Tile with Nubian chief

[This one is important: it shows how blacks were portrayed in Egyptian art - there is no way that any of these other artifacts portray blacks! WRF]

Tile with Nubian chief
Egyptian, New Kingdom, Dynasty 20, reign of Ramesses III, 1184–1153 B.C.
Findspot: Thebes, Egypt
Height x width: 25 x 6 cm (9 13/16 x 2 3/8 in.)
Polychrome faience
Classification: Architectural elements
Accession number: 03.1570
Emily Esther Sears Fund

Ramesses III was the last great military pharaoh of the New Kingdom. In his fifth year on the throne he defeated the Libyans and brought them back to Egypt as slaves. In his eighth year he faced an even greater threat: a confederation of displaced eastern Mediterranean tribes on the move, including Greeks and Philistines, known collectively as the Sea Peoples. Fresh from their victory over the Hittites, the Sea Peoples attempted to invade Egypt with the intention of settling there. Ramesses roundly defeated them both by sea and by land, recording his victories on the walls of his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu, "United with Eternity," which remains the best-preserved royal mortuary temple on the west bank of Thebes.

As the king was occasionally obliged for ritual and other reasons to stay at the mortuary temple, suitable quarters had to be arranged for him there, and so the temple complex included a ceremonial palace of mud brick luxuriously decorated with multicolored faience tiles and inlays. The two main entrance doorways showed the king as a sphinx trampling his enemies. Rows of bound foreigners on the lower jambs continued the theme of pharaoh's victory. The artists reproduced the foreigners' ethnic costumes and physiognomies according to convention. 

Shown here in his finery, bound and helpless, is a Nubian chief, from one end of the Egyptian empire. The Nubian has orange hair and a large loop-earring. Other tiles featured Syrians, Libyans, Amorites, Philistines, Bedouins, and Sea Peoples. Ironically it was the descendants of the militant Libyan tribes settled in the Delta by Ramesses III who in the Third Intermediate Period, in Dynasty 22, ascended pharaoh's throne.

© 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston