Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed nowBy subscribing, you are agreeing to the privacy policy. Unsubscribe anytime.
Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Asian Art / Egyptian Predynastic Hematite Mace Head, Naqada Period
North Africa, Egypt, Predynastic period, Naqada culture. A small, dense spheroid of polished hematite, drilled through the vertical axis for a wooden haft and swelling to a gently flattened equator. The metallic gray surface carries a lustrous sheen where handling and abrasion have burnished it, broken by deep oxblood-red patches and veins, a natural inclusion pattern typical of iron-rich ore bodies. Mace heads of this piriform-to-globular family belong to the earliest Nilotic weapon traditions, worked from hard stones (hematite, breccia, limestone, porphyry) by patient grinding and pecking rather than carving. Weight, not edge, did the work. Beyond the battlefield the mace became the paramount royal symbol of dominion, the instrument raised above a kneeling captive in smiting scenes from the Naqada horizon onward, which suggests examples in prestige materials such as this may have served display or votive roles. The mace (Egyptian hedj) outlived its practical usefulness by three millennia because of what it came to mean. By the close of the Predynastic period the weapon had been absorbed into the visual grammar of kingship: the ceremonial limestone macehead of Scorpion and the great votive macehead of Narmer, both recovered from the Main Deposit at Hierakonpolis, are carved with scenes of ritual and conquest rather than sharpened for use. The smiting pose they established, ruler with arm raised and mace poised over a captive's head, persisted on temple pylons into the Roman era. Hematite held its own symbolic charge in the Nile Valley. Its name in mineralogy comes from the Greek for blood, and the stone streaks blood-red when ground, an association Egyptian craftsmen exploited in amulets, headrests, and cosmetic implements. The red inclusions banding this piece are a natural feature of the ore, not an applied pigment. Item # 204403
Estimate:£301.58
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorAsian Art
Estimate:
£301.58
Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed now
