Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 99. (Budapest, 2003)

LIPTAY, ÉVA: Between Heaven and Earth. The Motif of the Cow Coming out of the Mountain

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH. THE MOTIF OF THE COW COMING OUT OF THE MOUNTAIN* Four Amon-priestess inner coffins from the 21

st Dynasty are on display in the Egyptian Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. Three of them once belonged to the burials of adult females, and the fourth one to that of a young girl. These pieces represent different types, and are dated to the second half of the dynasty (i.e. the first half of the 10

th century B.C.), which reigned for ca. 120 years. Nevertheless, all of them show the same iconographie feature: a variant of the scene of "the cow coming out of the mountain" on one or both sides of the anthropoid coffin-case near its foot-end. A recent study on the scene

1 - and some previous ones as well

2 - highlights the precedents of the composition amongst the New Kingdom versions of the Book of the Dead. This article makes an attempt to put the 21

st Dynasty motive of the "cow coming out of the mountain" to a broader context. * One of the coffins (51. 2093/1-2)

3 in Budapest is decorated with variants of the motif on its both sides. The last panel of the left side (fig. 1) depicts the cow-shaped goddess crowned with the so-called Hathor-headdress, as she is coming out of the mountain on the desert edge. Standing on a mat-basement, she is wearing a pendant with the memi-counterpoise on her neck. A vase with a bunch of papyrus-stems appears in front of her legs, which is a customary iconographie motif of the scene. The cobra goddess with outstretched vulture-wings above the cow is labelled with the hieroglyph of the goddess Neith. Right behind the cow, the vulture goddess is standing on top of the hieroglyphs nwb and the "lower sky", and she is followed by another cobra which has just emerged from the mountain. The latter goddess wears an c

nh-s\gn on her neck. On the other side of the cow, each of the „Two Ladies" occurs again over a nwb-sign, and the hieroglyph of the „lower sky" is again painted under the cobra. * This article serves as a preliminary study to the catalogue of the Third intermediate Period coffins in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, forthcoming. 1 Heyne, A.K., Die Szene mit der Kuh auf Särgen der 21. Dynastie, in Ein ägyptisches Glasperlenspiel. Ägyptisches Beiträge für E. Hornungaus seinem Schülerkreis (ed. Brodbeck, A.), Berlin 1998, 5768. 2 Bonnet, H., Reallexikon der ägyptischen Religionsgeschichte, Berlin 1952, 279-280; Allam, Sch., Beiträge zum Hathorkult (MAS 4), München 1963, 65-66. 3 Niwihski, A., 21

st Dynasty Coffins from Thebes. Chronological and Typological Studies (Theben 5), Mainz am Rhein 1988 (henceforth abbreviated 21

st Dynasty), no. 59 - lid: type Ill-c (late 21

st Dyn.).