Side Entrance

The Ostrich Palette (Fig. 25), at least two palm widths across (16 cm.) and at least two hand lengths long or high (41 cm.), seems to have been made at the same time as the carved-ivory knife handles and comb and certainly at the time of the Carnarvon handle; it has no archaeological provenance (Crompton 1918). On typological grounds its shape—especially the two out-facing bird heads with five pointed radii, each partly drilled through, in between—can be no earlier and is probably not much later than Petrie's Sequence Dates 57–58, that is, Nagada IIb/c (Davis 1989: 139–40). As for its place in the chain of replications of late prehistoric Egyptian art, however, we must consider it to be a stage in the replication of the scene of the order of nature (and of the human presence in relation to it) that is later than the knife handles and comb.

The image, carved in low relief, presents a bird-headed personage with human limbs wearing a belt with penis sheath; although Vandier (1952: 573) asserted that he carries a baton in his left hand (now damaged), there is none to be seen. The protagonist follows and seems to complete a group of three ostriches, somewhat like an anomalous creature inserted at the end of a row in the animal-rows formula and equally like the beast of prey pursuing its victim in the carnivores-and-prey formula. His head shaped to resemble those of the ostriches, he is, then, represented as disguised as an ostrich with distinctly human torso, limbs, and dress. The ostriches certainly cannot see that he is not one of them, for they are depicted as not seeing him at all. Unlike the presence figured at the edges of and outside the scene on the smaller knife handles and comb we have examined, this hunter, masked by an animal, is now introduced into the depicted scene.

The few scholarly commentaries describing this work have dismissed it as merely clumsy, a minor work with awkward figures positioned at peculiar tilts. In fact the Ostrich Palette presents a highly calculated image. It does not set out to replicate the neat order and straight baselines of either the animal-rows

Fig. 25.
Ostrich Palette: carved schist cosmetic palette, late predynastic (Nagada IIc/d, Sequence Date 57–58).
Courtesy Manchester Museum.

formula or the carnivores-and-prey formula. Instead, manifesting the composure evident on the boss side of the Carnarvon knife handle (fig. 23) and on several other carved palettes to be considered later, the image embeds the animal-rows and carnivores-and-prey scenes within a more complex scene of representation. More exactly, it advances the metaphorics of those images into the depicted scene itself.

According to its "bird's-eye view" of the relative orientations of figures, the Ostrich Palette depicts the masked hunter coming up obliquely behind the right side of the third ostrich, becoming a pair with it, following the two leading ostriches in their forward progress. His legs, with knees bent forward, imitate the ostriches' own bobbing gait, their knee joints bent backward; while they are leaving the scene, he is entering. Unlike them, he has two free arms, upraised, and is ready to throw himself on his prey and wrap himself around its body, just as the real hunter (outside the scene) holds the bird-headed palette in his hands to view this depiction of his mastery. (Perhaps it is just because he cannot close one hand over it—as over a knife handle [see Fig. 23]—that the human hunter literally enters the depicted scene.)

The masked hunter enters the scene from its sideline, or, more exactly, from below it. The baseline of the entire group of figures is the forward, masked edge of the space, more than two thirds of the visual field available for depiction (but utterly lacking it), where the human owner of the palette—and the hunter, real or metaphorical, depicted on it—grasps the tapering palette and mixes cosmetic eye paint to decorate and mask his face, or sharpen the sight of his eyes, before entering the scene of wielding his blow, real or metaphorical. The band of depiction on the palette, then, faces and perhaps serves as the metaphor for the band of paint the human owner and "hunter" paints across his own face.

These are, of course, relationships established by and in the scene of representation. We do not know how the cosmetic ground on this or other decorated palettes was used. It could have been applied to a cult image or divine statue as well as to the face of the owner of a palette, perhaps the same person as the "hunter" or "ruler" who is depicted in the images.^[1] In fact we do not know whether pigments were actually ground on the palettes; no trace of cosmetic

material has survived on the surfaces or in the saucers of any palette in the series examined in this study. (That the images evince a literal concern with the "sharp sight" of the hunter or ruler is suggestive, however, as Asselberghs [1961: 266] seems to have been the first to appreciate.) As we will see, the saucer for containing the cosmetic—whether it was really used or not—plays an increasingly prominent role in the structure of the images on the various palettes. It does not appear at all on the Ostrich Palette. On the Oxford Palette (Fig. 26), a "later" replication to be examined momentarily, the saucer is framed decoratively by intertwined animal figures. On the Hunter's and Battlefield Palettes (Figs. 28, 33) it divides the image into separate units that have distinct temporal and spatial positions in the narrative. Finally, on the Narmer Palette (Fig. 38), it has an even more peculiar, apparently symbolic status.

It could be, then, that the meaning of cosmetic, and consequently the function of the palettes and the images they carry, evolved substantially from the earlier to the later phases of the chain of replications—as we would fully expect if applied cosmetic had a representational status in itself and therefore its own textual history of repetition, revision, and refusal. Although we cannot confirm it through archaeological evidence, this is one possible "external" explanation for the "internal" textual development of the images.

On the Ostrich Palette the scene depicted is the representation of the hunters' mask and its effects . It shows as belonging to the scene of nature, to the plenitude of things transcribed by representation, an order of nature the real owner of the palette or the real person of the "hunter" must actually set out to create. To depict the mask, then, is to continue to mask the blow; the blow is struck from behind the mask.