Selket

This statuette represents Selket, who has the head and torso of a woman and the body of a scorpion (1). She wears a cow-horns crown, which consists of a sun disc held between two cow horns (the tips are broken), with the remains of a uraeus on the brow (2). She wears a long tri-part wig, with one section over each shoulder, and the third and largest falling down her back. The torso ends just below the breasts. The first and largest pair of arms is the most humanoid (3); they connect to her shoulders, which emerge from her wig, and no neck is depicted. All eight limbs are bent at right angles, and the upper and lower limbs are approximately the same length. The hindmost limbs are joined by a long, thin metal bar. The body is relatively flat and convex on the exterior. The form of the body is slightly undulating, perhaps to mimic the segmentation of the body of a scorpion, and the surface is covered with an incised crosshatch pattern. The curving tail, which was not originally part of this statuette, consists of eight beads that decrease incrementally in size (4). Other known examples of human-scorpion copper alloy figurines were used as finials on standards (5). NOTES: 1. Compare similar statuettes, without this headdress but with a complete scorpion tail, at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Atlanta, inv. no. 2005.5.5; the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, inv. no. 54.546; and published in G. Roeder, Ägyptische Bronzefiguren, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Mitteilungen aus der Ägyptischen Sammlung 6 (Berlin, 1956) 456-57, pl. 62. 2. This crown is more typical of Isis or Hathor and later becomes part of Selket’s iconography as she is syncretized to Isis; see J.-C. Goyon, “Isis-scorpion et Isis au scorpion,” Bulletin de l’Insitut Français d’Archéologie Orientale 78 (1978): 439-57; and F. von Känel, “Scorpions,” Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (Oxford, 2001) 186-87. 3. A scorpion typically has eight walking legs in addition to a much larger pair of pedipalps with pincers. It is unclear on this statuette whether the pedipalps have been omitted, or if the initial arms are meant to represent a type of pedipalps, in which case one of the pairs of walking legs has been omitted. 4. While the statuette may originally have had a scorpion tail, this one does not belong to the body. 5. See the example in the Walters Art Museum and in Roeder 1956 (supra 1) 456-57. Lisa M. Anderson