- This canopic jar was discovered in
- 1907 in this very mysterious little uninscribed tomb in the Valley of the Kings
- along with three others, because canopic jars come in sets of four.
- They are made to hold the separately mummified viscera –
- the stomach, the intestines, the lungs, and the liver – of the
- person who’s being buried. She’s just incredibly beautiful. She’s made out of this
- translucent stone. It has this
- veining, this wonderful, creamy,
- whitish-yellowish color. And then you get the
- beautiful shape with the high shoulder
- tapering down which echoes the human body.
- And then the stopper itself: the serene, oval face with the long, straight nose and the very
- full, sensuous lips. The
- slanted eyes, they’re very mysterious looking, and these
- arched eyebrows, they’re inlaid with glass. And that’s the only color you see. It’s very
- modern; a lot of Egyptian things would have been highly painted. This was meant to go
- into a burial and never be seen again. It seems to me that aesthetically
- this goes well beyond meeting the need of surviving into the afterlife.
- The first thing we want to know is, who is she? When we try to
- look at the inscription we see, oh, it’s gone.
- Someone has come along and gone ch-ch-ch-ch-ch
- and rubbed it away. Scholars have been able to reconstruct that this inscription was originally carved for
- a queen named Kiya. So then that’s the next question, is “Who is Kiya?” And she’s a very
- enigmatic figure herself. We know that she was Akhenaten’s wife. But then, just to make things more complicated,
- the head, the stoppers don’t seem to necessarily go with the jars. So what we think we’re looking at right now is
- the head of Akhenaten’s mother, Tiye, and
- the body of Kiya. The fact that the inscription was taken away would have
- rendered it nonfunctional. They were left
- in the tomb, but rendered nameless. Why?
- Everything you do in Egyptology gets questioned.
- You have to approach objects and
- theories in archaeology the way that I think you have to think about
- everything in life: you have to take the evidence you have,
- come up with a story that makes sense, but stay open.
- What we’re left with is this enigmatic, but
- beautiful, piece of art.
EnigmaJanice Kamrin
Canopic Jar with a Lid in the Shape of a Royal Woman's Head, ca. 1352–1336 B.C., reign of Akhenaten, Dynasty 18, New Kingdom, Amarna Period
Egypt, Upper Egypt; Thebes, Valley of the Kings, Tomb KV 55, Davis/Ayrton 1907
Travertine, blue glass, obsidian, unidentified stone
Theodore M. Davis Collection, Bequest of Theodore M. Davis, 1915 (30.8.54)
Egypt, Upper Egypt; Thebes, Valley of the Kings, Tomb KV 55, Davis/Ayrton 1907
Travertine, blue glass, obsidian, unidentified stone
Theodore M. Davis Collection, Bequest of Theodore M. Davis, 1915 (30.8.54)
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