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

ZOLTÁN HORVÁTH: A unique servant statue in the Egyptian Collection

silo. There is a socket in the clerk's block-shaped lower body indicating that a now lost writing board was once pegged onto it; see E. Martin-Pardey, Grabbeigaben, Nachträge und Ergänzungen, Corpus Antiquitatum Aegyptiacarum Pelizaeus-Museum Hildesheim Lieferung, vol. 6, Mainz am Rhein 1991, no. 1689; Breasted 1948, 15, pl. 13b. 0 Cf. the rendering of the writing hand on works of private sculpture portraying the owner as a scribe or on tomb reliefs and wall paintings showing scribes at work. E.g. the marvellous limestone serdab statue of Irukakhufu from Giza with a partly unrolled, inscribed papyrus-roll on his lap. Originally a pen, now lost, was inserted into the small hole between the thumb and the forefinger: M. Moursi, "A Masterpiece Scribe-statue from the Old Kingdom," in Festschrift für Jürgen von Beckerath, eds. A. Eggebrecht and B. Schmitz, Hildesheimer Agyptologische Beiträge, vol. 30, Hildesheim 1990, pi. 12b. For an overview of the writing posture, see Parkinson and Quirke 1995, figs. 21, 22, fig. III. 1 For an elaborated example, see a not fully published scribe statuette in the Louvre (inv. no. E 2709), formerly in the Clot Bey collection. The whole statue attests to an exceptionally high level of craftsmanship. It portrays a squatting scribe with an inscribed writing board supported on his knees. His right hand is raised and kept right above the upper surface of the tablet. The thumb and the forefinger are modelled separately, and a pen was once inserted into the space between them, see J.-L. de Cenival, "Les tablettes à écrire dans l'Egypte pharaonique," Bibliologia 12 (1992), 37, fig. 7. Servant statues with roughly-shaped right hand pierced through for a stylus: Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, inv. no. E 4139, from Beni Hasan, tomb no. 268; Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, inv. no. yEIN 1630, Saqqara, tomb of Gemni; London, British Museum, inv. no. EA 41573, Beni Hasan, tomb of Sobekhotep no. 723. For the British Museum statuette, see footnote 17 above; for literature on the rest, the reader is kindly asked to consult the Appendix. The pen is not an essential accessory of the scribe; see, e.g., the two scribe statuettes in the collection of Aluseum of Fine Arts, Boston (inv. nos. 21.409 and 21.808 from el-Bersha) each holding an uninscribed writing board, but the hand has not been drilled through. 2 According to the definition offered by Julia Harvey, the bagwig is "a short, smooth, full wig''' that "stands out from the head and thus cannot be confused with a shaven head or a skull cap". J. Harvey, Wooden Statues of the Old Kingdom: A Typological Study, Egyptological Memoirs, Leiden, Boston, and Cologne 2001, 9. This is type W.7a in her typology, see fig. la. Other wig-types also have a variant disclosing the earlobes: W.lb (a short echelon-curl wig), W.4 (a flared, striated wig, with parting, partly revealing the ears), W.4a (a flared, smooth wig, partly revealing the ears), W.6a (an echeloncurl wig in vertical rows), W.8 (vertically layered echelon-curl wig, with a straight fringe).