Page 186 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

THE LEVANT IN THE SECOND MILLENNIUM B.C.

At Tell cl Amarna necklaces were worn consisting of a series of blue glazed pendants
showing Bcs beating a tambourine. But in Egypt Bes was almost always wingless.
The question as to what liberties the Asiatic carvers took with Egyptian themes be­
comes peculiarly difficult to answer when we look at the other open-work panels. One
shows Anubis, the Egyptian god of the necropolis, as a wolf-headed man, in the same
attitude as Bcs and with a long sash round his waist. Until recently this seemed quite out
of keeping with Egyptian iconography, but it has lately been found on a head-rest of the
NincteendiDynasty (thirteenth century).95 The other panel (Plate 148c) shows a sphinx,
or rather a piece of sculpture in the shape of a sphinx. This is proved by the lines drawn
underneath the monster; they render in the normal Egyptian convention a reed mat or
tray on which such objects were placed, and which would be meaningless if the creature
itself were depicted. Sculpture of this type was offered sometimes as New Year s gifts to
the sovereign96 or placed in temples where the sphinx (which represents the king in his

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Figure 71. Ivory comb, from Megiddo

superhuman power) offered to the gods the objects he holds in his hands. In the model
followed by our ivory the object was a vase with costly ointment or incense covered by
a tall lid rendering the two cartouches with Pharaoh’s names. But the ivory differs in
two respects from the usual sphinxes of Egypt: it does not wear the royal crown, but a
fantastic head-dress with plant ornaments; and it has the body of a lioness, while the
Egyptian sphinxes are male.
The strange sphinx of our ivory occurs a few times in Egypt, in the Nineteenth to
Twentieth Dynasty, but has always been regarded as a Syrian figure copied in Egypt.97
It occurs among Syrian tribute offered to Seti I;98 and it wears almost always a round
medallion which is common among Syrian jewellery, but not in Egypt.99 On the other
hand, it occurs in Egypt in a carved gem of brown sard made for Amenhotep III100 much
earlier than any of the Asiatic instances. It may well be that the hybrid creature with its
fantastic accoutrements came from Syria and was introduced at the court in the second
half of the fifteenth century with the Mitannian princesses and their suites. It is known
sometimes to represent the Queen,101 and at a time when queens like Ty, the consort of
Amenhotep III, took an altogether unprecedented place in the official monuments
, our
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