Palette with Four Dogs
Unknown · Naqada III A-B, c. 3200-3100 BC
Two facing pairs of wild dogs, their bodies stretched along the edges of the stone, frame each side of this greywacke palette. Between them on the front the sculptor packed a whole desert bestiary in shallow raised relief: an ibis, a lion, and a strange hybrid creature that combines the parts of several animals. Turn to the back and the same four dogs enclose a tall palm tree flanked by two giraffes, their long necks curving with the shape of the palette. The surface is only about eighteen millimetres thick, and the carving is so shallow that the animals seem to float on the polished stone.
Palettes like this were made to grind pigment for eye paint, but the finest of them, from the Naqada III period around three thousand two hundred BC, were votive objects placed in temples. The animals, ordered and contained by the dogs, are usually read as an image of the wild world being brought under control, the same idea that the first kings would soon express with their own image. The palette was purchased by the Louvre in February nineteen hundred and four and is one of the very few complete decorated palettes outside Egypt.
Did You Know? Both faces of the palette are framed by the same four dogs, so whichever way you turn it the animals of the desert are held inside a ring of hunters.
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