ogDimwit

The man carved on this black granite sarcophagus was a professional dancer, and he made sure we would know it. His inscription names him as Djeho, son of Petekhons, and records what he did. He danced at Memphis on the day the Apis bull was laid in the ground, and at Heliopolis at the festival of the Mnevis bull. He was buried around 346 BC with his profession written into the stone beside him. Then there is the figure on the lid. It stands 120 cm, cut in profile, unclothed, and a clinical assessment published in 2023 reads its proportions as consistent with achondroplasia. That is the part worth pausing on. Egyptian funerary art idealises almost without exception, smoothing every owner into the same correct body. This sarcophagus does the opposite. It gives Djeho the body he actually had, at the height he actually was, in the hardest stone available.