Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Another Example of Males being Depicted as Female (and vice versa) in Ancient Egypt (cf. Facsimile 3 figures 2 & 4)

  

The first known representation of the curled-up god, in the Twenty-first Dynasty papyrus, illustrates the earth's fertility by showing the god engaged in oral self-impregnation. His curled-up position may have provide the artist's inspiration for this unique iconography. The papyrus explicitly identifies the god as 'Geb, the father of the gods, the great god who made the earth and all that the sun encircles'. None of the four later parallels corroborates the god's name. A feature characteristic of the Graeco-Roman representations is the androgynous nature of the figure which has replaced the sexual act depicted in the mythological papyrus as an indication of the god's fertility. At Deit el-Haggar the figure displays female hairstyle and breast, but the sexual organ is male (cf. fig. 3). Both the Philae and Dendara reliefs represent the figure with a female breast but without other distinctive female traits. As for male traits, the Dendara figure wears a beard, but no sexual organ is indicated. (Olaf E. Kaper, "The Astronomical Ceiling of Deir El-Hagger in the Dakhleh Oasis," The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 81 [1995]: 180)

 

The distinction is to be made between androgynous figures and purely male figures shown with pendulous breasts, as was noted by J. Baines, Fecundity Figures (Warminster and Chicago, 1985), 118-21. The breasts on the curled-up god are female. (Ibid., 180 n. 15)

 

Here is figure 3 referenced above (Taken from ibid., 178):

 



Here is a scan of John Baines, Fecundity Figures: Egyptian Personification and the Iconology of a Genre (England: Aris & Phillips LTD, 1985), 118-21, as referenced above, too (click to enlarge):