February 2023

Just after Christmas I went to see the recent hieroglyphics exhibition at the British Museum. I enjoyed it very much. Although I have never formally studied the ancient Egyptians, I was involved in planning schools sessions to go with exhibitions in the museum where I worked for so many years. The museum had a small collection of artefacts brought back from Egypt by the usual Victorian traveller. We only needed to borrow a few more exhibits from other museums, such as a mummy +case, to make a temporary exhibition which fitted nicely with the National Curriculum of the time. I never became very interested in hieroglyphics and hieratic, although I knew what they were. I preferred the exquisite paintings of gardens and everyday life from the walls of rock-cut tombs, the house models and the jewellery. But the recent exhibition at the BM drew my attention to a form of statue that I had never noticed before – block statues. They had a showcase full of them.

Block statues were a plain cube of stone, with only the head, feet, arms or sometimes just hands sculpted. The person, almost always male, was portrayed sitting on the ground in a squatting position, draped with a long robe or cloak which retained the cube form. Sometimes as little of the person as the head and hands were portrayed, sometimes the square block was shaped to suggest the line of arms or legs under the robe, or the limbs might be fully portrayed although still part of the block. Because there were large flat areas, much of the block could be carved with hieroglyphic texts.

It sounds like a clumsy idea, very utilitarian, yet many of these statues seem to me to be well-proportioned and quite graceful. In fact, I prefer the very minimalist ones, where only the head and hands and feet are visible, to those where more of the limbs are shown.

Block statues first appear in temples in the Middle Kingdom/12^th dynasty. By the Late period they had become the most common type of statue portraying non-royal but important personages. They were memorials to people such as priests, high-ranked soldiers, and officials such as scribes and treasurers. The limestone statue shown above, which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is of an official called Ankhwennefer (690 – 650 BCE), who was a sem-priest, associated with funerary rituals, and also a scribe and court official. CAVEAT INTERNET: he is not to be confused with the Ankhwennefer who was vizier to a pharaoh, probably Psamtik I (664 – 610BCE), and whose damaged statue, known only from a 1960 sighting on the art market in Cairo, showed a smaller statue of the god Ptah standing in front of him.  There was also a pharaoh called Ankhwennefer or Ankhmatis, who ruled Upper Egypt during the Ptolemaic period (200 – 186BCE) 

Sometimes there was a second head or a complete body carved into the same block. For example, the block statue of the architect and court official Senenmut in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin has a small head of Queen Hatshepsut’s daughter Neferure, whose tutor he was, just in front of Senenmut’s own head. A statue of Senwosret-senebefny in the Brooklyn Museum has a tiny statuette of a woman, perhaps his wife, carved into the front of the block between his legs.

The statues were placed in temples where they could share in offerings and witness religious ceremonies. The posture may have been intended to represent a guardian at the temple gateway. The lap of the statue could have offerings placed on it, and the text might ask passers-bye to pray for the individual, thus safeguarding his immortality.