The Gods Are Very Much With Us

In 1972 I studied the architecture of the Egyptian New Kingdom, or Empire, as my directing professor, Dr. Alexander Badawy called it, and our major text, A History of Egyptian Architecture, by Badawy, identifies these monumental scuptures at Luxor Temple as (see page 237)belonging to Ramses II and his wife Nefertari. (He then goes on to identify two standing statues at Amun and Amunet at Karnak Temple.) Whilst our ARCE OC group was examining these very handsome statues, our group was told that they are no less than Amun and Amunet, fashioned after the idealized likenesses of Horemheb and his wife. It's possible that Horemheb usurped these works and that their primary benefactor was Tutankhamun, then Aye. I've always been fascinated by troubling attributions and mis- or confused identifications. I spent some time examining these statues because something grabbed me when I was looking at them. I was struggling with the patterns worn by the female statue. If you are able to come in close to her torso and upper thighs, being careful to watch the tracery of the wing patterns descending down towards her feet, you just might be rewarded with yet another Amarna period design. This past Wednesday, whilst my gal Isabel and I were at the Tutankhamun exhibit at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, I saw these self-same wing patterns on the gold foil bodies of several gods and ushabti, incredibly carefully executed scalloped lines denoting feathers,and I couldn't help but instantly recall Amunet. Wing patterns on royal sculptures are common in the
New Kingdom. Into the Late Period, when private persons adopted royal customs and
elevated themselves into the hierarchy of royal status, the care with which artisans recreated these designs slipped, as did the media with which they worked. But the wing patterns of the earlier sculptures set the bar high for all artists who came later. Compare the exactness and care used in the inlays still extant from the Old
Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and then the New Kingdom, paying close attention to how they reached their zenith with the funerary objects of Thuya and Yuya, Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, and then Aye and Horemheb. Of course, we exact correlations because between the fantastic gold coffin of Thuya, and those of Tutankhamun, we cannot, to date, compare such objects with anything having belonged to later burials. But in the case of sculptures such as Amun and Amunet, we see the designs and they have survived the millenia, standing out-of-doors in the sun and moonlight of Luxor Temple. If you see something of Tutankhamun in Amun's face, I, too, see something there. If you see Ankhesenamun in the statue of Amunet, here at Luxor or at Karnak, then, perhaps, like me, you feel a grave sadness, relfecting on the shortness of their lives and the passage of time. The tenuous reign of the boy king and the usurping of his works by later Pharaohs may belie what came afterwards but the care and attention to the 18th dynasty patterns remain and there is nothing tenuous about their beauty. For all the time that has come and gone, and for all the time which is passing and will continue, we know for whom these pieces were designed, even if they are misappropriated by conflicting scholarly reports. They were designed for
Amun and Amunet and they are still very much with us.