Magical Healing Statue of Hor

An Egyptian myth told how Isis hid her infant son Horus in the marshes of the Nile Delta, how he was stung by a scorpion, and how the gods brought him back to health. Anyone bitten by a snake or stung by a scorpion could hope to be cured as Horus had been, and statues like this one put that hope into stone.

Hor, a scribe of the army, holds before him a small stela of the kind called a cippus. On it the child Horus stands naked on crocodiles, gripping dangerous animals in his fists, while above him looms the face of Bes, a protective god. Spells cover the stela and almost every surface of Hor's body. Water was poured over the statue. As it ran across the carved words it was thought to take on their power, and it was then given to the sick to drink or to put on the wound.

The head is lost. The museum dates the statue to the end of the Late Period, between 370 and 330 BC. In 1999 the Hungarian Egyptologist László Kákosy published it in his study of the healing statues of Turin, Florence and Naples.