Head of Akhenaten in the blue crown, sign traces at nape of neck
New Kingdom, Amarna Period
At some point after the end of the Amarna period, statues from the sanctuary of the Great Aten Temple at Amarna were demolished and their fragments left in the area of the sanctuary or in a dump outside the south temenos wall originally used for expendable material that had been used in the cult.The sanctuary and dump areas were excavated in 1891-92 by Howard Carter working for Flinders Petrie. When Petrie received almost all his finds from the Egyptian government, he allotted these sculpture fragments to Lord Amherst who had funded Carter's work. The Museum subsequently accquired most all of this important corpus, some four hundred fragments. Many joins have been made by curators over the decades, and the fragments are now being studied for the information they provide about the statuary that stood in the Aten Temple.
In this instance, three fragments of fine marble-like indurated limestone have been joined to reconstitute part of the left side of a head of Akhenaten.
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