Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)
ZOLTÁN HORVÁTH: A unique servant statue in the Egyptian Collection
In this respect, the incised right hand of the Freud statuettes can be misleading, as it was Dobrovits who proposed that the gesture of the Budapest statue supports that the piece portrays an overseer of work. Despite the variation in the rendering of the hand —the fingers on the Budapest statuette and on F(reud) M(useum) No. 3282 are bent whereas on FM No. 3279 they are outstretched —all three figures coincide in having the vertical incision between the thumb and the forefinger. Due to its better state of preservation, FM No. 3282 clearly demonstrates that the incision is not secondary but coeval with the fashioning of the statue, and the wood-carver had the customary representation of a writing hand in mind when he shaped the fingers: it was a pen to be inserted into the slot. 2 " Servant statues in their capacity of a scribe usually do not have an elaborated writing hand. In the majority of cases, the hand has been simply drilled through and a wooden stick has been inserted, the position of the hole generally indicating the vicinity of the thumb and forefinger. 21 To conclude, there is no ground to doubt that the three wooden figurines have been intended to act as scribes. A word must be said, however, about some features that all three statues have in common: on the one hand, these distinctive features demonstrate that the figurines should be considered as one group; on the other hand, they dissociate them from the rest of the scribe statuettes, and ultimately give rise to doubt the authenticity of these artefacts. These suspicious features are as follows: the bagwig revealing the earlobes, the position of the left arm, the patchy colouring, and the clumsy signs painted onto the reverse of the writing tablet. Each of the three statuettes wears the same short, black wig that reveals the large earlobes. It closely resembles the so-called bagwig, worn by standing wooden statues depicting the tomb owner, a variant of which is also known to reveal the earlobes. 22 On the other hand, this wig-type, at least to my knowledge, appears nowhere else within the corpus of servant statuettes and is rather infrequent even in the private sculpture of the Old and Middle Kingdoms. 23 The funerary equipment of Wadjet-hotep retrieved from his tomb at Sedment could be indicative in this respect: his 30-cm high striding wooden statue is the sole example from the Old Kingdom —First Intermediate Period for the bagwig disclosing the earlobes, 24 yet the servant figurines, found together with the wooden statue, uniformly wear the bagwig, but covering the ears. 2 ' Another feature that casts doubts on the authenticity of the Freud statuettes is the position of the left arm, intended to provide extra support to the writing tablet from below. Realistic as it is, this gesture is unique among scribe figurines of model scenes:
