What is the band beneath Nefertitis crown?
Upvote:4
According to Crowns of Egypt, this is "The Modius" and
was a type of flat-topped cylindrical headdress or crown of various sizes usually worn by queens or goddesses. A small modius was also used as a crown base for the headdresses of male and female gods.
Upvote:6
I've been asking around the people I know who have studied Egyptology, and I think that landofpyramids.org have got it wrong on their Crowns of Egypt page.
The Modius is a type of flat-topped cylindrical headdress. It is used in art from the ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman worlds. An example can be seen in this bust of Serapis. The term "Modius" is actually just one given by modern scholars based on its resemblance to the jar used as a Roman unit of dry measure.
That being the case, it seems that the term would be quite inappropriate for Nefertiti's crown.
As far as I can see, the term most-commonly used in the literature for Nefertiti's headdress (on this statue and in other artworks of the Amarna period) is simply "flat-topped crown", for example in this article titled Nefertiti's Regality, or this one describing a Dyad of Akhenaten and Nefertiti from Tell El-Amarna.
In fact, whatever label we assign to it today, this headdress seems to have been particular to Nefertiti:
By the time of the move to Amarna, however, Nefertiti was portrayed in an original headdress peculiar to her ... this flat-topped blue helmet would become her hallmark.
[Arnold, 1996, p107]
There are suggestions that the crown may be based on the Blue Crown of the king, or perhaps on an earlier version found in representations of Queen Tiye (wife of Amenhotep III and mother of Akhenaten).
Tiye can be seen portrayed as a sphinx wearing that headdress in a relief from the Nubian site of Sedeinga and also on a carnelian bracelet plaque in The Metropolitan Museum of Art [Arnold, 1996, p107].
As for the band at the bottom of the crown, it is generally interpreted as being a part of the crown itself, rather than a linen cap to be worn under the crown or a sweatband of some kind. Descriptions of the crown mention a gold "frontlet" and corresponding "back-band" (in addition to the gold Uraeus). For example, in her book, The Royal Women of Amarna, Dorothea Arnold describes the headdress thus:
The queen wears the tall, flat-topped crown, which is painted dark blue and has a multicoloured band encircling it. Gold is indicated by yellow paint at the edges of this band and on the frontlet and correlated back band of the crown; the Uraeus is also painted yellow.
(my emphasis)
[Arnold, 1996, p66]
So it seems the artist's renditions you saw were probably correct.
Source:
Arnold, Dorothea: The Royal Women of Amarna, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996
More post
- 📝 Where can I find digitised versions of Japanese war documents in original Japanese?
- 📝 Did Time magazine aid Al Capone?
- 📝 Sieges: Average Attacker to Defender Ratio in Middle Ages
- 📝 Were groups (or 'companies') of dogs used to attack enemy armies in medieval battles?
- 📝 How was Martin Luther King Jr. viewed by white Americans at the time?
- 📝 How tall was George Washington?
- 📝 Which European monarch of the middle ages died furthest from home?
- 📝 How big were Ancient China military forces?
- 📝 Was Christopher Columbus Polish?
- 📝 How can we be certain of customs in the primitive age?
- 📝 Why did the French nobility adopt Calvinism?
- 📝 Did the Indo-Greeks play a crucial role in promoting Buddhism?
- 📝 Why did the Soviets not shoot down US spy satellites during the Cold War?
- 📝 Why was slavery profitable in the Southern colonies and not New England?
- 📝 What's inside the Arch of Constantine?
- 📝 Did officers use cases / bags / pouches in the 18th century?
- 📝 How long would a letter take to arrive in England from America in 1890?
- 📝 What was the median price for a slave child in the Augustan Rome?
- 📝 Were there political parties in ancient Greece?
- 📝 Spanish-American war from Spain's perspective?
- 📝 What does this Rx glyph mean in what looks like Latin?
- 📝 What British WW1 uniform is depicted on this photo from Taunton?
- 📝 Did USS Buck (DD-761) send the message “Temper, Temper”?
- 📝 How true to the originals are Che Guevara's published diaries?
- 📝 In the Middle Ages, adultery was strictly condemned by the Church. How did Kings justify their extra-marital affairs?
- 📝 How to you reply to Henry Ford and Otto von Bismarck?
- 📝 How was Switzerland able to stay neutral during WWI and WWII?
- 📝 Could Egyptian hieroglyphs accurately record conversational day-to-day discussion?
- 📝 What Was "Courtly Love" (Amour Courtois?)
- 📝 Were early accounts of ancient child prostitution accurate?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 What is the band beneath Nefertitis crown?
- 📝 If the heir to a Kingdom is called Crown Prince, what is the heir to a Duchy called?
- 📝 Did Adolf Hitler ever address the fact that his own appearance was almost an exact opposite of what he considered the ideal Aryan appearance?
- 📝 What is the origin of 3 meals a day?
- 📝 What is the first recorded dog name?
- 📝 What drugs were used in England during the High Middle Ages?
- 📝 What knowledge may have been lost at the Library of Alexandria?
- 📝 What were the reasons for the Renaissance / scientific revolution in Europe?
- 📝 What fueled the street lights in 13th-century Cordoba?
- 📝 What do the phone number suffixes J, M, R, W in 1940 New York phone book mean?
- 📝 What are the factors that caused the new world civilizations to be less technologically advanced than the old world?
- 📝 What was the historical context of the 2nd amendment to the US Constitution?
- 📝 What is the significance behind "40 days" that often appears in the Bible?
- 📝 What did babies eat before the advent of modern blenders?
- 📝 During the breakup of the Soviet Union, on what basis was citizenship granted or withheld for each of the fifteen new republics?
- 📝 What was the typical peasant's diet like in Europe during the High Middle Ages?
- 📝 Aside from the Pyramids, what is the tallest man-made structure still standing in Europe & the Near East from ancient times?
- 📝 What did the Emancipation Proclamation exactly do?
- 📝 What is the logic for the map maker classifying the map this way, specifically in Canada?
- 📝 What do the numbers on this 1960s anti-integration sign mean?
- 📝 What is the first horse name recorded in history?
- 📝 What is the pre-schism Christian church called today?
- 📝 What is the oldest building in the world still in use?
- 📝 What did Germany do in World War II about the different rail gauge in the Soviet Union?
- 📝 What is the reason for the selections of gun caliber size in history?
- 📝 What led some people to (correctly) believe that there was no land under the ice cap at the North Pole?
- 📝 What were the acceptance criteria in universities of medieval Europe?
- 📝 What was the status of Arab Christians during the crusades?
- 📝 What is the origin of the stereotype that Polish people lack intelligence?
- 📝 What is the historical basis for the Exodus?