Published Catalogue Text: Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Bronzes at the Harvard Art Museums
This gazelle is suspended from its four legs, which are drawn up over its belly. The rear leg and foreleg on each side are crossed at the hocks and bound with rope. The flat hooves face forward and backward at 90 degrees to the body. The body sags to form a deep, rounded reservoir. The long neck curves forward, with crease marks shown in the skin. Its head is in an unnatural position; its muzzle is between its trussed forelegs. Its body and thighs are stippled to indicate fur. Four grooves on the body’s bulging sides indicate ribs or creases. Its open eyes are large, with heavy, hooded lids; a rosette or curly forelock falls between them. There are heavy tufts of hair at the base of its large ears. Straight, spiraled horns extend back from its head, and a large post rises between and slightly in front of them.
On the belly is a hinged, rectangular plate (2.9 x 1.5 cm) showing male genitalia in relief; the surface is stippled like the rest of the animal's body. The plate, which is complete, partially covers a pour hole, presumably to permit the lamp to be filled while burning. The straight end of the plate forms the inner side of the wick hole, which is large (2.9 x 2.1 cm) and rounded.
The lamp stands on a tripod formed by three bent gazelle legs with the flat, cloven hooves on square plates (2 x 2 cm). The proper left foreleg is modern. The gazelle's tail curves downward from under the nozzle and is attached to the bend of the front tripod leg with a shell-like element to form a suspension loop.
A tube projects from the gazelle’s forehead. It has a finished edge into which a rod was inserted. The inner rod is broken off at the level of the outer tube. By analogy with a group of similar lamps, it is likely that the inner tube was a long handle or suspension device terminating in a bird head (1).
The lamp belongs to a group generally associated with Egypt and dated variously from the second century BCE through the second century CE, although only one example comes from a dated context (2). The gazelle (dorcas) is a small genus of antelope known to Pliny and Aelian as being native to North Africa and was a popular import to Rome (3). Roman mosaics and wall paintings usually show the animal captured in a net, but the Harvard lamp preserves an image that occurs throughout ancient Egyptian art and demonstrates that this artistic motif continued in use into the Roman and Coptic periods (4).
NOTES:
1. See M. Dodt, “Eine bronze Öllampe mit Tierkopf aus Zülpich und ihre möglichen Vorbilder,” Kölner Jahrbuch 33 (2000): 329-40, which describes and illustrates five examples (Bonn, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, inv. no. U1322; Cairo, Coptic Museum, inv. no. J. E. 38864; British Museum, inv. no. Q3593; Louvre, inv. no. N926; Turin, Museo Egizio, inv. no. 7198; and this piece), which he sees as forerunners of a lamp excavated in late Roman fill at ancient Zülpich. He believes they could be either censors or lamps (ibid., 340). In four examples the rod is attached to the back of the animal's neck; the example in the Louvre (ibid., 355, no. 5) has a similar tube within a tube rising from the forehead. Markings on the British Museum example suggest to Dodt that the long rod was removable when the lamp stood on a table or stand (ibid., 338).
2. See D. M. Bailey, A Catalogue of Lamps in the British Museum 4: Lamps of Metal and Stone, and Lampstands (London, 1996) 19, no. Q3593, pls. 18 and 183, dated to the first to second centuries CE and “made in Egypt.” For an example from a context dated to the second half of the second century CE, see ibid., 50, no. Q3719AE, pl. 61. For a similar example, see J. W. Hayes, Greek, Roman, and Related Metalware in the Royal Ontario Museum: A Catalogue (Toronto, 1984) 158-59, no. 247, an iron lamp from the Fayum dated to the second to first centuries BCE. See also id., Ancient Lamps in the Royal Ontario Museum 1: Greek and Roman Clay Lamps: A Catalogue (Toronto, 1980) 40-41, nos. 192-94, pl. 20, for clay derivatives of the same date also from the Fayum.
3. See J. M. C. Toynbee, Animals in Roman Life and Art (Baltimore, 1996) 145-47. One of the hunt scenes in the wall paintings at the monastery of St. Apollo at Bawit shows a gazelle hunt; see A. Badawy, Coptic Art and Archaeology: The Art of the Christian Egyptians from the Late Antique to the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA, 1978) 248, fig. 4.24.
4. D. G. Mitten believes that Harvard's lamp is later than the examples cited above and puts it in the fourth century CE; see id. and A. Brauer, Dialogue with Antiquity: The Curatorial Achievement of George M. A. Hanfmann, exh. cat., Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, 1982) no. 56. The unusual lamp in the form of a bound bull from Edfu cited by H. Hoffmann, The Beauty of Ancient Art: Classical Antiquity, Near East, Egypt, exh. cat., Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (Mainz, 1964) no. 101, is illustrated in P. Labib and V. Girgis, The Coptic Museum and the Fortress of Babylon at Old Cairo (Cairo, 1975) 12, pl. 25, dated to the fifth to sixth centuries CE. Badawy 1978 (supra 3) 321-32, gives examples of the inventiveness of theriomorphic forms in Roman Egypt, among which he cites an open lamp with volute nozzles whose rod-hook is supported by dolphins (ibid., figs. 5.6 and 5.12) and a lamp in Turin, also noted by Dodt 2000 (supra 1). He does not date these examples but discusses them in the context of fifth- to sixth-century CE items. However, the Turin lamp lacks the naturalism and careful surface detailing of the Harvard piece.
Jane Ayer Scott
