Egyptian sculpture

138 EGYPTIAN SCULPTURE

certain method of identifying them is by the two lines or wrinkles on the neck of Akhenaten, just below the chin. Another method, however, is by the fact that the ears of Akhenaten are pierced with a hole so large that there is often only a slight margin of the lobe left, whereas the ears of Nefert-yti are not so pierced.

Of sculptures in the round, the finest example fs, of course, the head of Queen Nefert-yti, now in the Berlin Museum. It is of limestone, painted, and has never been finished, for one eye has still to be inserted; it is not part of a statue, but is a bust only; itis possibly, therefore, the sculptor’s life-study for the queen’s statue. The delicacy of the modelling, the truthfulness of the portraiture, mark this out as one of the great pieces of sculpture in ancient Egypt.

The standing statuette of Nefert-yti (Pl. XXXIV. 1) shows her at a more advanced age; the figure is that of a middleaged woman, the face also shows signs of age, the rather hanging breasts and the sharper outline of the jaw, when seen in profile, are a sure indication of this. The cheek also shows the hollow of age, and the prominence of the muscles from the nose round the sides of the mouth indicates the loss of youth. The eyes in this statuette are outlined, as in the sandstone head, with dark paint, so also are the arched eyebrows, but the lines of the eyebrow and of the eye are not lengthened unduly.

A fine example of the art of Tell el Amarna is the sandstone head (Pl. XXXV. I) now in Berlin; this was a composite statue, in that the head-dress was of a different material, and only the tenon of it remains. The body also was obviously of another material, probably white alabaster, to represent the clothing, for at the lower part of the neck the stone is cut as a tenon to fit into some other material. The head is of brown sandstone, to give the colour of the