An Egyptian statuette in Malta rediscovered

Abstract

The votive statuette of Neferabu was first published in London and Paris by C. S. Sonnini. At this time the statuette was still in Cairo and Sonnini claimed to have seen it "in the hands of an Italian monk who gave it to the Baron de Tott, a diplomat for the king of France." Years later, A. A. Caruana, librarian of the Malta Public Library, described the object as a statuette-group made of Maltese stone. Still, the statuette, already in the Valletta Museum, was yet to be identified. In 1931, the first photograph of statuette was published in the catalogue of the Valletta Museum by Sir Temi Zammit, who described it as a triad of a priest holding the figures of Horus and Maat. However, Zammit failed to identify the cobra and the sun disk in his report, misinterpreting the sun as the disk of the moon. Nevertheless, Zammit made a significant contribution to the identification and dating of the statuette, placing it correctly in Dynasty 19. A few years after World War II, Rosalind Moss provided the first scholarly publication of the statuette. Moss indicated that the object's provenance was Deir el-Medina and identified its owner as Neferabu, who had been the occupant of Deir el-Medina tomb No 5. This tomb had already been published by Jacques Vandier. Once more in 1982, Dr. Morris Bierbrier, then assistant keeper, Department of Egyptian Antiquities, British Museum, described Neferabu's statue, indicating that the statue was of genuine Egyptian origin and that it was not discovered in a tomb in Gozo, but had been transported directly from Cairo to Valletta.