Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)

JOHN GEE: Towards an Interpretation of Hypocephali

have been unable to classify due to lack of adequate photographs or line drawings. These are: Cairo JdE 35636 (SR 10693), Cairo SR 10698 (T 13/3/25/1), Louvre N 3525 CI

/3, one mentioned by Bietak in his excavations, which may be the earliest known, and is the only one made of gold, but which was unpublished,

31 and one mentioned by Birch whose location unknown but may have been in Florence.

32 Identifications There have been three major proposals for identifying the figures on hypocephali, those of Joseph Smith/Reuben Hedlock, Louis Speleers, and Edith Varga. The Smith/Hedlock and Varga identifications were applied to type III hypocephali while the Speleers method applied to type IV. The following table illustrates the correspondences between the different systems:-*Method If we ignore the ancient Egyptian identifications of the various figures in the hypocephali, we will construct an understanding of hypocephali that bears no resemblance to the ancient Egyptian understanding. We will, in short, not understand it at all. First, if we wish to understand the iconography of the hypocephali we must pay careful attention to those instances where the ancient Egyptians actually identify a figure. This will greatly improve the chances that our interpretation is correct. Second, identification of the figure will not tell us what the ancient Egyptians understood by the figure. That understanding will only come as we assemble information from ancient Egyptian sources of the proper time. Sources from the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom are only of secondary value to understanding what is meant by Egyptian of Saite or Greco-Roman times of the same figures. Although there will be some facets of Egyptian religion that remained constant, others changed, and it is the sources closest in time or space that will be the most informative about the meaning of the iconography in the hypocephali. M. Bietak, Grab des Anklt-Hor, Obersthofmeister der Gottesgemahlin Nitokris, Wien 1978, p. 205. Birch, op. cit. (note 7), p. 165.