EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
Significant composite statue
fragments from Amarna
Recent discoveries and identifications have contributed to our knowledge of the distinctive composite
statuary of Akhenaten’s reign. Kristin Thompson describes two significant unpublished pieces of
composite statues which deserve to be more widely known.
Most pieces of Amarna composite statuary representing
heads, limbs and torsos are made of quartzite; some have
surviving tenons which would have been inserted into
mortises in garments and bases, secured with gypsum.
Specialists have long assumed that the garments of
Amarna composite statues were made from a contrasting
material, and it is most likely that this would have been
a light-coloured limestone, though the possibility has to
be entertained that the garments consisted of some other
substance such as wood or gypsum.
Numerous limestone fragments from Amarna
representing garments exist in museums and magazines,
but until recently no surviving portions of mortises on
such pieces had been identified. In 2010 a right shoulder
in fine white limestone (UC108), on display in the Petrie
Museum at University College London, was found
to contain the remains of a mortise. The sleeve was
discovered by Petrie in his 1891-92 season of excavation
at Amarna but with no specific provenance recorded.
Beautifully carved with narrow pleats and the edge of
what was probably a broad collar of beads, the shoulder
is roughly life-size (height 8cm, width 9.6cm, depth
UC108. This sleeve, made from fine white limestone, came from a dress
that was part of a composite statue
6cm; the widest pleat is 1cm). The front of the shoulder
contains a pair of vertical cartouches with the late name
of the Aten (total width 2.5cm) and the grooves retain
traces of blue frit. The presence of the late name is not
surprising, since composite statuary seems to have been
introduced toward the end of Akhenaten’s reign.
The mortise has a rounded profile and perhaps about
a fifth of the original opening survives. Its surface has
been shaped to a slightly rough texture by pecking with
a small, pointed stone tool. Given that the sleeve has been
broken off at the bottom, there is no way to determine
how deep the mortise was.
The second fragment is a segment of a stomach (Amarna
registration number S-5995), almost certainly from a
statue of Akhenaten. The material is brownish-purple
quartzite and it is roughly life-size; height 19.3cm, width
16.3cm, depth 18.5cm; finished surface of stomach, 17cm
x 9cm. It was discovered in 1989 during the excavation of
the Kom el-Nana temple, now almost certainly identified
as the Sunshade of Ra of Nefertiti (see EA 33, pp.5-7).
The find-spot was in grid square AB21, roughly the centre
UC108. The scooped-out area on the underside of the sleeve is part of a
mortise that originally would have had the tenon of an arm, probably made
of quartzite, fastened into it
32
EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
S-5995. A front view of Akhenaten’s stomach, from a composite statue
that stood in the Kom el-Nana temple
The stomach’s right profile, showing the massive tenon that would have
rested inside a kilt, probably, like the sleeve, made of light-coloured limestone
of the collection of rooms on the Central Platform, to
the east of the hall with two rows of columns (see EA 1,
pp.20-21 for a photograph and reconstruction drawing).
The stomach was the only piece of statuary found in the
Central Platform, while fragments of several statues of
Nefertiti, Akhenaten, and the princesses were found in
the North and South Shrines; these included a few pieces
from composite statues. The area around the shrines
also yielded a surface find, a purple-quartzite foot with a
deposit of gypsum on its tenon (see EA 36, pp.38-39).
The stomach fragment is notable both as the largest
known piece of a composite statue and as the only
known portion of a torso from such a statue. It consists
of a smooth vertical segment of Akhenaten’s stomach,
including a very deep horizontal navel. The edges are
all broken away. Beneath it is a large tenon, designed
to be set down into a mortise in one or more pieces
forming a kilt. Presumably below the kilt there would
have been legs and feet of the same quartzite; tenons on
the undersides of the feet would have fitted into a base
made of a different stone.
The stomach surface represents a relatively small portion
of the piece. The tenon is deep and square, as the profile
and bottom views show. Apart from some large chips off
the lower right edge, it is well preserved. As the right
profile view shows, the tenon is not just a thin column
extending down from the middle of the stomach. Rather,
it extends far to the rear, and it seems probable that the
flat back of the tenon continued up along the back of the
torso.This flat rear surface suggests that Amarna composite
statues were not finished at the back. There would have
had to be some means of supporting the statue, given
the lack of a back pillar. The most likely explanation is
that the statues were slightly flattened at the back and
attached along the torso and garment to depressions in a
back panel extending up from the base. This panel would
have needed to reach only up to shoulder level.
These recent discoveries have expanded the corpus of
known composite pieces and revealed how they were
assembled. Limestone was used for garments which had
mortises firmly fixed with gypsum plaster into tenons on
the body-pieces. Royal crowns were probably made of
faience, while the princesses had granodiorite sidelocks
of youth. Frit or paste added to the body cartouches and
broad necklaces completed the colourful and realistic
effect created by these innovative statues.
q Kristin Thompson is a member of the Amarna Project at Tell elAmarna, registering stone statuary and relief fragments. The front and
profile photographs of the stomach are by Barry Kemp, the others by
the author. UC108 © The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology,
UCL. Thanks to Stephen Quirke and the staff of the Petrie Museum
for their help in the examination of this piece.
S-5995. A view of the tenon’s base, showing its square shape
33