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Fragment of a Water Clock with the Cartouche of Alexander the Great
Unknown · Reign of Alexander the Great in Egypt, 332-323 BC
A chip of dark basalt only nine centimetres long, and on it, in sunk relief, a frieze of five pointed stars and a cartouche enclosing a royal name. The name is Alexander. When the Macedonian conqueror took Egypt in 332 BC he was crowned as pharaoh, and Egyptian priests wrote his name in hieroglyphs inside the oval ring reserved for kings, exactly as they had for Ramesses or Nectanebo. The stars are the clue to the object: they belong to the decoration of a water clock, a stone vessel from which water dripped through a small hole while marks inside measured the hours of the night.
The rest of the vessel is scattered: a fragment found in 1887 at Tell el-Yahudiya in the Delta is in the British Museum, another is in Berlin, a fourth in a private collection. The Louvre's piece was bought in Egypt in 1895 by the collector Emile Guimet for his museum in Paris and transferred to the Louvre in 1948. A small object with a large lesson: the new Greek ruler chose to be an Egyptian king in every detail.
Did You Know? Alexander never learned to read hieroglyphs, but here his name is spelled out in them like that of any pharaoh.
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