Baboon on a Limestone Base (380–30 BCE): Art, History and Details

Baboon on a Limestone Base (380–30 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This finely carved Papio hamadrayas baboon squats low on a base, hands on knees in a traditional pose, copied from nature. Mane and mantle are incised with a scalloped pattern to imitate tufts of fur, and the sides of the face are stippled or dotted. The separate limestone base is ancient; judging by the inscription it does not belong with the statuette, which has been glued onto it in modern times. It reads, "Words spoken by Harpocrates, given life and health, lord of heaven, (on behalf of) Padiuser, the son of Usernakht and [mother's name uncertain]." The baboon is the sacred animal of Thoth, god of the moon and of writing, and guide of the deceased in the underworld. Thoth's cult reached immense popularity in the Late and Ptolemaic periods (the Greeks identified him with Hermes). Statuettes of Thoth as a baboon are common, although not nearly as numerous as presentations of Thoth's other animal manifestation, the sacred Ibis.

Object facts

• Title: Baboon on a Limestone Base
• Date: 380–30 BCE
• Culture: Egypt, Late period (715–332 BCE), Dynasty 30–Greco-Roman period (332 BCE–395 CE), Ptolemaic dynasty (305–30 BCE)
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: pale turquoise faience
• Dimensions: Overall: 10 x 4.5 x 7.5 cm (3 15/16 x 1 3/4 x 2 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Egypt - Late Period
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1988.154

A detail from the museum

The statuette is made from Egyptian faience and is glazed with a pale, semigloss turquoise.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Kozloff, Arielle P. Animals in Ancient Art from the Leo Mildenberg Collection. 1981.
• “The Year in Review for 1988.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 76, no. 2 (1989).
• Berman, Lawrence M., and Kenneth J. Bohač. Catalogue of Egyptian Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.