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Boston Museum of Fine Arts researcher Florence Dunn Friedman offered new interpretations of Egyptian King Menkaure’s fourth dynasty statues during a lecture at the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture on Wednesday.
Friedman analyzed individuals that appeared with Menkaure and how materials of the statues reveal their geographical origins, with a particular focus on sculptures with women.
Menkaure led the construction of the third and smallest pyramid of Giza in the 25th century B.C.E., and his temple complex yielded the most statues out of his contemporaries. The physical characteristics of the people in these statues reveal insights into the subjects’ societal standings, according to Friedman.
“Size conveys importance in statues of man and wife: the man is almost always larger than the woman, and thus the dominant figure. Standing men have left legs advanced. Women stand passively with legs together,” Friedman said.
Friedman observed a particular statue that defied this rule, where Menkaure and a woman are roughly the same size and stand on similar footing. Friedman proposed that this woman could represent Menkaure’s mother.
“We don’t know who Menkaure’s mother was for sure, but queen mothers in the old kingdom appeared to have ‘played a significant role in the competition for the throne and the succession,’” Friedman said.
Commenting on the larger collection, Friedman noted the prominence of the Heb-Sed motif in the statues, referring to an ancient Egyptian festival celebrating the reign and rejuvenation of the pharaoh.
“The overarching theme of the whole body of Menkaure’s greywacke material is the Heb-Sed, with the appearance being a subsidiary episode in the overarching Sed-theme of renewal,” Friedman added, referring to the dark sandstone that many of the statues were carved from.
Friedman suspects several statues originated from northern Egypt in the Memphis capital due to the type of stone used. “It had Tura limestone,” Friedman said, referring to the main quarry for limestone in ancient Egypt.
Friedman remarked on the similar themes conveyed by the statues she studied, such as one portraying the king sitting on a throne as opposed to another where he strides forward.
“Both project similar messages about a solarized king appearing before the world,” Friedman said. “Different statue forms can project the same eternal truths.”
At creation, these statues’ intended audience was “the gods and the priests who could read their encoded messages.”
“Statues were physical forms through which the dead could live,” Friedman said. “The word for sculptor is ‘he who causes to live.’”
The talk marked the third Egyptology lecture held by the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture so far in the semester. The next lecture is planned to take place on Feb. 25.
