The viewer would likely first encounter the statue at an angle, offering a profile view and exposing the god Horus in the midst of his embrace of the pharaoh’s head. It was placed against a wall of the Valley temple, separated from the main access-route by large red-granite pillars. To better understand this question, it is important to consider the statue in its original context. Yet as far as we can tell, this statue was somewhat unique even among its counterparts, especially regarding its portrayal of the connection between pharaoh and the divine. Khafre’s statuary continued to influence royal images for the remainder of the Old Kingdom and beyond. Examples like “Khafre Enthroned” show that this pharaoh’s reign marked not only a peak in manufacturing ability, but also in technical prowess, blending idealism and naturalism in a variety of stones, the extremely hard gneiss in this example, but also in quartzite, limestone and greywacke. Overall, Khafre’s pyramid complex at Giza contained over 300 statues of the king, far more examples than any other pharaoh from the Old Kingdom. The bases of some of these statues still exist in the Valley Temple today. The statue was registered as the 14th object in the Cairo Museum’s Catalogue Général (CG 14). Though the exact circumstances of its deposition are unknown, subsequent excavations of the temple suggest it was originally one of about 23 seated statues of the pharaoh, estimated from the numerous fragments of similar statues found within the temple.
In 1860 CE, Auguste Mariette, the first director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, found the statue buried in a pit dug under the floor of Khafre’s Valley Temple. The shimmering green stone also undoubtably referenced a hope for rejuvenation in the afterlife, a color association that has roots deep in the Predynastic past. Thus, the material itself was sought after by Khafre to project an aura of economic reach, access to luxury materials and ultimately, power over Egypt’s neighbors. By the end of the Old Kingdom, we know that the Egyptians referred to this region by the terms Wawat, Irtjet and Setju, even mentioning a ruler who joined these lands together. It was transported some 1200 km to its final emplacement, within the Valley Temple of Khafre’s pyramid complex at Giza. This stone is only found in remote stretches of the Sahara Desert in Nubia, west of the Second Cataract of the Nile. The statue is made of anorthosite gneiss, an especially hard, green stone with distinctive ripples of white inclusions that made it technically challenging to carve. A falcon extends its wings to embrace the back of the king’s headdress, emblematic of the god Horus, another protective deity often directly associated with the living king, whose cult centered in Upper Egypt. He wears the nemes headdress with a uraeus, or cobra, representing Wadjet, the protective goddess of Lower Egypt. On his head, the pharaoh is depicted with two kinds of divine protection. The pharaoh sits atop this, expressing at once a sense of determination and serenity looking above and beyond the viewer while gesturing a similar message with a clenched fist and opened hand. The sides of the throne are decorated with the sema-tawy hieroglyph, meant to represent the king’s duty to literally “bind” the constituent parts of Egypt together under one authority. 2500 BCE) pharaoh Khafre slightly larger-than-life and seated upon a lion-pawed throne. This statue, often referred to as “Khafre Enthroned,” is one of the most important and iconic surviving sculptures from ancient Egypt. Provenance: Giza Pyramid Complex of KhafreĬurrent Location: Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt. By Jeffrey Newman, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles.ĭate: Old Kingdom, Fourth Dynasty, Reign of Khafre (ca.
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