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Is the Dama de Elche, one of the masterpieces of ancient Iberian art, really a fake?

An Egyptian Pharaoh in Spain? One photograph in “Warriors, Wolves & Women: The Art of the Iberians,” AO 06:03, by Ricardo Olmos, especially intrigued me: the image of a seventh-century B.C. sphinx. The sphinx appears to be wearing the double crown of ancient Egyptian pharaohs. Nothing was mentioned in the text about this astonishing detail, so I’d like to know if, indeed, it is the double crown. Richard Firsten Miami, Florida According to Ricardo Olmos, the bronze sphinx is indeed wearing the double crown of ancient Egypt. During the orientalizing period (c. 700–550 B.C.), the art of Iberia was […]

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Endnotes

1.

Anne Claude Philippe Caylus, Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, greques et romaines (1761).

2.

Georg Zoega, In De Origine et Usu Obeliscorum (Rome, 1797), p. 465.

3.

Johan David Akerblad, “Lettre sur l’inscription égyptienne de Rosetta, addressée au Citoyen Silvestre de Sascy” (Paris, 1802).

4.

W.E. Rouse Boughton, “Letter to the Rev. S. Weston respecting some Egyptian antiquities, with four copper plates,” Archaeologia vol. XVIII (London, 1814), pp. 59–72.

5.

Boughton, Museum Criticum of Cambridge (1815).

6.

Jean-François Champollion, De l’Ecriture Hieratique, (Grenoble, 1821).

7.

Thomas Young, Hieroglyphics, Collected by the Egyptian Society, Cairo2 Vols. (London: Howlett and Brimmer, 1823–1828), pl. X ff.

8.

See J.M. Blázquez, “La Dama de Elche, una obra maestra del arte ibérico,” Historia 16 235 (1995), pp. 99–113.