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Document Details :

Title: Von Kultdienern und schwarzen Sklaven
Subtitle: Zu Ikonographie und Technik zweier hellenistischer Bronzestatuen aus Ägypten
Author(s): FRANKEN, Norbert
Journal: BABESCH
Volume: 97    Date: 2022   
Pages: 65-76
DOI: 10.2143/BAB.97.0.3290533

Abstract :
The focus of the investigation are two little-known and only partially preserved bronze statuettes from Egypt, which apparently represent young men in ordinary working clothes. With the help of new photographs with detailed side and rear views, the author succeeds in reinterpreting a statuette of a young man that was recently found in a private collection in the United States. Although the figure had already been correctly assigned to a bronze workshop in Roman Egypt in the auction catalogue of the Julien Gréau collection, which was published in 1885, this attribution seemed to have been forgotten recently. Even if there are no comparable examples among the preserved bronzes, a number of iconographically related terracottas can be cited, which speak for a origin from Hellenistic-Roman Egypt and an identification of the depicted as a servant in the cult of Harpocrates. The second part of the article is about a statuette torso, which was probably acquired in Lower Egypt and has long been on permanent loan from the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in the Antikensammlung of the University of Kiel, which can be reconstructed as a figure of a standing African slave wearing the exomis.

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