The EES holds one of the finest collections of archival material relating to early exploration in Egypt at our offices in Doughty Mews, but it isn’t often that we get to show our more beautiful items off. While going through the Amarna Object Cards in the Lucy Gura Archive, office manager, Hazel Gray, thought it would be a good idea to let people know that they are here. To bring you as many of these Object Cards as possible everyone in the Office thought it was best to put one a day onto our Facebook and Twitter feeds, connecting them for ease of browsing through the tag #Amarnafortheday. So far social media viewers have been treated to four images a week including: stunning unfinished sculpted heads of Nefertiti, carved reliefs and comical sketches of tummies – but we have much more to come!
While deciding which of the cards to present we discovered this beautifully sketched record of a scribe and baboon statuette held in the Cairo Museum (above left). Registered on site at Amarna as the 193rd object found during the 1932 to 1933 dig season John Pendlebury described it in his diary as:
“a small group consisting of an ape sitting on an altar and a cross-legged scribe below – absolutely brilliantly done” (Grundon 2007: 160)
The statuette was subsequently deposited in Cairo where it was given the accession number, JE59291 – a number which can also be seen on the pedestal of the statuette in this EES archive image (above right). The entire object is 14 cm high by 11.2 cm long and is carved from steatite, sat atop a limestone base. The baboon represents the god Thoth, a deity associated with scribes through the wisdom taught in hieroglyphs. The god is also linked to the moon and the baboon’s headdress in this object card clearly shows both a full moon and crescent moon.
Unfortunately, this is listed as one of the items stolen from the Cairo Museum during the revolution of 2011 and it is not yet clear whether this item has now been returned.
To read more about Pendlebury’s life and excavations at Amarna see:
Grundon, I. 2007. The Rash Adventurer: A Life of John Pendlebury. London.
To visit the archives and see the Amarna Object Cards for yourself please email archive@ees.ac.uk to arrange a visit. We regret that they are not on display and only viewable by appointment only.
For more information about current excavations at Amarna visit the Amarna Trust website. Many of our Object Cards relate to items currently listed in the Amarna Small Finds Database, which is freely available to browse online. Publications of work at Amarna can also be found by clicking here.