THE NORTHERN PORTICO OF THE COURTYARD

Today the upper register is preserved to a length of three metres in the Eastern part of the portico and, for a short stretch in the westernmost part. Its upper part was exposed during the 2001 season. The decoration shows a row of offering bearers heading towards the entrance of Harwa’s tomb. The register is executed following a style closely recalling Old Kingdom art. The carving is lightly raised and extremely accurate; great attention is paid to every detail of the figures. The register can be considered among the artistic masterpieces of the period, but exhibits peculiarities which make comparison with the contemporaneous works of the same genre difficult. The procession appears to be permeated by a festive atmosphere: some  of the offering bearers wear a lotus or papyrus flower wrapped around their heads. Every figure is different from the others, avoiding in this way plain repetition. The postures of the figures reveals an experimental approach fully exploiting all the possible ways of rendering a human figure in two dimensions, derived from the typical ‘cubist’ vision of Egyptian art. This is illustrated by the case of the offering bearer carrying a calf: his left arm is depicted in rear view to allow a full view of the animal, in this way drawing attention to it (Fig. 3).

This composition derives from a 2000-year-old iconographic motif and has an air of sentimentality to it, attributed by the turning back of the calf’s head, whose melancholic expression sharply contrasts with the the papyrus flower wrapped around the man’s head.

Of the second register limited portions of the decoration are preserved in the western part and eastern corner of the portico. The figures in the latter part are only outlined in red ink, demonstrating that the carving has still to be finished when the work in the tomb was interrupted. For the time being, it is only possible to catch a glimpse of men engaged in activity that we are unable to interpret with certainty.

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