I did not know previously about
Isis wearing that lotus, but it is well represented on Greco-Roman
Isis, and perhaps, anyway, it was not very recent. I too was thinking of objects from Tutankhamen's tomb, such as the alabaster lotus
cup, and, thanks partly to Ben's posting a well focused close-up of the Hadrianic
Isis from Tivoli itself (the one in the background of my Dying
Gaul), I am now convinced that it is just her forearms that are
restored: her headdress is a lotus. For that matter, aren't the Nicopolis coins that we started with also, probably, lotus-crowned and
Claudius II's
Isis as well? In representations of the deceased, he may nold a lotus, and the ladies in the Tomb of Nakht (Dyn. XVIII) hold them and wear them. It was raining today, but I'll go back to
LIMC. Thank you, both.
PatHere is an idea, just to think about. I have a huge picture book that some students gave me, and I have been looking through it thoughtfully. Of course, we've always taught that
Egyptian sentiment, like Hebrew and Greek sentiment in due course, became much more humanistic in the course of time. The Middle Kingdom, famously, offers a story you can call a novella, for instance. But it really takes hold in the wealthy and cosmopolitan world of Dynasty XVIII, and after that it was there for the
Greeks to fall in love with:
Greeks never call Egyptians 'barbarians', just everybody else.
Greece teaches us how wrong we are to hang onto the 18th-century idea of
Egypt as a Magic Flute,
Illuminati sort of world. When
Isis almost naturalistically suckles Harpokrates and wears a comfortable lotus on her
head, rather than a crown that can only be worn symbolically, she is humanized. The lotus is a flower that Egyptians must always have loved as moist and cool and clean and sweet. Just look at the girls at the banquet in the Tomb of Nakht, one of whom holds a lotus to her nose (the things on their heads are perfune cones); just look at the girl musicians from the same tomb, whose
hands are occupied and who have lotus, in bud and opening (in the course of the evening) in their headbands. It seems to me that
Isis and Harpokrates as
Hadrian knew them, and long before, embodied these humanistic, sweet and gentle aspects of religion.
Then it occurred to me that
Spes holding a flower is acting like that, too, and her unrealistic flower might go back to a lotus. Surely that's too fanciful! It is not impossible, though. After 30 BC, Captive
Egypt was frightfully fashionable in early Augustan
Rome. Just like Blue Willow and Magic Flute stuff in 18th-century Europe. Just like Japonoiserie after WW II.
Pat L.
And having mentioned the upper-class
Egyptian craze of the Augustan period, here I'll just post a most delicious
bit of Egyptianizing from the Black Room of the Villa at Boscotrecase, which at one point may have belonged to
Agrippa Postumus (it even has Augustus's white Apollonian swans on one panel); here we see not only a pseudo-Egyptian panel painting but even an attempt to make an
Egyptian lotus
frieze. It is hard not to think of Art Deco.
Courtesey BullMMA