The Wilbour Plaque at the Brooklyn Museum

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1997 by Richard A. Fazzini

The Wilbour Plaque (Pl. I) is named for the American Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833-1896), who acquired it in 1881. As a scholar, Wilbour's greatest passion was for ancient inscriptions, although he also collected uninscribed objects, of which this plaque is the most famous.

A small fragment of limestone, the plaque bears two images in the characteristically Egyptian sculptural technique of stink relief, in which the figures are carved into the ground rather than raised above it. At the left is a king wearing the baglike headdress called a khat with the protective uraeus cobra on his brow. At the right, on a slightly smaller scale, is a queen wearing a cap crown also adorned with a uraeus.

According to Wilbour, he acquired the plaque at or near the site of the ancient city of Akhetaten, meaning "Horizon of the Aten" - a city dedicated to the solar deity as manifest in the sun disk called the Aten. The dedicator was the king who came to the throne as Amunhotep IV (r.c. 1353-c. 1336 B.C.), whose name means "[the god] Amun is Content." He changed his name to Akhenaten, meaning "Effective for the Aten," and eventually moved his capital to Akhetaten from Thebes, the ruins of which are in and around modern Luxor. Because the modern name of Akhetaten is Tell el-Amarna (referred to simply as Amarna), the years the royal family spent there have come to be called the Amarna Period.

Wilbour identified the king on the plaque as Akhenaten and probably assumed that what he called the queen was Akhenaten's chief wife, Nefertiti. He wrote in 1881 of this presumed artist's sketch of the two heads, "I think there are none others so nearly handsome; usually they are very ugly."(1) The major excavations of Amarna and of the earlier monuments of Akhenaten and Nefertiti at Thebes had not yet been undertaken, so Wilbour presumably could not have realized that the difference he saw between his plaque and certain other representations of the same figures was the result of stylistic and iconographical evolution.(2)

In the early years of Akhenaten's reign an angular and manneristic style developed [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. II OMITTED], whereby Akhenaten and Nefertiti were depicted as virtually identical. Both were shown with receding foreheads, lined and haggard faces, long noses, large lips, and slanting eyes. Both had hollow cheeks, heavy jaws with drooping chins, long and thin necks, and pronounced collarbones. However, during the Amarna Period, the style of royal imagery became more curvilinear, organic, and sensuous, and Nefertiti was no longer shown as a near carbon copy of Akhenaten. The Wilbour Plaque is a splendid example of the late Amarna style.

Given the absence of inscriptions and the fact that ancient Egyptian art was not primarily concerned with reproducing its subjects' actual appearance, it is not surprising that the identification of the figures on the plaque has sometimes been questioned. Indeed, they were once called Smenkhkare, Akhenaten's immediate successor, and Queen Meritaten, one of Akhenaten's daughters.(3) More recently it was suggested that the figures might be Nefertiti and a somewhat later image of the next king, the young Tutankhaten (r.c. 1336-c. 1327 B.C.) before he changed his name to Tutankhamun and abandoned Amarna for Thebes and Memphis.(4) Nevertheless, beginning with Wilbour's observations and the first publication of the plaque in 1927,(5) the general consensus has been that its subjects are Akhenaten and Nefertiti - an opinion maintained in the most recent publication of the plaque.(6)

The earlier and more exaggerated images of Akhenaten have been considered as perhaps representing his actual appearance to some extent, but at the same time being "deliberately unrealistic" and not, as is often claimed, a reflection of a pathological condition.(7) On the contrary, the earlier images have been considered to reflect a new concept of the kingship and, given the close resemblance of Nefertiti to Akhenaten, the queenship as well, the implication being that the queen, like the king, had a close relationship to the god.(8) However, the differentiation of the king and queen on the Wilbour Plaque does not indicate a decline in their perceived status.(9)

Unfortunately, no specific significance can yet be attached to the khat headdress as worn by a king and the cap crown as worn by Nefertiti and a few later queens of the Amarna Period,(10) although it is possible that on queens the cap crown indicated a special status. In recent years a number of scholars have come to believe that Queen Nefertiti's disappearance from the ancient sources during the last few years of Akhenaten's reign was not the result of her death but rather of her elevation, perhaps under the name Nefernefruaten, to the position of co-ruler with Akhenaten.(11) The Wilbour Plaque has been thought to reflect this state of affairs. The queens more alert face and the uraeus that rears back as if to lunge contrast with the king's more remote and serene visage and cobra, suggesting to Dorothea Arnold, the most recent commentator, that she was playing a more active and energetic role than before.(12)