Collection Spotlight: December, 2024

Egyptian Objects

On display in the museum’s Founders Room

---

Spanning the rise and decline of what we know today as ancient Egypt, these seven objects together tell a story of craftsmanship, creation, and communication. This exciting new display showcases a selection of Egyptian artifacts collected by Dr. Leland C. and Paula Wyman. The Wyman’s extensive collection of art and objects was acquired by the Art Complex Museum in 1968 and is now part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Art was at the heart of Egyptian life, as artisans and craftspeople drafted, carved, painted, and chiseled the buildings, monuments, tombs, and temples that dominated the landscape. Carvings, sculptures, and paintings were created to venerate gods and royalty or to play parts in the intricate religious beliefs that governed Egyptian life. Art was a way of enacting change within this world and the afterworld, so each carefully crafted object here in this display was thought to have potent powers imbued into it through the combination of material, form, and symbolism.

Amulets are small objects that were made and worn by ancient Egyptians to invoke certain magical properties, and dozens of different types of amulets were used in rituals, carefully slipped into mummy linens, or worn as jewelry. The bright blue-green faience amulet (E-48), molded with hieroglyphs on both sides, would have been worn on the body, keeping close the message its words communicated. The material of faience was often associated with ideas of rebirth, as faience pieces entered the kiln dull and exited bright and colorful. Egyptian faience is a non-clay ceramic made of crushed quartz or sand mixed with lime, alkaline salts, and copper. Objects were modeled by hand or shaped in molds, often with details then carefully carved into the pliable material. To achieve the characteristic bright blues and greens of faience, minerals were sometimes mixed into the ceramic to form an outer glaze when fired in a kiln, and sometimes glazing materials were added on top of the object in the form of a powder or a slurry. After being fired, faience pieces were hard, colorful, and shiny. Developed during the earliest days of the dynasties of Egypt, faience objects would come to be produced extensively in factory-like environments. Similar intensive setups existed for the craftspeople carving sculptures, painting walls, and molding jewelry.

Colors transmitted meanings along with artists’ choices of materials. Green, the color of plants, had regenerative connections, adding to green faience’s amuletic power. Red represented both vitality and destruction as it was simultaneously the color of blood and fire. The color black similarly had a dual nature as the color of darkness and the underworld as well as the color of the fertile dark mud of the Nile River, symbolizing death, life, and rebirth. Blue was linked with water and the heavens in the sky, and yellow and gold were often associated with gods. These colors were used by Egyptian artists in many forms, from blue-green faience to naturally occurring stones such as red carnelian or blue lapis lazuli.

Bright colors characterized Egyptian paintings, often applied atop carefully drafted and chiseled wall carvings. The block of limestone (E-10) in the display is an example of such wall decoration, having once been part of a larger column of hieroglyphs and images. Perhaps part of a tomb wall or within a temple, the colors on this object are remarkably saturated despite the thousands of years that have passed since they were applied. Similarly vibrant is the sketch of the head of a falcon, carefully drawn on a chunk of white limestone (E-6). This ostracon, or piece of stone repurposed as a writing or drawing surface, holds a sketch on one side and a hieroglyph on another. Being that the falcon head is outlined very precisely and painted with color when most ostracon are only black sketches, it could be that this was a formal draft for a larger project, such as a tomb or temple wall painting. Both these stone objects show how interlinked art, color, communication, and craftsmanship were in ancient Egyptian life.

Egyptian artists created their colors with natural materials, choosing different chemical compounds for their symbolic colors, mixing pigments and grinding minerals. Minerals such as galena, or lead sulfide, and malachite, a copper mineral, were ground up on palettes such as this fish-shaped one (E-9), and used as cosmetics. Kohl, the well-known dark inky paint used by Egyptians around the eyes, was made of powdered lead minerals or antimony mixed with oils. This eye decoration can be seen depicted in the black glazed lines of the wedjat eye amulet (E-23), whose regenerative healing powers were thought to protect its wearers, both living and dead. The faience amulet of Anubis (E-12) also brought protection, as the miniature form of the jackal-headed god called upon his abilities as god of embalming and overseer of the dead.

The world was a place filled with peril to ancient Egyptians, both in life and in the afterlife, and so protective amulets such as these were very common. Created and recreated for thousands of years, amulets were often distilled down into their essences, so that stylized symbols stood for much more than may be apparent. The gold amulet (GE-1) combines the notched palm reed that Egyptians used to tell time with the figure of the god Heh, creating a composite hieroglyphic symbol representing the notion of eternity. The palms he holds in his hands as well as his face and body are simplified and stylized; the general shape of this amulet was enough to communicate its meaning. Gold was thought to be the divine color of the gods’ skin, and so this object carried much symbolic power, meant to grant everlasting life to its wearer.

Though the stone fish-shaped palette was made as many as 3,000 years before the faience amulets were created, all by unnamed makers, these objects speak to the long-lasting importance of Egyptian art and artists. Amulets, drawings, carvings, and paintings, through their carefully selected materials, shapes, colors, and hieroglyphs, communicated a great deal of information to other Egyptians, to their gods, and to us today.

See other Collection Spotlights in the Spotlight Archive.