Statue of Tutankhamun on a Leopard.
This mysterious image of the pharaoh, wearing the hedjet white crown of Upper Egypt and riding on the back of a leopard represents his passage through the dark Netherworld. That these figures, as Howard Carter observed, “were supposed to have some form of magic inherent in them is evident, although their exact meaning in this burial is unclear to us.” On his funerary pilgrimage the dead pharaoh would be transported on the head of a goddess, carried through the swamps on a papyrus barque to battle a demon god, and borne above his adversaries on the back of a guardian leopard. Having crossed the various thresholds of his journey he would emerge along with the rising sun, reborn as the new pharaoh. Discovered in the Treasury, draped in a linen shawl and sealed beside its twin in a black varnished wooden shrine, the ritual statue portrays the pharaoh walking with a long staff in one hand and a flail in the other. Although both men and women of the Amarnan royal family were depicted with curving breasts and slight paunches, the statue’s low hips and feminine bosom suggest that it may originally have been intended for a woman and was reworked for Tutankhamun’s funeral.
