This statuette portrays a priest named Wesirnakht (“Osiris is strong”), who kneels and places his hands palms down on his thighs. The details of the carving of the body are irregular; musculature is shown on Wesirnakht’s lower legs but not on his arms.^[1] The proper left side of his chest exhibits a more pronounced swelling of the breast than does the right. His nipples and collarbone are not depicted. His toes splay where they meet the ground, responding to the pressure of his body weight. He has a bland expression, with small eyes without cosmetic lines, heavy eyebrows shown as a raised ridge, a nose defined by a sharp vertical line, and a mouth pursed in an expressionless expression described as the “Late Period smile.”^[2] He wears a striated wig, the back of which is detailed with lines that form inverted “U” shapes. Small tabs of the wig rest in front of his ears. The wig falls to his shoulders and is undercut around the back, creating a clean line of demarcation between the figure and the pillar behind him. Rather than being positioned fully upright and symmetrically as was the norm, Wesirnakht leans forward and slightly to the left.1

Additional Views of Cat. 21

The figure’s back pillar is a characteristic feature of Egyptian statuary. No single, satisfactory explanation has been accepted for the use and persistence of this element, but among the most plausible is that it was intended to protect the statuette from breakage, although the pillar often stops at the bottom of the neck (as with this statue), leaving the head vulnerable. The pillar also provided a surface that could be inscribed with the name and titles of the owner of the statue, often with additional prayers for his or her well-being in the afterlife.^[3]2

Wesirnakht wears a pleated shendyt kilt, a wide belt, and a broad collar with three rows of pendant beads.^[4] The kilt has semicircular hems and a tapering front panel that stops short of his knees. The kilt is wrapped right over left, the reverse of most other examples.^[5] This style of kilt was initially associated with king and gods, but by the end of the Old Kingdom it was also shown on representations of elite men, and it is found on the interior of Middle Kingdom coffins of men along with images of other desired offerings. It is rarely shown in a nonroyal context in the New Kingdom, and never on elite men in the Third Intermediate Period. But in Dynasty 25 until the reign of Amasis (Dynasty 26), a span of about a century, it became a common article of clothing for high officials, especially those with priestly titles. After the reign of Amasis, the shendyt was replaced by a high-waisted kilt, but in Dynasty 30 it reappeared.3

Archaizing Trends in the Late and Ptolemaic Periods

This statuette presents challenges in determining a more precise date for its manufacture within the three-hundred-year-long Late and early Ptolemaic Periods because, like many other roughly contemporary statues, it has stylistic features inspired by earlier eras. As a result, one must rely upon subtle clues provided by the statuette’s overall appearance—like the details of the clothing, jewelry, and wig, and the orthography and vocabulary of the inscriptions—in order to create an overall profile that might help in assigning it a date.4

In the Late Period, Egyptian sculptors looked back to, and drew upon, 2,500 years of artistic output. Although we cannot be entirely certain what motivated artists of one period to look to another for inspiration, the contemporary political situation certainly played a role in archaism. Although the Egyptians did not write continuous histories, they maintained lists of kings, and many of those rulers left inscriptions on their monuments that commemorated their deeds and achievements. For example, the Kushite (Nubian) kings of Dynasty 25 (about 747–656 BCE), who moved north and reunified Egypt after the country had broken into rival dynasties, followed the canons of early Middle Kingdom royal sculpture as a tribute to those earlier kings who had reunified the state after the political fragmentation of the First Intermediate Period. Artists of Dynasties 25–26 imitated earlier styles of sculpture and relief, especially those of the Old Kingdom, and they revived entire genres, such as the portrayal of officials in the pose of a seated scribe holding a papyrus and pen.^[6]5

This statuette of Wesirnakht has proven to be a puzzle. The most authoritative work on sculpture of the Late Period refers to it as “incongruous and out of the ordinary … [it] does not fit into any category or follow the accepted rules for a period.”^[7]6

Many features of the Chicago statuette are consciously borrowed from earlier eras. As Russmann noted, “this little figure is one of the clearest examples of the archaistic trend of the Thirtieth and Thirty-first Dynasties.”^[8] The most obvious borrowing is the overall pose, which harkens back two thousand years to the first statues of elite men kneeling, their palms on their thighs.^[9] This form became popular again from the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE; however, it is not attested in the Ptolemaic Period.^[10] The broad collar is clearly archaizing, for, with very few exceptions, no jewelry is shown on statues of men in the Late Period, other than in Dynasties 27 and 31, periods of Persian rule when more elaborate clothing and jewelry were shown .^[11] The shendyt kilt is shown on male statues in Dynasties 25–26 and again in Dynasty 30.^[12] The striated wig, of which this statuette is perhaps the latest example, occurred in Dynasty 25 and into Dynasty 26 until the reign of Necho (610–595 BCE), when it was again copied from bygone styles. In these examples, the striated wig is never shown, as it is here, with tabs in front of the ears, creating another inconsistency between the Chicago statuette and the corpus of preserved material.^[13] Although its clothes, and especially the addition of the broad collar, are considered to be incompatible with Dynasty 30, the statuette cannot be Ptolemaic because of the pose. Vernus accommodated these issues in his dating of the piece by suggesting that it belonged to a period whose statuary is not well attested—the Macedonian Dynasty between Dynasty 31 and the Ptolemaic era.^[14]7

Texts

The text on the back pillar records the priestly titles and genealogy of Wesirnakht: The “one revered by Osiris Resy-Wedja in Buto, the Foremost One of Pe, Great One of the Double Uraeus Who is in the Sky, Priest of Horus Who is on His Papyrus, Wesirnakht, son of the Foremost One of Pe, the One who Recovers the Five [?], Horhotep, born of the Lady of the House, Tadiese” (fig. 1).^[15] The two columns of text are framed at the top by a horizontal sign for “sky,” 𓇯. Wesirnakht’s father, Horhotep, was probably the owner of a lintel from Buto, now in Cairo, dated to Dynasty 30.^[16]8

Provenance

The Art Institute of Chicago, acquired in 1910.9

Publication History

Art Institute of Chicago, Thirty-Second Annual Report: June 1, 1910–June 1, 1911 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1911), 19, 62.10

Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 58, 59 (ill.).11

Bernard V. Bothmer, Herman De Meulenaere, and Hans Wolfgang Müller, Egyptian Sculpture of the Late Period, 700 B.C. to A.D. 100, exh. cat. (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1960), 114–16, cat. 91, pl. 85, figs. 226–27.12

Edna R. Russmann, “The Statue of Amenemope-em-hat,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 8 (1973): 45, fig. 8.13

Pascal Vernus, Athribis: Textes et documents relatifs à la géographie, aux cultes, et à l’histoire d’une ville du delta égyptien à l’époque pharaonique (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1978), 191–92, no. 158 (as Oriental Institute 10243).14

Karen B. Alexander, “From Plaster to Stone: Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago,” in Recasting the Past: Collecting and Presenting Antiquities at the Art Institute of Chicago, by Karen Manchester (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2012), 38.
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