ИСТИНА

The Egyptian collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, preserves an alabaster sculpture head of a youthful male (4 cm length, 5.3 cm width, and 5 cm height), his hair curly, with a well-shown lock of youth at its right side, falling over and behind the ear, with a diadem band over his forehead (inventory number I, 1а 5429). It belonged originally to the collection of Vladimir Golenishchev, and its provenance is unknown. There is a hole at the top of the head, obviously for fixing the crown; the forehead was topped with a uraeus, of which only traces are preserved. The original statue did not have a back pillar. A research of the object by Dr. Olga Vassilieva (the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts) allowed drawing convincing parallels between it and a group of sculpture heads of youthful kings at the Egyptian Museum at Berlin (ÄS 14568, 13457, 23140). Their attribution to Ptolemy V prevails in scholarship (Kyrieleis 1975; Cleopatra’s Egypt 1988; Derricks 1998; Ashton 2002; etc); though not unchallenged, it seems most reasonable. Thus, Dr. Vassilieva proposed an attribution of the Moscow sculpture head to Ptolemy V as well (2015). The task of the present paper is to discuss the historical plausibility of this attribution. It seems obvious that the Moscow and the Berlin sculpture heads tended to reproduce, though with a degree of conventionality, the individual features of the ruler (which excludes the possibility that the Moscow head represents a deity). These features and especially the side-lock indicate the age earlier than 12-13 years, and this minor age is not disguised in any way but rather highlighted. At the same time, the side-lock together with the uraeus and the crown are the attributes of the infant Horus. The Late Egyptian ideology of kingship seems to assert with somewhat increasing strength that the sacral qualities of the king are derivative from the embodiment of Horus, son of Osiris and Isis (not the celestial “elder” Horus, like in earlier epochs; see the Fayum stela ÄS 7493; the statue of “Nectanebo-the-falcon” from Tanis; the Egyptian titulary of Alexander, son of Alexander the Great and Roxane; the presentation of Ptolemy IV in the stela of Raphia; etc.). The idea of king’s non-derivative immanent personal sacrality became virtually extinct, and the concept of Horus’ embodiment in him or even the god’s own paramount reign (e.g. the Satrap Stela) happened to be especially topical under a rule of a weak or an alien king. But this was exactly the case of the early reign of Ptolemy V, whose state was weakened by insurrection and the unsuccessful Fifth Syrian War: notably, Horus’ motives are quite important in the Memphis Decree of 196 B.C. (Rosettana). Probably the iconography of the Moscow and the Berlin heads of Ptolemy V belong to the time of his early age (at the cusp of 200s and 190s B.C.), when highlighting it provided for his comparison to a popular image of the infant Horus and was an advantageous motif for his propaganda. The author is grateful to the Head the Department of Ancient Orient, A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Dr. Olga Vasilyeva for the permission to research the object. The research is sponsored by the Russian Science Foundation (project no 19-18-00369 “The Classical Orient: culture, world-view, tradition of research in Russia (based on the monuments in the collection of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and archive sources)”.