerings. Thieves and enemies of a king did this to neutralise the image, and so later did people who saw the old gods as dangerous.
Where to see them
The Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square in Cairo holds Khafre enthroned, Rahotep and Nofret and the statue of Djoser, and the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza displays many royal statues in its great staircase. The pair statue of Menkaure and his queen is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The Louvre, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art all have large sculpture galleries. In Egypt, statues still stand in their original places at Luxor, Karnak and Abu Simbel.
Sources
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “King Menkaura (Mycerinus) and queen” (11.1738).
- E. Bleiberg, Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt, Brooklyn Museum (2019).
- G. Robins, The Art of Ancient Egypt (revised ed. 2008).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline, “Egyptian Statuary”.
- UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, “Portrait versus Ideal Image” (2010).
