Unusual bust patterns for individuals during the New Kingdom: function and symbol

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Guidance Department, Tourism & Hotels, Pharaohs academy,Giza, Egypt.

Abstract

The culture of the ancient Egyptians was the culture of death for who study the ancient Egyptian beliefs in-depth; they were keen to afterlife, as they cared about death and prepared for it well and knew it was the difficult journey that separates it from the eternal life that he will live quietly and enjoy in its green fields. But to reach this moment, he had to go through a difficult journey of death, in which he is fighting evil spirits who wish him destruction and immortality. The ancient Egyptians knew the memorialization of their dead in various and various ways since ancient times, where they buried their dead in places close to their places of residence, offering them offerings daily, then memorialization took other forms during the new Kingdom and became a cult of the ancestors and perpetuating their memory. The paper aims to present the idea of ​​memorializing the deceased through statues of individuals half unusual in terms of form and method of carving during the New Kingdom. The author explains how these busts were used to perpetuate the memory of the deceased in terms of the shape, design, and writings that were engraved on them and therefore the research author uses a descriptive approach that allows explaining these busts and comparing them to others in the same historical period and then the development that occurred for these statues to produce results that can be formulated that these statues Which is a unique model that individuals used during the New Kingdom to memorialize the ancestors in order to help them in the other world. The study sample was drawn from a group of busts that belong to the members of the New Kingdom and vary between those that were formed in the form of amulets or that were designed in the form of a double body. In the end, we can conclude that the busts that belong to individuals during the era of the modern state are evidence of individuals' knowledge of worshiping ancestors and perpetuating their memory as they used to help them cross like them to the other world.

Keywords