 Hi everyone, welcome to your daily serving of Barn's Takeout. I'm Karl Walsh, I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the Barn studying their Egyptian objects in the collection. And today I'd like to talk to you about a Egyptian statue head that has been perfecting the art of social distancing for quite a while now, since the mid-1990s. This statue head used to be on display in the Dutch room of the Marion building, the original building the collection was in. And this room was a small room that was mostly filled with Navajo tapestries and lovely hardwood furniture. And you can see that our statue head is perched atop a cabinet that was in this room. And both of these photos show the statue head and the one on the left is an archive photo dating to 1951. And the one on the right is a reconstruction of this room that was done for an exhibit at the Barn's in 2015. Now the reason why this statue isn't on display anymore is because this room was actually decommissioned in the mid-1990s to make way for an elevator to be installed in the Marion building to improve access. So most of the objects in this room have been in storage and are no longer on display at the moment. And it's really nice to be able to actually introduce you into this room and to see the statue head again. So this statue dates to the early Ptolemaic period in Egypt and this is roughly about 300-200 BC. At this time in Egypt the country is being ruled by a dynasty of rulers called the Ptolemies who were descendant from Ptolemy who was a general of Alexander the Great. And you probably know at least one of the Ptolemies already because the most famous of which is Cleopatra, Cleopatra VII who was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt before Egypt was conquered by Rome. So this is quite an interesting statue head and kind of exciting time period that it comes from as well. Looking at the statue you can see that it's made out of this lovely dark stone called diorite or possibly gabbro. And the features of the face are really finely carved and they're really well done. It's a really nice example of Egyptian stone carving. You can see it has these lovely almond shaped eyes with these little lines carved in low relief that represent coal which is a black eye makeup that the Egyptians were famous for wearing. He's also got these lovely stylized eyebrows that are basically just lines. He's got quite a big chunky nose and lips as well and he has this very kind of faint smile and I think this gives him a kind of a sense of kind of quiet serenity or joy as well. The features are what we call idealized. So this isn't actually supposed to be a accurate form of portraiture. It's not supposed to be kind of realistically showing what he looked like in life. It's instead supposed to kind of put forward an idealized version of him like his best self basically and it's also fitting within the kind of the traditional canon of Egyptian art that has been practiced for thousands of years by this point as well. So this is a very kind of specific intent for the statue. It's supposed to be kind of putting this best self forward rather than being an accurate portrayal of what he looked like in life. You'll notice that he's bald and that kind of seems antithetical to him being a most ideal form of himself but the reason for that is because this is communicating his specific role in Egyptian society that of a priest. Priests were expected to practice very kind of strict hygiene and grooming rules in order to be kind of pure and clean to enter into the sacred spaces of temples. So the reason why he has this lovely kind of smooth head is to express that he is a priest and that he is practicing Egyptian religion as well and that he's an important person in society. You'll notice that his head is still pretty kind of bulbous in large and again this is not kind of reflective of what he actually looked like in life and looking at the side view you can see quite distinctly that kind of rather exaggerated shape of the head it's really really round and looking at the front you can see that it's kind of bulbous and then on the rear as well you can kind of still see how big this head is. The reason why they do this seems to be, we don't really know really, it might have something to do with kind of expressing the head as a kind of show of wisdom or knowledge which would kind of fit in with the idea that he's a priest because priests kind of are allowed access into temples and they perform all these rituals and practices connected with gods that are kind of secret and not seen by a lot of people in society so that could be a reason but we don't really kind of know at this point but we have a lot of other statues dating to this period, the early Ptolemaic period of priests that have these really big heads and Egyptologists call these egghead statues for obvious reasons. So we have other examples of this type of statues and there are actually ones you can go see in places like the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Brooklyn Museum as well. Originally this also would have been a full statue so it would have been a standing statue, it's not just a head the Egyptians don't really do portrait busts of that kind so this would have been originally part of a larger piece as well. We don't really know who this individual is usually Egyptian statues will often have a hieroglyphic inscription which will name the individual and often have kind of ritual incantations or titles of the individual but because ours is just a head we don't have any remains of these inscriptions that could have been on it which are usually on the base. They're sometimes also put on what we call a back pillar and we could see in our example here that we have a really nice back pillar behind his head that would have run the whole length of his body and this is a space where they can usually put inscriptions as well but unfortunately our example doesn't have any remains of carved hieroglyphics so we don't know specifically who this person is. All we really know is that he is a priest and therefore has probably a quite important position in society. I really wanted to emphasize as well that the stone that this is made of is really wonderful and it's kind of hard to see just from an image you really kind of have to see this in person to get an idea of how wonderful the carving and the finish to this is as well. This lovely dark stone that it's made out of this diorite or gabbro has looks very kind of dark and black from a distance but when you come up closer you see that it's full of these little flecks of lighter and darker stone they get this almost kind of kioskoro effect of contrasting light and dark that's really kind of wonderful to see and you can see variations of color in things as well. The surface of the stone is also beautiful it's really really tactile, finely polished. When you see it you really kind of want to go up and touch it because it really kind of engages to you and you really want to feel and experience the texture of the stone as well and the way that the light travels and kind of reflects off the surface is also wonderful because it really engages you it makes you want to kind of walk around the piece and to really experience all those different angles and reflections of light and how they illuminate different parts of the face and the body and how they kind of bring out different things every time you move around it as well. So it's really engaging and really interactive it's not just kind of visual it's definitely multi kind of sensorial and I think this kind of brings an animism to it it's almost kind of alive in a way and you almost feel like you're interacting with a person and this is definitely intentional by the Egyptian artists because statues are not kind of are not made to be works of art that are appreciated in kind of in a garden or anything they're meant to represent people after death they're funerary monuments so they are intended to represent again this most idealized form of an individual and to help them continue to live after death and the afterlife as well and the act of making an image of a person is really powerful it's really important it helps to kind of according to Egyptian belief maintain the essence of the person to keep their body and the parts of their soul together after death so they continue can continue to enjoy the afterlife and everything about this statue is helping to kind of continue this individual's existence after death making it out of stone obviously gives it a huge amount of permanence and make sure that it kind of it can live on for thousands of years after this individual died and even the stone color is really important it's this dark kind of black color and black in Egyptian art is a really powerful symbol of regeneration and renewal because when the Nile floods it leaves behind this dark black mud and silt that fertilizes and brings new life to the land so black as a color is one that is associated with renewal and rebirth so you can see that this priest was really concerned about him surviving in the afterlife after death through choosing what type of stone that he's having his statue made out of as well and being able to afford that type of stone too so because these are funerary monuments as well they have specific locations that they probably would have been placed in they would have been placed sometimes in a tomb but often they're in a tomb chapel above the tomb or near to it or in a temple courtyard and the reason for this is so that members of the deceased's family and if you were wealthy priests and could continue to come and give offerings to your statue offerings like food and water incense and flowers that would help you to continue to live and kind of consume in the afterlife as well it would seem that these offerings were actually gave life and sustenance to the deceased through their statue so this statue was actually probably placed in a temple courtyard and this is because of other examples of this type of egghead statue in the early Ptolemaic period often seem to come from temple courtyards so it's likely that this individual was probably this statue and this individual had this placed in a temple courtyard which makes sense because he's a priest so he's very intimately tied to the temple as well so I've had a lot of fun introducing you into this hidden gem in the collection and that wraps up today's barn takeout if you haven't already subscribe to our channel to get your daily serving of art and you can also leave a comment below we really really enjoy reading these and responding to them so please do leave a comment and thank you for watching today