New Kingdom, XVIIIh Dynasty, reign of Amenhotep IV-Akhenaten, Ca. 1353 - 1336 BC.
A sandstone relief depicts a high official originally sitting in front of a balance. He is depicted according to the new artistic canons: feminine breast, prominent belly, long and expressive face, thin arms with long hands and tapering fingers. His right arm is raised in a gesture of command, and his left arm is bent at elbow, with the hand gripping a scribe's writing palette. The man wears a transparent robe and thickly wavy wig, typical elements of clothing in Amarna Period. A hieroglyphic text divided into four columns shows the titles and the unfortunately incomplete name of the person. However, it is possible to reconstruct his name both based on the hieroglyphs, albeit incomplete and based on the titles: he is probably Huya, a high official of Pharaoh Akhenaten and steward of Queen Tiye, Pharaoh's mother. Behind the figure of Huya we can see the bust of a standing figure with a shaved head, represented in smaller dimensions than Huya. The column of hieroglyphs above it shows only his name: Meh, he was probably a servant of Huya. Along the right side, the fragment has a raised edge, which allows us to affirm that it comes from the corner area of the wall of a tomb. The relief fragment was part of a larger scene of weighing the gold of the tributes, an activity in which Huya in his function of “Overseer of the Double Treasury” presided. The piece is dated to the late New Kingdom, precisely during the reign of the “heretic Pharaoh” Amenhotep IV-Akhenaten (1353-1336 BC). In addition to revolutionising Egyptian religion, by imposing the cult of the solar disk Aten, he gave impulse to a new artistic style, characterised by exaggerated forms, called 'Amarna art' by scholars, from the name of the village of Tell el-Amarna, in Middle Egypt, the place where stood the ancient city of Aketaten “Horizon of the Sun-Disk”, founded by Akhenaten to be the new capital of Egypt. For similar see: La storia della scultura del Mondo, Egitto1978, p. 146 fig.2. This piece is accompanied by a report from Simone Musso, consultant curator for Egyptian antiquities at the Stibbert Museum, Florence, Italy, member of the Nuri Archaeological Expedition.
Size: 420mm x 410mm; Weight: 9.15kg
Provenance: Property of a London collector; formerly with Mayfair family S. A., acquired from a London professor in the late 1970s. This item has been cleared against the Art Loss Register database and comes with a confirmation letter.