This statue represents the funerary god Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, a composite god formed of three individual deities of the underworld. It portrays the god as a mummy, bound in bandages that conceal his arms and hands and reveal only his face. His face and ears are covered with gold (now partially worn to reveal a reddish underlayer) because the flesh of gods was thought to be made of that precious metal. Gold is also a more specific allusion to the solar god Re and to the life-giving and restoring rays of the sun. Ptah-Sokar-Osiris’s eyes are outlined in black with long cosmetic lines. The inner and outer edges of his eyes (canthi) are marked by a spot of red paint. The area between his eyes and black-painted brows appears pinkish tan. His wig is detailed with bold stripes of blue and yellow, the latter a substitute for the usual gold, and has a horizontal brow band from which wide, parallel stripes rise and curve over the top of the head and around the ears to form the classic tripartite-style wig.^[1] The striping of the wig has a very long tradition in the decoration of coffins, reaching back to the early first millennium BCE.^[2] The god wears the shuty crown made up of two tall plumes with blue, green, yellow, and red stripes, a red sun disk outlined in yellow, and green corkscrew horns of a ram, an animal which, at the time this figure was made, had been extinct for more than a millennium.^[3] This crown is associated with gods of rebirth, especially Sokar and Ptah. It appears on personifications of djed pillars (see the front and back of the coffin of Paankhaenamun in cat. 99), symbols of Osiris, in which context it symbolizes the combined deity Ptah-Sokar-Osiris.^[4] The crown has further references to the unity of the daily circuit of the sun across the sky and its nighttime passage through the dark underworld, symbolized by the gods Re and Osiris, respectively. It also alludes to the concept of the eternal rebirth of the deceased with the rising and setting of the sun each day, because the symbol of the newborn (rising) sun is the solar disk, while the old (setting) sun is represented as a ram with corkscrew horns. The shuty crown on this statue is inserted into a hole at the top of the head. The two feathered plumes are flat in profile, while the horns are carved both front and back with undulating curves. The back of the feathers is covered with a yellow pigment, without the elaborate striping seen on the front, while the back of the horns is the same green color as the front surface.1

Additional Views of Cat. 36

The figure wears a false beard that is painted dark blue. No straps for the beard are shown on his cheeks. Red, blue, green, and yellow stripes on his neck represent a beaded collar or pectoral. The chest is entirely covered with the representation of a very wide collar that consists of beads in the form of open and closed lotuses, rosettes, geometric shapes, and a final line of teardrop-shaped beads.^[5] The flowers are another allusion to nature and regeneration. The collar is shown with large clasps in the form of falcon heads, topped with a sun disk on each shoulder—hence its name, falcon collar (wesekh n bik).^[6] Examples of these falcon clasps (also called terminals) are known from the Middle Kingdom onward, and many are fashioned, as represented here, of gold with inlaid eyes.2

The body of the god is covered in a design that represents a net of light and dark blue and yellow beads arranged in a diamond pattern, here shown over the representation of red linen wrappings. The figure closely imitates features exhibited by contemporaneous coffins, including: a very wide collar that covered the entire chest of the representation of the deceased; the use of bead nets (see cat. 105 for such a net); a lack of detail in the arms and hands; and a pedestal under the figure’s feet.^[7]3

The body and base are each carved from a block of wood. A square tenon affixes the statue to the base. A rectangle on the top of the base is a cover for the cavity into which a funerary figurine or a small papyrus would have been placed. The wood was covered with a thin preparation layer of calcium carbonate and then painted using a gum-based medium.^[8] The sides and top of the base are painted with geometric patterns. The center top is blue-green to represent a pool, a reference to the Nun, the waters from which life began. The sides have a rectilinear pattern known as a “palace façade” that represents the niching that surrounded sacred spaces and which also appears on early stone sarcophagi. Some other examples of these statues have little figurines of jackals or falcons on the base, imitating contemporaneous coffins. The base is thus simultaneously a coffin and a place of rebirth and regeneration for the object that was enclosed within it.4

Function

This type of statue was intended to hold a small figurine or a papyrus that was inscribed with spells from the Book of the Dead or other underworld books. These elaborate containers in the form of the god were an element of the furnishings of private tombs from the late New Kingdom up to the first century BCE.^[9] Some were made in two parts like miniature coffins, but most have only a cavity within the body or base. In the first millennium BCE, when tomb furnishings became much less diverse and numerous, these figurines remained a standard part of the tomb goods, indicating a continuity in the beliefs regarding their role in cult.^[10] These Ptah-Sokar-Osiris figurines were placed near the coffin along with one or more boxes for shabtis, a round-topped, wood stela, and a wood box for canopic jars.^[11]5

By about 700 BCE, these statues usually held not a papyrus but a small figurine of Osiris called a “corn mummy,” which was formed of mud mixed with grain that was intended to germinate, symbolizing the revivification of the dead.^[12]6

Texts

The single line of hieroglyphs on the front of the statue is a recitation of Osiris (rather than of the composite god Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, as would be expected) granting that funerary offerings be given to the deceased. It reads: “Words said by Osiris, Foremost of the West, the Great God, Lord of Abydos. May he give a voice offering [to] the Hathor Asetirdis, daughter of Wesementjenu, true of voice.”^[13]7

The text on the back, running from the bottom of the wig to the base, is the standard offering formula calling upon the king to grant that Osiris will give offerings to the deceased: “[A gift that the king gives] to Osiris, Foremost of the West, the Great God, Lord of Abydos, that he [the god] might give a voice offering of bread, beer, oxen and fowl, and every good and [pure] thing upon which a god lives [to] the Hathor Asetirdis, daughter of Wesementjenu, true of voice, living.”8

According to these texts, the owner of this statue was a woman named Asetirdis (Isis is the one who made her).^[14] Asetirdis is referred to as the “Hathor,” rather than Osiris. From about 400 BCE into the Ptolemaic era, and more consistently in the Roman Period, deceased women were assimilated to the goddess Hathor rather than the god Osiris.^[15] This was not a less prestigious sense of the divinization of the deceased; rather, it was a way for a woman to retain her gender and also to create a complementary pairing with the male god, symbolically creating a sexual partnership to continue the eternal cycle of regeneration.9

The underlying theology and function of this type of funerary figurine is related to, yet distinct from, shabtis (see cats. 37–42). However, an example of a Ptah-Sokar-Osiris statue in Leiden bears the shabti formula, indicating that even an ancient craftsman confused the two types of objects.^[16]10

Provenance

Christie’s, New York, Antiquities, June 5, 1998, lot 61 (unsold). Acquired by Phoenix Ancient Art, S.A., Geneva, Switzerland; given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2002.11

Publication History

Christie’s, New York, Antiquities, sale cat., (Christie’s, New York, June 5, 1998), lot 61.12

Elizabeth Feery, “Statue of Osiris,” in “Notable Quotations at the Art Institute of Chicago,” special issue, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 29, no. 2 (2003): 52–53, 95.13

Francesca Casadio, Emily Heye, and Karen Manchester, “From the Molecular to the Spectacular: A Statue of Osiris through the Eyes of a Scientist, a Conservator, and a Curator,” in “Conservation at the Art Institute of Chicago,” special issue, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 31, no. 2 (2005): 8–15, figs. 1–10; 104–5.14

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), 33.15

Karen Manchester, Recasting the Past: Collecting and Presenting Antiquities at the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2012), 44–45, cat. 2.16

Art Institute of Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago: The Essential Guide, foreword by Douglas W. Druick, 4th ed. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2013), 64.17

Clara Granzotto, Ken Sutherland, Julie Arslanoglu, and Glen Ferguson, “Discrimination of Acacia Gums by MALDI-TOF MS: Applications to Micro-Samples from Works of Art,” Microchemical Journal 144 (2019): 231, 237, 239, fig. 6.18

Clara Granzotto, Amra Aksamija, Gerjen H. Tinnevelt, Viktoriia Turkina, and Ken Sutherland, “New Insight from MALDI-TOF MS and Multivariate Data Analysis on the Botanical Origin of Polysaccharide-Based Paint Binders in Ancient Egypt,” Analytical Methods 16 (18) (2024): 2959–71.
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