Head of a Royal Statue with the White Crown

With its crown this sandstone head is almost one and a half metres tall, so the statue it came from was far larger than life. It wears the White Crown, the tall rounded crown of Upper Egypt, the south of the country. The museum calls it the head of a royal statue and dates it to the reign of Thutmose I, from 1493 to 1482 BC, without naming the king.

It has been read in other ways. The Turin Egyptologist Ernesto Scamuzzi published it as the head of a statue of Osiris, god of the dead, who also wears the White Crown. In that reign the two images could meet in one figure. At Karnak, in the hall between the fourth and fifth pylons of the temple of Amun, Thutmose I set up sandstone statues of himself in the form of Osiris, and those on the south side wore the White Crown. This head comes from the same temple, and the museum does not say whether it belonged to one of them.