Lot 3F
Egypt, Ptolemaic Period, ca. 100 to 30 BCE. A charming couchant wood Anubis, depicted as a jackal. The wooden sculpture has extensive remains of gesso, painted a deep red color with black-lined details giving him human-like eyes and eyebrows, a collar, and a ridge of hair. He sits in a perky but thoughtful position, with his ears up, his back legs beneath him, and his paws out in front. Size: 9.3" L x 2.4" W x 6.5" H (23.6 cm x 6.1 cm x 16.5 cm)
Wood representations of sacred animals and deities were often placed into Egyptian tombs belonging to high-status individuals. Similar ones were also made to grace furniture (which was sometimes placed into the grave as well). Anubis, based on the real animal, the African golden jackal, is a god associated with mummification and the afterlife, usually depicted as a canine, or a man with a canine head. Like many Egyptian deities, Anubis's role changed over time: in the First Dynasty, he was a protector of graves and an embalmer. In the Middle Kingdom, Osiris took his role as lord of the underworld, but Anubis continued to weigh the hearts of the dead against a feather to see if they deserved eternal life.
Anubis is also associated with Wepwawet (Upuaut), an Egyptian god based on the African golden wolf, with grey or white fur in contrast to Anubis's. Together, they were worshipped at the city of Asyut, called Lycopolis (city of wolves) by the Greeks. In 1895, American traveler William Vaughn Tupper described Asyut: "In the hills seen on the horizon are the tombs of the priests and numberless holes in the rocks once filled with mummies of the Jackal
the hills are now strewn with skulls and bones of the Jackals" (from the William Vaughn Tupper Scrapbook Collection, Boston Public Library).
See a very similar, but less bright, example at the British Museum (EA61506).
Provenance: Ex-private Lauwers collection, Antwerp, Belgium, acquired in the 1980s.
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#120885
- Condition: Loss to some of the gesso & pigment, tail missing, else quite excellent.
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