Comments on: Wilbour and the Stela of the Seven Years’ Famine: Part I /2010/06/24/wilbour-and-the-stela-of-the-seven-years-famine-part-i/ Technology blog of the Brooklyn Museum Fri, 04 Apr 2014 18:19:45 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.3 By: Tom Hardwick /2010/06/24/wilbour-and-the-stela-of-the-seven-years-famine-part-i/comment-page-1/#comment-1048 Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:08:04 +0000 /bloggers/2010/06/24/wilbour-and-the-stela-of-the-seven-years%e2%80%99-famine-part-i/#comment-1048 Hi Amy,

I’d say that most Egyptologists would now recognise the stela of ‘Djoser’ as a Ptolemaic creation without having to think twice about it – and certainly, as you imply, the figure of the king fits right in with Ptolemaic proportions and iconography. What the Egyptians – who must have been far more aware of their own visual heritage than we are today – would have made of the text and image is hard to say. Could they really have thought it was ancient?

The Egyptians were past masters of referencing their own visual heritage for artistic and political gain. Brooklyn is lucky to have a wonderful group of ‘archaising’ reliefs from the 25th and 26th Dynasties. This piece

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/3518/Tomb_Relief_Fragment

copies a scene from a tomb of the 18th dynasty, almost 800 years earlier; this piece

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/4281/Relief_of_a_High_Official

is inspired by the artistic styles of the even earlier Middle Kingdom.

]]> By: Amy Calvert /2010/06/24/wilbour-and-the-stela-of-the-seven-years-famine-part-i/comment-page-1/#comment-766 Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:51:25 +0000 /bloggers/2010/06/24/wilbour-and-the-stela-of-the-seven-years%e2%80%99-famine-part-i/#comment-766 What a wonderful series of letters providing a peek into the early days of Egyptological exploration! Even though this enigmatic relief efficiently revealed its later character through the grammar, the king’s costume points to a later date as well. This stela brings up a previously unconsidered point–in putting this scene into my larger database, I would regard it to be part of the Ptolemaic corpus rather than an Old Kingdom scene even though that is its supposed origin. Would you think that such ‘time shifted’ data would pose difficulties in analysis when comparing this to other Ptolemaic material/scenes?

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