Egyptian sculpture

6 EGYPTIAN SCULPTURE

the cutting of the mortise and the tenon. In the words of this great artist, ““when the tenon is placed in the mortise, it enters in order that a limb may come to its place.” It must be remembered that Sen-irui says of himself that he was a “craftsman, excellent in his craft and supreme in his knowledge.”’ Only a man of great artistic ability could not only have designed a statue, but have made the accurate measurements as to the size of the various parts and the methods of fitting the pieces together. So complicated a piece of work required both capacity and experience, and Sen-irui’s self-complacence is justified. There is no other literary reference to the actual making of statues; consequently the stele of Sen-irui is extremely important in this connection.

Composite statues became common in the New Kingdom, due probably to the size of the colossi, for until this period colossal statues are rare. The method of making the statue was by sculpturing it in several pieces, each piece being worked in a different workshop. As in wooden statues, the arms are made separately, but here a different technique had to be used to suit the material. Instead of a mo tiseand-tenon joint the arm is slipped into place by means of a dovetail, the dovetail being actually on the arm, which then slides into the appropriate slot on the figure (Pl. III. 1). The garments also are sometimes made of a different material from the rest of the statue. This is a not uncommon method of work in the time of Tell el Amarna. Parts of a figure still remain in which the feet were of red jasper, the clothing of white alabaster, and the wig of black granite.

In metal, the composite statue is known in the Old Kingdom in the great statue of Pepi, where the head and possibly the body were cast by the cive perdue process, the eyes were