Bonner, SMA – PDF, 56.

the head. In his right hand the god holds two short daggers with the points upward; in his left are two stalks of grain inclining back over his elbow. These stalks appear in many representations of Agathodaimon, thrust into the coils of the snake tail. The companion gem, in the University of Michigan collection, is a smoky-brown chalcedony, of which the upper third has been broken away.²³ It was almost certainly found in the Fayûm. This stone is convex on both faces, which meet in a sharp edge without a bevel; but this is almost the only difference in the execution of the two amulets. The head of Chnoubis has been lost, but the lower line of the leonine jaw and the neck remain, and the rest of the figure has been done in the same style; the rendering of the cuirass and the tunic is identical in both gems. In this one the stalks of grain might be taken for torches, since the ears incline slightly upward from the line of the stems.

The third of these stones (D. 101) is a brownish-yellow jasper, roughly circular, pierced for a cord after the design was completed. The workmanship is inferior to that of the two previously described, and there are some differences in the design. The lion head is encircled by a nimbus, from the rim of which seven double rays project; the middle pair was almost obliterated by the perforation. The body of the god is nude except for the kilt. The right hand holds a sword, point upright, the left a palm leaf.²⁴

The fourth of the group, discovered in the excavation of Byblos, was published recently by M. Dunand (Fouilles de Byblos, I, Pl. 137, No. 1250; II, 44). Here the left hand of the god, apparently empty, is held in front of the body, and the right holds two swords (?) upright. On the reverse the inscription Chnoubis naabis biennuth encircles the familiar symbol of three broken lines crossed by a long horizontal stroke, and also a diagonal cross with short strokes, almost dots, in the four angles.

Attention has already been called to the Egyptian habit of clothing their gods in military costume such as they saw on the statues of the Roman emperors (p. 40). The rather awkward combination of human arms and trunk with a single serpent coil has not appeared on any other Chnoubis amulets that I know, but the device of covering such a junction with the clothing is not new. Several terracotta figurines of Isis as serpent give her human arms and clothe her with a tunic from which the snake coil emerges below;²⁵ and the Greek vase painters divide Kekrops' human and serpentine parts in a similar manner.

The longer inscriptions that are cut on magical amulets are to be considered in a later division of this study, but those on these three stones should be

²³ D. 100.

²⁴ The blade of the sword narrows abruptly near the point, and the projections at the top of the hilt, intended to keep the hand ftom slipping, are exaggcrated, with the result that the sword looks much like a candle in its stick. On the Byblos amulet to be described next the “swords” look like long pins or sharpened wands.

²⁵ For this type of Isis see Perdrizet, Terres cuites de la Collection Fouquet, Pl. 15, lower row, and Breccia, Terrecotte figurate, Pl. 8, 29 (No. 35); only the head is human in other specimens, as Perdrizet, P1. 15 (above), Breccia, Pl. 9, 32 (No. 37). For Kekrops see Cook, Zeus, III, 186–187 (fig. 95 and Pl. 24).

<<previous     next>>