Like many ancient Egyptian objects, this fragment of a lintel came from a tomb; this particular lintel was once part of the tomb chapel of an official named Iniuia. The upper section is carved in the form of a curved cavetto cornice that topped many ancient Egyptian doorways. This architectural element represents the unbound fringe of woven mats that formed the walls of many ancient buildings. Here, the cavetto has traces of red, blue, yellow, and black pigment.1

Below the cornice is a scene carved in sunk relief of the tomb owners Iniuia and his wife Iuy. Both wear elaborately pleated clothing. Their hair reflects the contemporary fashion for complex styles. Iniuia’s “duplex” wig is composed of longer curls topped by a shorter layer of hair. Iuy wears a very full wig of curls or braids, ornamented with ribbons. They kneel and raise their hands in adoration of the god Osiris and his sister-wife Isis. Both deities are seated on a mat, with their cloaks pulled over their knees, and their bodies reduced to abstracted silhouettes. Osiris wears the tall atef crown flanked by feathers, a false beard, and a beaded collar with a counterpoise at the back, and he holds the crook and flail, scepters that symbolize his rule over the agricultural and animal worlds. He is labeled “Osiris, Foremost of the Westerners,” the west being an allusion to the land of the setting sun, which was believed by the ancient Egyptians to be the land of the dead. Behind him, Isis, who is identified as “Mother of the God,” holds an ankh, the sign for life. Her headdress, in the form of a seat or throne, is the hieroglyphic writing of her name.2

Farther to the right is another representation of Osiris, this time dubbed the “Lord of Rosetau” (one of the realms of the dead), and the goddess Nephthys, sister of Isis. To their right, on a now-lost section of the lintel, Iniuia and his wife would have been shown adoring the deities, as they are on the left side of the lintel.3

The Egyptians favored symmetrical compositions because they evoked the idea of balance and harmony. Here, the center of the composition is marked by the two pairs of deities sitting back-to-back. Although Osiris is accompanied by two different goddesses, Isis and Nephthys, these sister goddesses are identical except for their headdresses and the brief hieroglyphic captions that identify them. Symmetry is also created in the orientation of the hieroglyphic text in front of Iniuia and Iuy. Because they face to the right, the signs that identify them and describe their actions face the same direction. The text, which is painted with Egyptian blue, reads: “Giving praise to Osiris, kissing the earth to Wennefer [another name for Osiris], that he may give sweet breath to the scribe of the Treasuries of Gold and Silver of the Lord of the Two Lands [i.e., the king], Iniuia, justified, and his sister [i.e., his wife], the Mistress of the House, Iuy, favored of Hathor of the Sycamore.”^[1]4

In earlier eras, gods were not represented in private tombs, but by the time of Iniuia, that rule of decorum had changed. In the Middle Kingdom, the king, a semidivine figure, could be shown in a nobleman’s tomb; by the early New Kingdom, both the king and the gods regularly appear in private tombs. Only by the later part of Dynasty 18 were gods depicted without the intermediary figure of the king.5

The lintel is in the same style as the upper part of the large, rectangular stelae that were in vogue at the end of Dynasty 18.^[2] Both feature a cavetto cornice above a register that shows the deceased adoring the gods.6

Life and Career of Iniuia

Iniuia lived during the reign of Tutankhamun, just after the reigns of Akhenaten (reigned about 1352–1336 BCE) and Smenkhkare (reigned about 1338–1336 BCE) in the Amarna Period. The Amarna Period is marked by Akhenaten’s attempt to replace the traditional, polytheistic religion with the worship of a single god, the Aten, who was represented by the disk of the sun. With Akhenaten’s religious changes came dramatic modifications in artistic style.7

Polytheism was restored by Tutankhamun, in whose administration Iniuia worked. Another shift in artistic conventions accompanied this change in religious practice. The tomb of Iniuia reflects the early post-Amarna style, evident in the softness of Iniuia’s belly, his angular facial features, and the elaborate clothing worn by him and his wife.^[3] Texts from Iniuia’s tomb and from monuments of other members of his family document his life and career. He came from a family of civil servants, being the son of a magistrate, Iuny, and his wife Wesy. Iniuia served as the Overseer of Cattle of Amun and High Steward of Memphis, combining positions in the civil service and in the temple administration. His wife was a Singer of Amun. They had four children. The two older sons became very successful officials, both serving as Scribe of the Treasury of the Temple of the Aten, indicating that the Aten cult continued to function in the north in the reign of Tutankhamun and probably in those of his successors Aye and Horemheb.^[4]8

Tomb of Iniuia

This lintel originally stood in a small, mud-brick chapel located above Iniuia’s subterranean burial chamber. The chapel, fronted by two columns, was divided into front and back chambers by low screen walls that were bridged by the lintel. The interior of the chapel was lined with stelae, one of which is in the Cairo Museum.^[5]9

Tombs of this period from the area around Memphis combine architectural elements of temples and tombs; this chapel resembled a miniature temple. As with other contemporaneous tombs, the chapel was topped with a six-to-seven-meter-tall, mud-brick pyramid topped with a stone pyramidion that showed the deceased and his wife adoring the rising sun.^[6]10

Iniuia’s tomb is located in a very prestigious area. Saqqara was the necropolis for Memphis, the capital and residence of the king.^[7] The grant of the land and permission to build there was, with little doubt, a reward for Iniuia’s service that was granted by the king himself. Iniuia’s tomb is immediately south of the tomb of General Horemheb, who later built another tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the traditional location for royal burials in Thebes. The quality of carving on the lintel and on other sections of Iniuia’s tomb suggest that workmen from the royal workshops were assigned to decorate it.11

The history of Iniuia’s tomb reads like a mini-history of Egyptology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries CE. In particular, it exemplifies how objects excavated from a single tomb were often acquired by collections across Europe and in the United States.^[8] The dispersal of elements from the tomb can be dated to the late 18th century when the lid of a shabti box is documented as being in the collection of General Jean-Joseph Tarayre, the governor of Suez and a friend of Napoleon, who apparently acquired it during the French survey of Egypt from 1798–1800. Tarayre’s descendants donated it to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1977.^[9] A spectacular stone anthropoid coffin from the tomb was acquired by the French Consul in Egypt and given to King Louis XVIII in 1823. It is presently in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, along with the pyramidion from Iniuia’s tomb.^[10] The latter was probably recovered by the Franco-Tuscan expedition led by Jean-François Champollion and Ippolito Rosellini from 1828–29. The two columns from the chapel which originally supported the Chicago lintel were removed by the Prussian Expedition led by Richard Lepsius in 1843. A more systematic yet still incomplete clearance of the area was undertaken in the 1860s by Auguste Mariette (who founded the Egyptian Antiquities Service). He recovered more elements of the chapel, including the large stela that stood on its north side and other sections of relief.^[11] Thereafter, the tomb was covered by wind-driven sand and forgotten until the Anglo-Dutch expedition, which sought to locate the source of some of the New Kingdom Memphite reliefs in the Leiden collection and started work in the area in 1975. They uncovered the tomb of Iniuia in 1993, after years of successful rediscovery and excavation of important “lost” tombs of Dynasties 18–19.12

It is not known when the lintel was removed from the tomb. The Art Institute acquired it in 1894.^[12]13

Provenance

The Art Institute of Chicago, acquired in 1894.14

Publication History

Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 41, 42 (ill.).15

Bertha Porter and Rosalind L. B. Moss, Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Reliefs and Paintings, vol. 3, Memphis, pt. 2, Saqqâra to Dahshûr, 2nd ed., revised and augmented by Jaromír Málek (Oxford: Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, 1981), 707.16

William Kelly Simpson, “A Shawabti Box Lid of the Chief Steward Nia (Iniuya) Acquired by General Jean-Joseph Tarayre,” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale 81 (1981): 326, 328.17

Hans D. Schneider et al., “The Tomb of Iniuia: Preliminary Report on the Saqqara Excavations, 1993,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 79 (1993): 4, 6n8.18

Hans D. Schneider et al., The Tomb of Iniuia in the New Kingdom Necropolis of Memphis at Saqqara (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012), 79, fig. III.29.19

Nico Staring, The Saqqara Necropolis through the New Kingdom: Biography of an Ancient Egyptian Cultural Landscape (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 312.20