Egyptian sculpture

TELL EL AMARNA 137

of the hair smoothly over a cushion applied to the back of the head. Such a method of doing the hair was in fashion in England fora short time about 1914, the hair being taken straight from the forehead smoothly over and turned in under the cushion, which was fastened to the back of the head. Such a fashion of hair-dressing is impossible to represent in sculpture except by an apparently deformed head. The Tell el Amarna style of hair-dressing continued until the time of Sethy I (p. 124, fig. 3), about the form of whose head there is no question at all. That the little princesses even as children are represented with this method of hairdressing is not surprising, for in all art, until a certain stage of development is reached, children are represented merely as small men and women, dressed in the same fashion as their elders

The figures of Queen Nefert-yti when young prove her to have been one of the most beautiful women of any period of the world’s history. Her likeness to Akhenaten, her husband, suggests that she was possibly of the same family, but it may also be partly due to the convention of the art of Tell el Amarna. The extraordinarily fine fragment showing merely the nose and mouth and a portion of the left cheek is so fine as to modelling that it might almost have been done by one of the greatest of the Greek sculptors. It is possibly part of a composite statue in which the face and hands were of fine limestone, the rest of the figure being made up of black granite for the hair, and alabaster to tepresent a figure garbed in white. In this fragment the nose is straight, the nostrils very clearly cut; the lips, of the full type of Tell el Amara, are sharp-edged. This is certainly a portrait of Nefert-yti, and not of Akhenaten. Schafer has pointed out that in these portraits of the king and queen, which are often conventionally represented, and are almost identical, one