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BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Porcelain & Pottery / 7 Romano-Egyptian Faience Amulets - Wedjat, Phalli, & Abstract Motif
North Africa, Egypt, Romano-Egyptian. A group of seven diminutive faience amulets, the largest a pale blue-green Wedjat, the restorative eye of Horus, its brow, cosmetic line, and curling teardrop crisply incised, the pupil filled with a dark bituminous inlay that makes the eye read at a glance. Five smaller amulets of turquoise-glazed faience take phallic form, several with ribbed or striated detailing and flaring bases, charms of potency, fertility, and apotropaic defense worn in life as readily as carried into the tomb. The seventh and most petite is a rectangular bead-amulet of cream-colored faience, its faces filled with abstract rectilinear paneling. All are pierced or shaped for suspension, the kind of small protective hardware that accumulated on a single cord at the throat. The Wedjat, the "sound one," is the eye Horus lost to Seth and had made whole again by Thoth, and its restoration is the reason the sign functions as a guarantor of wholeness and health. Egyptians read the eye in parts as well: the fractional Horus-eye notation assigned each element, brow, pupil, teardrop, and the two hatched fields, a submultiple of the hekat grain measure. Bitumen, dark and resinous, was used to fill incised detail on later faience and sees frequent use in Ptolemaic and Roman-period workshops, where it stands in for the black inlay of earlier, costlier pieces. Phallic amulets belong to a widespread Mediterranean vocabulary of apotropaia in which the generative organ deflects the evil eye through shock and laughter as much as through fertility symbolism. Their popularity across Egypt during the Roman period reflects the entanglement of Egyptian funerary amulet practice with Greco-Roman charm traditions, particularly those of the fascinum. Item # 204919
Estimate:£339.28
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorPorcelain & Pottery
Estimate:
£339.28
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