Day 33 - Black Thutmose I
March 16, 2018
Along with an enormous granite sarcophagus, Gallery 132 contains 13 facsimile paintings made in the 1930s. I haven't previously paid much attention to these paintings - after all, they're facsimiles, not the real thing, right? Wrong, and indicative of a rather snobbish and misguided attitude on my part, I think. The paintings are done at scale and apparently accurately reproduce the colors of the originals and the conditions in which they were found. And they are fascinating.
The captions discuss the representation of various groups of people, including the wealthy classes, laborers, and non-Egyptians (Nubians, Asians, etc.), with attention, among other things, to skin color. I knew some of this already - for example, that men were depicted as darker than women. If I'd thought about it, I might also have told you the reason: Men worked outdoors, women didn't (although surely this was true only of upper-class women?). Skin color was also used to distinguish nationality, obviously.
But who knew that royal figures were also sometimes depicted as dark-skinned? Today's object is a reproduction of a painting, 26" by 32" or so, of a black cult statue of Thutmose I; the original was made during the 19th Dynasty (1294-1279 B.C.E.) and found at Thebes. The statue is on a sledge that is being pulled by six workmen while at the same time it is being fanned by one man and receiving an offering from a second man. Meanwhile, five women are venerating the statue, or perhaps the cartouches bearing Thutmose's names in hieroglyphics. The figures remind me of those of the Amarna period, which preceded this painting by a few decades.
And the statue is black. At first it was thought that this was because the statue of Thutmose may have been made of ebony. But the caption further explains that royal figures were sometimes shown as black, the color of the fertile soil of the Nile Valley, because it represented rebirth and regeneration.
Similarly, in an adjacent painting, Osiris has green skin, also symbolic of fertility and rebirth.
Skin color was as multi-layered a phenomenon then as it is now.
The captions discuss the representation of various groups of people, including the wealthy classes, laborers, and non-Egyptians (Nubians, Asians, etc.), with attention, among other things, to skin color. I knew some of this already - for example, that men were depicted as darker than women. If I'd thought about it, I might also have told you the reason: Men worked outdoors, women didn't (although surely this was true only of upper-class women?). Skin color was also used to distinguish nationality, obviously.
But who knew that royal figures were also sometimes depicted as dark-skinned? Today's object is a reproduction of a painting, 26" by 32" or so, of a black cult statue of Thutmose I; the original was made during the 19th Dynasty (1294-1279 B.C.E.) and found at Thebes. The statue is on a sledge that is being pulled by six workmen while at the same time it is being fanned by one man and receiving an offering from a second man. Meanwhile, five women are venerating the statue, or perhaps the cartouches bearing Thutmose's names in hieroglyphics. The figures remind me of those of the Amarna period, which preceded this painting by a few decades.
And the statue is black. At first it was thought that this was because the statue of Thutmose may have been made of ebony. But the caption further explains that royal figures were sometimes shown as black, the color of the fertile soil of the Nile Valley, because it represented rebirth and regeneration.
Similarly, in an adjacent painting, Osiris has green skin, also symbolic of fertility and rebirth.
Skin color was as multi-layered a phenomenon then as it is now.
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