Sherds of a faience New Year vessel


Accession Number
W1359
Current Location
House of Death (ground floor), Domestic piety case
Object Type
Receptacle/vessel
Period
Late Period
Material
Faience
Provenance
Egypt
Measurements
Height: 48mm
Number of Elements
1
Animal
Monkey/baboon

This image may be used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. For uses not covered under the Creative Commons license, or to license images for commercial uses, please contact the Egypt Centre.
Description

This fragment comes from a New Year Vessel made of faience. Baboons are depicted on either side of the neck. The agricultural year began with the annual Nile-flood, which both irrigated and fertilised the arable land besides the river. During the Late Dynastic period a special type of flask was made to contain water from the flood, as a New Year offering. The text on the side of these vessels expresses the wish for a rejuvenating commencement to the year, and both the material of which they were made and the details of their decoration evoke the new life of plants and animals that the over flowing river made possible. Some were included in burials.

Bibliography

See C-H Blanquet 'Typologie de la bouteille de nouvel an' in Cl. Obsomer, A-L. Oosthoek (ed) ""Amosiades Melanges offerts au professeur Claude Vanderslyen par ses anciens etudiants"", Louvain-la-Neuve, 1992, p49-54; Yamani, S. 2002 New Year's bottles from Tell Marqula (Dakhla Oasis). Bulletin De L'Instit Francais D'Archeologie Orientale Vol 102 p425-436.