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Hippopotamus
Thebes, area of Deir el-Bahri, Dynasty 18, ca. 1450 B.C.
Painting on limestone, 4 11/16 x 4 1/8 in.
Rogers Fund, 1923
23.3.6

Herbert Winlock, the famous excavator for the Museum's Egyptian expeditions from 1906 to 1932, wrote, in the December 1923 Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, "One of the most charming bits that have ever come out of Egypt is on a flake of whitest limestone about the bigness of a man's hand. Some temple sculptor has been asked how he would draw a hippopotamus and, picking up this flake, he has portrayed a sedate beast of purplish brown hue with pink eyes and belly and an enormous jowl indicated with a few swift brush strokes of black." Because of the constant construction of temples and cut-rock tombs on the west bank of Thebes in the New Kingdom, flakes of limestone were strewn everywhere. Often they were used as sketch boards and practice "paper" by artists and scribes. Like all animals in two-dimensional Egyptian art, this hippo was drawn in profile.

In ancient times large numbers of hippos lived in the Nile and foraged in the wetlands along its banks. Egyptians feared them because of their huge mouths, teeth, and size and their aggressive natures when angered. Yet, because hippos are denizens of the fertile Nile mud, Egyptians also saw them as symbols of rebirth and rejuvenation. The birth-related aspect of the hippo's powers also appears in the complicated shape of the goddess Taweret, who protects women in childbirth. Her pregnant-looking body has a hippo's head and a crocodile's tail. She stands upright like a human and has a lion's limbs for her arms and legs.

Notice: color, pose, point of view, materials

Discuss: function, symbolism

Compare with: Statuette of the god Anubis, Cat, Comb, and Menna and his family fishing and fowling

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Taweret

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