Colossal granite head of Amenhotep III
From the temple of Mut, Karnak, Egypt
Originally 18th Dynasty, around 1350 BC
Taken over and recut by a later king
King Amenhotep III (1390-1352 BC) commissioned a large number of
statues of himself in Thebes, mostly for his mortuary temple on the
west bank of the Nile. This colossal head was found in the Temple
of Mut, the consort of the principal god Amun. The temple is just
to the south-east of the Temple of Karnak.
Royal statues in Egypt were sometimes usurped (taken over) by
later rulers. The normal procedure was simply to re-carve their
name over the old one, but in some cases the physical features were
also altered. Ramesses II (1279-1213 BC) seems to have altered a
number of statues of Amenhotep III in this way, presumably because
he wished to represent his ideal image in a certain form. In this
statue, Ramesses seems to have concentrated on changing the
characteristic thick lips of the older statuary to thinner ones. In
other cases he took to reducing the plump stomach areas of
Amenhotep's statues to make them closer to his ideal of the
physical shape of the king.
The statue wears the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt.
T.G.H. James and W.V. Davies, Egyptian sculpture (London, The British Museum Press, 1983)
A.P. Kozloff and B.M. Bryan, Egypts dazzling sun: Amenhotep (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1992)