Painting of the Divine Tribunal on Linen

Culture: Egyptian

Period: Late period or Ptolemaic, 664-31 B.C.

Material: Linen

Dimensions: 16 cm x 33 cm

Price: Sold

Ref: 1038

Provenance: Collection Egon Zerner, Auction Kunstsalon P. Cassirer and H. Helbing, 15./16. December 1924, Lot 64, Taf. 29.

Condition: Fragment, painting well preserved and framed behind glass.

Description: Rectangular linen fragment, probably the decoration of a mummy, with a delicate painted plaster coating. Depicted are the deities Sobek, Sekhmet, Horus and Isis, facing to the right, sitting behind each other. Each one wearing an ostrich feather on their heads and holding one in their hands. They are each framed by thin dotted bands and are distinguished by different background colours. Above is a broader, black grounded decorative strip consisting of white-red blossoms. The colours used are rose, green, black, red and white. Four out of the 42 judges of the dead are depicted on this vignette, representing the divine tribunal monitoring the “Weighing of the Heart”, through which the deceased was granted access to the afterlife. The divine observers illustrated the 125th spell of the Book of the Dead, in which the deceased declares his innocence. As also in this case, there is often only a representative selection of the 42 deities depicted, in sitting position for the hieroglyph of “Sitting God” and the Ma’at feather (justice) as symbol for their judgemental authority. With two written collection labels on the revers.