This finely made amulet shows a snake-headed man with his arms at his sides and his left foot advanced. He stands on a rectangular base with rounded corners. There is a suggestion of a tripartite wig under his serpent head. His eyes are oval-shaped. Even in this diminutive scale, the artist has portrayed the idealized body of a man in the prime of life, with a broad chest, narrow waist, and long legs. He wears a knee-length kilt that emphasizes his round buttocks. His tiny hands are curled into fists and his thumb is prominently shown.1

This snake-headed man is the representation of the god Nehebkau, whose name means the “one who appoints the positions [of gods and the deceased]” in the afterlife.^[1] He is known from the late Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts as the “One Numerous of Coils” who feeds the deceased king. In the Book of the Dead, he is one of the judges of the deceased who appear at the weighing of the heart. In the funerary text known as the Amduat, he is shown as a double-headed snake whose tail also ends in a snake’s head.^[2] Many Nehebkau amulets were made in the Third Intermediate Period, when he was also depicted on the sides of the throne of Sekhmet (see cat. 78), and, for reasons that are not well understood today, on the throne of Mut (see cat. 75).2

Additional Views of Cat. 73

The date given for this piece is based on a comparison of Late Period gold amulets to those of the later Ptolemaic Period. This finely detailed example was most probably cast, while most gold amulets of the Ptolemaic age were stamped of thinner sheets of gold. A good parallel for the Chicago example is a solid-gold figure with an erect phallus from the Groppi collection.^[3] It shows the same level of craftsmanship, it is about the same height (1.8 cm), it has the same idealized body with the same degree of detail, and it has the same style of loop on the shoulders. In the sale catalogue for the Groppi collection, the amulet was dated to Dynasty 6 on the basis of a somewhat-similar bone amulet dated to the Old Kingdom (although this early date seems very unlikely).^[4] Elsewhere, the Groppi amulet was assigned a more plausible date of “surely after 1000 B.C.,” which also seems appropriate for the Chicago amulet of Nehebkau.^[5]3

For more on amulets, see About Amulets.4

Provenance

Reverend Chauncey Murch (1859–1907), Luxor, Egypt; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1894.5

Publication History

Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 132 (ill.).6

Roberta Casagrande-Kim, ed., When the Greeks Ruled Egypt: From Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, with contributions by Mary C. Greuel et al., exh. cat. (New York: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 2014), 103, no. 117.
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