Starting in the New Kingdom, ancient Egyptian artisans mass-produced faience finger rings in an array of colors, including green, yellow, red, and, most frequently, various shades of blue and blue-green. These vibrant pieces of jewelry made colorful additions to the Egyptian wardrobe that, depending on their iconography, could also lend protection to the wearer both in life and in death. The subject matter for such rings was diverse, ranging from images of gods and goddesses to simple decorative motifs.^[1] Other rings bore the names of Egyptian kings (see cat. 69) or depicted animals or sacred symbols. Of these, the most common was the Eye of Horus, which the ancient Egyptians called the wedjat (also spelled udjat in English).^[2]1

According to myth, in one of many contests that took place during Horus’s decades-long struggle against his uncle Seth for the throne of Egypt, Seth tore out the young god’s eyes. Thoth, the god of wisdom, restored Horus’s eyes, making them whole (wedjat) once more. When written as a hieroglyph, the wedjat takes the form of a human eye and eyebrow with a cosmetic line extending from the eye’s outer corner. The shapes below the eye—a vertical drop and a diagonal line that terminates in a spiral—evoke the facial markings of a lanner falcon, a reference to Horus’s falcon (or falcon-headed) form. (For more on the symbolism of the wedjat, see cat. 92.)2

Faience rings like this example were mold made, with the decorated bezels and plain bands formed separately and then joined using a slurry. Fired clay molds for ring bezels and bands have been found in great numbers at sites including Akhetaten (now Tell el-Amarna), the royal city of King Akhenaten (reigned about 1352–1336 BCE) in Middle Egypt, giving insight into the manufacturing process and attesting to the popularity of this type of jewelry for a broad swath of the population during the New Kingdom.^[3]3

The two-toned bezel of this ring takes the form of the right wedjat eye, which had strong associations with the sun.^[4] The bezel and “D”-shaped band are made from a lavender-blue-hued faience, with white faience inlaid into the front of the bezel to enliven the image.^[5] The fragile openwork spiral line descending from the eye adds to the elegance of the design of this ring, which would have been worn to promote health and wellbeing.4

Additional Views of Cat. 68

Provenance

Émile Brugsch (1842–1930), Bulaq Museum and Egyptian Antiquities Service, Cairo; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1892.5

Publication History

Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of The Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 85.
6