Ugly?

Before we dive into the hieroglyphic script, there’s something that needs mentioning.

Looking at these rough edges, wonky lines, and clumsy hieroglyphs, this might not be the most beautiful Egyptian stela you have ever seen (compare, for example, with the one in fig. 1). Even so, it has a prominent place in the permanent collection of the Dutch Rijksmuseum van Oudheden.

In the museum, it is placed in the room forming a timeline of Egyptian history, because this style, which we might initially describe as clumsy or even ugly, places this stela in a period of political instability: the so-called First Intermediate Period.

Most of ancient Egyptian history is divided by Egyptologists into ‘Kingdoms’ and ‘Intermediate Periods’. The First Intermediate Period lasted from around 2150 to 2040 BCE and falls in between the Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom, which is followed by the - you guessed it - Second Intermediate Period, and so on. The ‘Kingdoms’ were periods of great political power and stability, the Intermediate Periods… not so much. They were usually periods of political instability following the collapse of the central government, either because of outside attacks or because of instability in Egypt itself. In the First Intermediate Period, some of the local authorities were able to grab more and more power, causing the pharaoh’s great power over all of Egypt to diminish.

During the absence of a central and stable government, art was still created, but it did lead to less unity in art styles, and more artistic freedom for local artists, resulting in the ‘wonky’ style we see here.