Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)

ZOLTÁN HORVÁTH: A unique servant statue in the Egyptian Collection

scribe wears a white apron and a black bagwig revealing the earlobes. The head is turned slightly left. The whites of the large eyes are white and outlined in black; the pupils are also black. The top of the head is unusually flat, and the forehead is protruding. The left hand has been restored; the lower body is cubiform. Much of the original painting has been preserved in excellent condition. One must recognise that most of the servant statues appearing on the antiquities market are de-contextualised artefacts, i.e., deprived of their tools and taken out of their immediate surroundings; hence, it is rather difficult to recognise what types of activities they were engaged in. Quite often it cannot be deduced simply from the position of the limbs. Nevertheless, the three figurines concerned here leave little doubt that each has been fashioned ab ovo to portray a scribe with a pen in his right hand and holding a wooden tablet on his lap (figs. 5 and 6). Beside the characteristic features that determine their overall appearance (the head turned slightly left, the raised and bent right arm and the schematic, block-shaped lower body), the practice of pegging the writing board with its profiled outline onto the block-shaped base relates them evidently to the corpus of small scribe figures in wooden models which made their first appearance in the flat-roofed granaries of the First Intermediate Period and became widely used in various inspectional scenes during the early Middle Kingdom.

19 7-8 FIGURE OF A SQJJAFTING SCRIBE WITEI A WRITING BOARD ON HIS LAP. LONDON. FREUD MUSEUM, INV. NO. 3297