Hello and welcome to "Insider Insights." I'm Emma Wagner, Associate Educator
in Public Programs and Creative Practice at the Met. While the museum is temporarily
closed we're providing closer looks at objects from the collection and
exhibitions with Met experts. We hope you'll join us as we debut a new program
in the series each week. Today we're joined by my colleague Isabel Stünkel,
Associate Curator in Egyptian Art, who is going to discuss a few artworks in our
collection that relate to healing and magic in Ancient Egypt.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Isabelle.
Thank You Emma. Hello everybody. I hope you're watching this while being safe and well.
I specialize in ancient Egypt and in this current situation I inevitably think
about artworks in our collection that
relate to healing and magic in ancient Egypt, and in this short video I would
like to introduce you to some of these objects.
The statue here represents the godess Sakhmet,
her name means "The Powerful" one. She was thought to be
responsible for illness and war, but she's not a negative goddess.
She controls these awful experiences and thus, is the goddess of healing.
When she is appeased and satisfied then there's peace and health, most commonly Sakhmet is
represented as a woman with the head of a lion, as is the case here.
That such a potentially destructive goddess was associated with a lion makes total sense
in a country where Lions once existed, they're such powerful and dangerous
animals, which were feared, but also admired.
In ancient Egyptian conception
this power can be protective. It was very common in ancient Egypt that something
negative was turned into something positive.
Sakhmet was believed to be able to send out illness,
but this means that she controls it, and thus she had healing powers.
Physicians were often called "priests of Sakhmet."
So in this statue, we see her not as a goddess ready to attack,
but appeased and calmly seated on a throne.
Though her potential fierce aspect is
still very clear from her lion head.
The statue is over 83 inches tall,
that is over 2 meters, so this is over life-size. It is made out of a dark stone
grano-diorite and I'm showing you the statue here in different angles,
the view on the right gives you the chance to admire her massive lion head in
profile, and you again see how she's very calmly seated on a throne which is
typical for Egyptian deities who were usually beneficial.
Her hands are resting on her lap,
and her left hand is grasping something. So this is on the viewers' right.
It's a little difficult to see, what she's holding is an ankh sign
The sign of life, and I'm showing you on the right here an ankh from our collection.
The ankh was a symbol for life and the fact that many Egyptian deities often
hold it in their hands, signifies that they have the power to give life.
On her head is a sun disk, which can be part of a headdress for several goddesses,
but here for Sakhmet, it points to her role as the daughter of the Sun God.
On her forehead in front of the sun disk, in between her feline ears is the so called
"uraeus", this is a protective rearing cobra.
It is completely damaged on the left statue, but on the right I'm showing you the top
part of the second Sakhmet in our collection, where the uraeus is preserved
a little better. The Cobra's heads is missing, but you can see it's broad, inflated hood.
On her lion head, Sakhmet is wearing a human hair wig with strands of
hair falling over each shoulder onto her chest. This wig is a very common element
for representations of Egyptian female and male deities and it forms an
interesting transition from the animal head to the human body.
The Sakhmet statues are really magnificent sculptures. The lion heads have wonderful details
there's the modeling of the flesh, with massive bone structure and
the knees in a very naturalistic way, but then you have other features that
are transformed into more geometric patterns, for example her muzzle.
She has a broad muzzle, typical for lions and then there are these parallel curved
lines with little tiny dots at the ends, it makes you immediately think of whiskers.
But actually these lines do not depict the whiskers themselves, but the
whisker spots. These small dark spots where the whiskers emerge.
So in the statue this element is represented in a very stylized way,
which builds this wonderful tension to the more naturalistic depiction of other features
such as the modeling of the broad nose and the area above her eyes.
We are very fortunate to have six Sakhmet statues in our collection and here are five of them.
All together in museums all over the world and at two temple sites in Egypt,
there are several hundreds of seated and standing Sakhmet statues.
Many have inscriptions that give the name of King Amenhotep III, who had
these statues made and who reigned in the 14th century BC.
The Sakhmet statues originally probably all derived from his mortuary temple.
Suggestions have been made that they were created because the King was in poor health or because Egypt
suffered from epidemics at the time, but we don't really know for sure.
These statues are clearly meant though to invoke Sakhmet’s beneficial powers, it has been
convincingly demonstrated that they can be seen as a "litany in stone", that
represents rituals to appease the goddess and to free the King from any
illness or negative things in general.
Altogether probably more than 700
Sakhmet statues existed, possibly two for each day of the year.
Together with statues of other deities, these Sakhmets stood at Amenhotep III’s
vast funerary temple and they may even have been part of the large sky map
meant as an eternal ritual calendar. In any case the production
of these statues was an extraordinary effort to invoke Sakhmet’s healing and protective power.
Another masterpiece in our collection that is related to healing
is this magical stela, that was probably used in treatment of patients.
One of the dangers in ancient Egypt were snakes and scorpions, which were
plentiful and having been bitten by a poisonous snake must have been a very
frightening and dangerous experience. Medical knowledge was actually quite
advanced in ancient Egypt, but of course not all ailments can successfully be
healed with medicine alone and magic played an important part in treatments.
Before I talk in more detail about the stela, I wanted to show you its home in the Museum.
You see the piece here on the right of this image.
This gallery view also gives you an idea about the size of the piece. The stela is about 33 inches high
that is about 84 centimeters.
And in these side and back views, you see that
the stela is very densely decorated and inscribed, covering not only the front and
the back, but also its sides and its base. There are many small images shown.
Some figures and top areas and then inscriptions in the lower parts.
Here's the front side again with a detail of its top part. From an inscription on the base,
we learned that this object was commissioned by a priest called
Nesatum and dedicated to a temple. The stela dates to the 4th century BC, which we
know from inscriptions including one on the top right, which names the King Nectanebo II,
who was also depicted here on the top right kneeling
with his arms raised and adoring the rising sun. There are many intriguing
figures in this top part of the stela, there are depictions that relate to the
travel of the sun god. These images that tell of the destruction of his enemies,
and it's negative forces, and there are many protective deities.
The sun god is reborn every morning at sunrise, which is
depicted at the very top of the stela. This is the circle in the center and the
sunrise means regeneration and rebirth.
The quality of the carving is amazing.
This is really a masterpiece, you have to keep the size in mind, the majority of
all of these little figures are less than an inch tall, so less than two and a
half centimeters and the stone- graywacke is actually quite hard and not that easy to carve.
On the statue are several inscriptions that include
magical spells against snake bites and scorpion stings and one long inscription
tells the story of how the god Horus became seriously ill as a boy when he
was bitten or stung by a poisonous snake or scorpion. His mother Isis cried for
help and the sun god stopped his travel across the sky and sent the god Thoth to
help Isis. Thoth then recited magical spells that are part of the story and
are inscribed on this piece, and he was able to cure the child. We can find
several of the figures of the story in the central panel, so let's take a closer look at this.
In the center is the frontal depiction of the god Horus as
a child. He is nude and has his hair arranged in a side lock, which is a
common depictions of children. In his hands he holds several desert animals:
snakes, and scorpions, an antelope, and the lion. And he is standing on two crocodiles.
The way Horus grasp these animals and
stands on them, shows his control over these animals. He has been healed.
Above this figure is the head of the Bes-image, Bes was a protective deity who among
other things was thought to ward off negative forces that caused illness and
to both sides of the Bes head is a wedjat eye that has additionally a pair of human arms.
This is, the wedjat eye is a symbol for regeneration that I will come back to.
Then there are three smaller figures
standing on curled snakes. To the left of Horus is a specific form of the
sun god and on the very left is the goddess Isis, the mother of Horus who had
cried for help when he was injured and on the very right is the god Thoth, he is
depicted as a man with the head of an Ibis. He has this very long beak and he's
the one who is able to cure Horus in the story written on the stela.
All three of these small deities stand on curled snakes, expressing their power over them
and in addition each snake has a little knife in its head, difficult to see you
might be able to see this at the bottom right, and these snakes clearly show the
snakes as being neutralized.
To both sides of the scenes are vertical
inscriptions that give the words that Isis and Thoth say, they both express
that they will protect Horus and any person who is suffering as well.
This is very interesting because the story of Horus seems to have been served,
seems to have been used as mythological precedent. If the god Horus was healed, a patient could
be healed as well. In the dedication inscription it says that the stela is
meant to give air to the suffocating. This stela was thought to have healing
power and was probably used for magical healing procedures. The texts and the
images on the stela were thought to be highly charged with healing power.
Water was probably poured over the stela and when it ran over the images and the text
it was thought that the water magically absorbed their efficacy.
The water could then be collected and be drunk by patients suffering from poisonous bites
This stela exemplifies the large role that magic played in ancient Egyptian ruling practices.
In addition to such high quality and very valuable pieces,
there were many low cost magical objects for everyday life.
People everywhere want to avoid disease and other misfortune, and to that and many
use amulets to ensure well-being. Such amulets are objects believed to have
certain positive properties that can magically be bestowed upon its owner.
In ancient Egypt, one of the most popular amulets was the wedjat eye and here's an
example from our collection. The wedjat eye depicts the eye of the god Horus
and you've seen this eye earlier, we're just quickly going back to the magical
stela, so in the central panel there at the top we had two wedjat eyes that
additionally had human arms, but let's go back to our amulet here.
The wedjat eye depicts the eye of the god Horus, who we saw before as a boy, but Horus can have
many different worlds and can also be depicted as a falcon, or as a man with a falcon head.
The wedjat eye is a combination of human eye and a falcon eye.
The human eye elements are the eyebrow, the actual body of the eye and the cosmetic line,
and below are two elements a vertical extension and curved line that ends in a
spiral, these are elements of a falcon. They depict the different colored
feathers underneath a falcons eye, and then this piece additionally at the very top
has a small pierced loop for a suspension, so that the piece could be
attached to a string for example. According to an ancient Egyptian myth
Horus' eye was injured, but Thoth was able to heal it. So this is the healed eye of Horus,
meaning that this eye bears all this healing and regenerative power.
Its name actually means "the one that is sound". Due to its regenerative power,
amulets in the shape of wedjat eyes could be placed in between mummy wrappings,
so that the deceased would receive regeneration and be reborn
and this eye could be used as a magical charm in life, as a general protection against
all kinds of dangers. This particular amulet here is made out of faience, which
is a non-clay ceramic material that could be produced in different colors.
For amulets, the colors green and blue were popular
since they allude to the colors of vegetation and water, which in a desert country signifies life.
As my last slide, I am showing you here a
very luxurious golden example of a wedjat eye, with this wonderful
granulation work. And this piece has three loops for suspension at the top,
that even decorated with little rosettes. The eye of Horus was also seen as the
moon and the story of the wedjat eye being injured and thus not complete, but
then healed and restored to completeness was also used to explain the waning and
waxing moon. In any case the wedjat eye was a very popular symbol that
represents the healed eye of Horus and was thought to protect against disease
and injuries. So I would like to conclude this video with this ancient symbol of
regeneration and protection that resonates in our current world more than ever.
Thank you for listening and stay safe and well.