DivineFelines is winding down on November 29th here in Brooklyn. So, Iwant to focus on one of the ex

DivineFelines is winding down on November 29th here in Brooklyn. So, Iwant to focus on one of the exhibition’s star objects, and my personal favorite—a very beautiful and interesting statuette of a leonine goddess made of woodwith gold gilding which originally contained a cat mummy. Every feature of thisstatuette—like its form, pose, materials, etc.—is common in ancientEgyptian art. But the combination of these individual features is veryunusual. Thegoddess’ lion head with a uraeus-cobra on the forehead, and remains of a nowmissing sun disk identify her as one of the daughters of the sun god, Re.Goddesses like Sakhmet, Bastet, Wadjet, Mut, and many others appear in the formof a lion-headed woman. But they are usually depicted standing, stridingforward, or sitting on a throne. Our statuette’s crouching pose, with both knees drawn up to the torso and legsbound together as if she were a mummy, is very rare. Egyptian artists preferredto use this pose in 2-dimensional representations of Underworld or guardianentities. Althoughmillions of cat mummies were created in ancient Egypt, the fact that thisstatuette served as a container for a mummy is very strange. Cat mummies wereusually placed inside either rectangular or cat-shaped containers. Lion-headed goddesses, in turn, usuallycontained bones of the so-called ichneumon—a type of an Egyptian mongoose.The statue of Wadjet, is actually an ichneumoncoffin.Theshape of the floral base on which our goddess sits resembles a papyrus or lotusplant. But, lion-headed goddesses are almost never represented in this form.Rather, standing lion-headed goddesses may hold a papyrus scepter. The goddess Bastet also sometimes appears as acat sitting on a similar base. Althoughwe have not been able to pinpoint the identity of this goddess beyond being oneof the feline daughters of the sun god, we are grateful that it survived to ourday and can be appreciated by our visitors for its grace and beauty.Posted by Yekaterina Barbash -- source link

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