ИСТИНА

The Egyptian collection of the A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts at Moscow preserves a clay offprint of a seal showing a Hellenistic ruler. The object belongs to the former collection of Egyptian artifacts gathered by the Soviet diplomatist Oleg Kovtunovich, part of which was transferred to the Museum in 1980s. The object is small (1,5х1,5х0,5 cm) and round, of a rather good quality (better than most sealings of the well-known Edfu hoard); it has a sharp cleavage in its upper part and an oblong fracture at its down part, which, however, do not spoil the image. The ruler is shown in his right profile; he has large wide-opened eyes with well-shown lids, a prominent, though not too big nose, a rather small mouth, a stubble running from cheeks to chin, oval ears; his hair is shown in slightly curly, not too long locks. His rank is indicated with a rather wide diadem, its neat ties falling behind his nape. The appearance of the ruler might seem youthful but not childish. The style of the image is Hellenic, without features of Egyptian influence. The object has never been published, and no obvious iconographic identification of the ruler has been so far forwarded. The aim of the paper is to characterize to a possible extend the context of the object inside the Museum collection and to present judgement concerning its provenance and the identity of the ruler portrayed. It is rather certain that the seal-offprint shows a Ptolemaic king of the later period of the dynasty (of the second half of the 2nd or the first half of the 1st century B.C.); and, as many objects of Kovtunovich’s collection originate from the Faiyum, one can think of such provenance for this object as well. However, both these points need a refinement, in the first place narrowing the attribution to a single ruler, which is going to be presented in the conference paper.