Pendant (c. 700 BCE): Art, History and Details

Pendant (c. 700 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This pendant consists of two parts: a superbly carved lion’s head in amethyst that has been set into a D-shaped gold base consisting of a platform surrounded by eight seated baboons. The lion’s head is an heirloom from the New Kingdom, most likely a gaming piece that had been adapted in the Napatan period to serve as an pendant amulet. This procedure was fairly common in antiquity as a means of recycling precious stones. The importance of leonine deities in Nubian religion was obviously the motivating force behind the creation of this spectacular ornament.

Object facts

• Title: Pendant
• Date: c. 700 BCE
• Culture: Sudan, Napatan; lion's head component: probably Egypt, Third Intermediate (1069–715 BCE), Dynasty 25
• Type: Jewelry
• Technique: amethyst and gold
• Dimensions: Overall: 3.5 x 2.9 x 2.7 cm (1 3/8 x 1 1/8 x 1 1/16 in.)
• Collection: Egypt - New Kingdom
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1987.1

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Markowitz, Yvonne and Peter Lacovara. "An Amethyst Gaming Piece Transformed." Cleveland Studies in the History of Art 1(1996): 6-11.
• Berman, Lawrence M., and Kenneth J. Bohač. Catalogue of Egyptian Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999
• Lacovara, Peter, Yvonne J. Markowitz and Sue D'Auria. Nubian Gold: Ancient Jewelry from Sudan and Egypt. Cairo; New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2019.

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.