Relief of a Man Carrying a Shoulder Pole
Unknown · New Kingdom, 1539-1069 BC
A fragment no bigger than a hand, and yet a whole gesture survives. A man walks with a pole across his shoulders, a ewer hanging from each end, steadying the load with his hands. His hair is cropped close, and he wears a kilt whose front flap ends in a point. The relief is raised, the figure lifted from the background and modelled with care, and the paint is still there: pale pink for the flesh, red and white for the details, black for the hair. Notice that the surface curves gently; the piece was carved on a convex support, perhaps a column, rather than on a flat wall.
Carriers of this kind appear throughout Egyptian art bringing water, wine or milk to a master's table or to the fields, and the shoulder pole is still used along the Nile today. The style of the figure and the paint place the fragment in the New Kingdom, between the sixteenth and eleventh centuries BC. Where exactly it came from is not recorded; the Louvre bought it in July 1868. It hangs here among the scenes of farm work and provisioning that show how the countryside fed Egypt.
Did You Know? The curved surface suggests the fragment came from something round, perhaps a column or a curved stela top, rather than a flat wall.
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