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Author Topic: Isis  (Read 36955 times)

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Offline curtislclay

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Re: Isis
« Reply #25 on: May 21, 2007, 11:30:25 pm »
Confirming Pat's attribution: Ben's coin seems to be quite like Cologne 1045, AE 23, 10.01 gr., year 16, Harpocrates wears skhent on head and holds lotus, oinochoe and palm in field, falcons on corners of throne back, a detail not shown by Ben's and Pat's coins.

Pat's is like Cologne 1046, AE 24, 8.65 gr., same year, same types but without the oinochoe behind throne and palm branch before.

Ben's coin clearly shows Isis reaching her r. hand to her bare breast to offer it to Harpocrates.  She is definitely nursing him, and this same activity seems to be meant on all Alexandrian coins of Isis seated with Harpocrates, and in all of the similar reliefs and statues illustrated in LIMC.

In Domna's SAECVLI FELICITAS type, in contrast, the lady does not bare her breast and does not reach toward it with open hand to offer it to the child.  Ben has remarked on this point, and it was made forcibly by Elberling in 1866: Cohen was wrong to see nursing here, the child is too far away from the breast, sometimes the child raises both hands as though to embrace the mother.  For thirty years Elberling had instructed his agents to pay any price for a coin actually showing the child being nursed, but they always reported back that the descriptions in the auction catalogues were inaccurate and no nursing was taking place!  One might wonder whether Elberling himself wasn't weaned too early, but he got the facts right!  This type doesn't depict nursing, which has to make us question the ID as Isis and Harpocrates.
Curtis Clay

Offline slokind

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Re: Isis
« Reply #26 on: May 22, 2007, 02:30:49 am »
It is true, though certainly not conclusive, that Imperial art while embracing great amounts of Greek and Hellenistic symbolism, stops short, except in very rare cases, of showing a Roman woman of any standing, let alone an empress (even Domna!), exhibiting (let along using!) a functional mammary gland; they were particularly averse to nipples (they aren't just worn off).  All the Roman ladies, and empresses, shown as Venus, even a Venus with only one bare breast, also wear a thin shift where the Greek statue showed skin.  Remember, this was the culture (in Italy, traditionally) that also thought it shocking to wear sandals that showed bare feet.  What Romans DID was one thing; what they celebrated or even confessed to in public was another.  It is, I think, possible that they wanted the idea of Isis without, quite, her concrete iconography.  The exceptional female nudity of a couple of Flavian ladies, scrawny editions of the Pudica type with their own high wigs in stiff curls, are the only nude empresses and ladies of court that I can think of.  So, I do think that, after all, we are to think of Isis and Harpokrates, just as the Venus Genetrix of Sabina really does refer to that statue, holding her apple and graciously unveiling, without being anywhere near as joyous about it as the actual copies of the statue of c. 410-400 BCE were.  I mean, like Jesus being baptised in the Jordan is meant as a nude man, but not only has he all the attributes of a rubber wetting-pants doll but the Jordan river arches up to shield him as well.  I mean, they just won't draw it or engrave it or sculpt it if it's a working breast or a working thingy of any sort.  I mean, one can't look at the denarii without remembering Isis, but it was necessary to have her hold something sort of like a wreath, or a teething ring (we might say), rather than offer Harpokrates nourishment.  Can't prove it, of course.
Pat L.
From my old teaching files:
• Copenhagen, NCG  Cat. 541.  Marcia Furnilla as Venus.  The body is the Aphrodite type we call the "Capitoline Venus", that which Nicola Pisano adopted for Truth and Botticelli for the Birth of Venus.  As he put Simonetta Vespucci's head on Venus, here a Flavian sculptor has put that of a Flavian imperial woman: not Julia Titi, not Domitia (Domitian's wife), so evidently (also comparing some other portraits) Marcia Furnilla, Titus's second wife.  What WOULD Vespasian say?
(One of the best possible advertisments, until A. Dürer's Women's Bathhouse, for bodily modesty).

Offline moonmoth

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Re: Isis
« Reply #27 on: May 22, 2007, 03:40:31 am »
That's interesting. Maybe 150 years later, this posthumous coin of Theodora does definitely seem to show a mother offering a functioning breast to her infant.  Of course, a culture can shift a good deal in 150 years, as our own demonstrates.

"... A form of twisted symbolical bedsock ... the true purpose of which, as they realised at first glance, would never (alas) be revealed to mankind."

Offline Heliodromus

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Re: Isis
« Reply #28 on: May 22, 2007, 05:45:51 am »
Pat, Curtis, thanks very much for the attribution. That give me more to follow-up on the symbolism.

It's interesting to see the same type in the temple of Isis (headress on pediment), which does suggest as Pat says that it may have been a statue that is being copied here.

Pat, the objection to imperial nudity is interesting, but how can we be sure that that the figure on the coin is meant to represent Julia Domna as well as Isis? From Curtis's 198-202 dating of the type, it seems that the child is depicted too young to be taken as Caracalla or Geta who'd have been around 10 yrs old (b. 188, 189 respectively) at the time. On the other hand, if it was meant to be one of them then I suppose it might further explain why he is not being breast fed!

It'd be useful to know, if possible, what the wreath-like object being (noted by Curtis) held by the figure on the coin is. Perhaps it's a key to the identification of the figure.

Ben

Offline slokind

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Re: Isis
« Reply #29 on: May 22, 2007, 03:27:40 pm »
Ben: As for implicit free association (free as all propaganda is) of JD with Isis, I said all that can be said (that I know of) above in Reply #12.  As to the chronological ages of Harpokrates and Caracalla...!   Harpokrates is intrinsically and eternally the divine infant in his role in the Isis Lactans composition.  Caracalla is intrinsically the Imperial heir, but he is mortal!  That is the limit to human divinity, which caught up even with Jesus, who, nonetheless, in a creche, meaning incarnation and bodily weakness, incorporates the final bodily weakness of the crucifixion.  I cannot pretend to be privy to any fantasy world of Septimius and Julia, though they may seem to have been imaginative in such ways.  But look, too, at the Harpokrates and Telesphoros (not to mention Eros) types in Balkan provincials.  Telesphroos, too, is eternally, intrinsically infantile (or a toddler), and Eros intrinsically never grows up, quite.  They had other deities for long and devoted marriages and partnerships!  Even in Christianity, as Theotokos, Mary is not the bearer of a full-grown god incarnate, and the Infant of the Nativity remains just that.  I'm not interpreting pre-Christianity in Christian terms; if anything, I'm reminding myself that the way that Christianity thought of its mysteries was inherited from the way that Greco-Roman antiquity had thought of theirs.
Anyhow, I do think that placing a virtual Isis Lactans on JD's reverses with Saeculi Felicitas was designed to invite that association.
Pat L.

Offline Heliodromus

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Re: Isis
« Reply #30 on: May 22, 2007, 03:34:06 pm »
The coin is a bronze of Commodus from Flaviopolis in Cilicia depicting Isis wearing the lotus blossum facing Serapis.

Are you sure this is meant to be a lotus blossum, and not some variant of the crown of hathor (plain, or with plumes and/or wheat ears)? Why would Isis be wearing a lotus blossom? The only Egyptian deity that Google turns up associated with a lotus crown (sometimes with central plumes) is Nefertem, and the lotus blossom has a distinct shape:

http://www.cartermuseum.org/collections/porter/collection.php?asn=P1990-51-2069-1&mcat=3&scat=22

http://www.kenseamedia.com/egyptian_gods/nefertem.htm

Interestingly though there is a terracotta Isis-Aphrodite in the NY Met museum where I-A is wearing what is described as a kalathos, but looks at least to be lotus shaped:

[BROKEN LINK REMOVED BY ADMIN]

Ben

Offline Heliodromus

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Re: Isis
« Reply #31 on: May 22, 2007, 04:07:46 pm »
Pat,
You may well be right that this is intended to be Julia-Isis, but it just seems unsatisfying that we're not given any better clues. If this is meant to be Isis then why is a hand that could be holding a sistrum - obvious attribute of Isis - instead holding a (to us, so far) unidentified object? If this is meant to be Julia-Isis, rather than plain Isis, then how are we meant to know that? Why not two infants or a fancy hairdo?! Of course a contemporary roman might laugh at such questions secure in the, to them, "obvious" knowledge of who it is! Or maybe they'd be scratching their heads and shrugging their shoulders also?

It seems we're definitely missing something with that wreath/rattle/thingy - it seems a bit unusual, but was surely meant to convey something. The odd shape-shifting headress is another question, although I guess that clueless celators copying a throne crown prototype a la chinese whispers could account for it!

Ben

Offline moonmoth

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Re: Isis
« Reply #32 on: May 22, 2007, 04:37:23 pm »
One thing I have learned about Imperial Roman coins is that the imagery was often used like a language, with attributes of different personifications or even deities thrown together to make a point.  What exactly that point might be is sometimes not easy to see, though people like Curtis and Pat can make pretty good conjectures from their different and complementary viewpoints. 

So it could be Isis at base on those Domna coins, even if some of the appurtenances are not the traditional ones.  In fact I am surprised that Isis does not appear on more coins from Rome, when you compare the frequency of appearances made by Serapis, another Egyptian deity, and even Cybele, a foreign goddess the Romans invited in to help them beat the Carthaginians - both of whom, like Isis, had popular cults in Rome.

Bill
"... A form of twisted symbolical bedsock ... the true purpose of which, as they realised at first glance, would never (alas) be revealed to mankind."

Offline Heliodromus

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Re: Isis
« Reply #33 on: May 22, 2007, 06:16:09 pm »
While it is certainly true that it is customary to see Isis wearing the “seat/throne” symbol – often seen in Egyptian art or the horns and disk – which one might ask why she would be wearing the symbol for Hathor, because of her associations with Hathor/Horus (Hathor that healed Horus). I do not pretend to be the expert on Roman/Egyptian symbolism but I would say that given the Roman association of Isis as a dispenser of life, protector, etc and the similar association of the lotus flower, then it might be logical to find her wearing such a crown (as she might the horns/disk).

Well, she wears the throne crown because that is literally her symbol - part of the hieroglyph that gives us her name meaning queen of the throne, and the crown of Hathor because she assimilated Hathor (thereby becoming the mother to Horus). But more importantly, logic aside, these are simply the crowns that she is customarily shown wearing. I've seen a few coins described as her wearing a lotus crown, but never one that looked more like a lotus than a Hathor crown to me, and more importantly I can't find any historical basis for her ever wearing one.

Quote
Nefertem is the ancient Egyptian god, a son of Ptah, but I am not aware of his assimilation into Roman-Greco mythology – though he may have been in other forms.  Though he is associated with the lotus, his headdress bears no resemblance to the lotus blossom, which indeed that found on the Isis coin does.

I think it's meant to be something close to an Egyptian blue water lily (see attached pic). It occurs quite often in Egyptian art.

Ben

Offline slokind

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Re: Isis
« Reply #34 on: May 22, 2007, 08:18:17 pm »
But, considering what Harpokrates actually holds on the coins numbered LIMC 219 and 223 (above), and considering also lotus in Egyptian decorative arts, not usually wide opened,  I wrote "lotus BUD" in order to be helpful.  Of course, Lousiana isn't Egypt, but the buds of our water lilies do resemble what Harpokrates holds.  Pat L.

Offline Heliodromus

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Re: Isis
« Reply #35 on: May 22, 2007, 10:01:04 pm »
Yes - no argument over the bud.  I was just illustrating what Nefertem's headress is based on (and contrasting that to Isis's headress on gordian_guy's Commodus coin).

Ben

Offline slokind

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Re: Isis
« Reply #36 on: May 22, 2007, 11:23:32 pm »
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.  Pat
Here 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

Offline Heliodromus

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Re: Isis
« Reply #37 on: May 23, 2007, 01:22:57 am »
I'm still not convinced that the coin that started this thread, the Claudius II type, the festival of Isis types, gordian_guys coin, don't all just show variously rendered types of the double plumed crown of Hathor. I also assume that Hadrian's Isis in the Capitoline shows the same thing, although the picture isn't really clear - not so sure about that one, although many small statues of Isis do show the horns and sun disc (& maybe plumes) as a small fused whole.

The lotus being held at the funery banquet seems very similar to that used as Nefertem's crown.

I find it hard to believe that the Romans decided to give Isis a lotus crown out of the blue (certainly not a Roman tradition), so I think a case can only really be made for it being a lotus if there is an Egyptian prototype.

Ben

Offline slokind

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Re: Isis
« Reply #38 on: May 30, 2007, 09:48:44 pm »
My Hadrianic Isis Lactans of Hadrian at Alexandria arrived today in good time, and, being happy with it, I post my own photo of it, as promised.
Pat L.
30 05 07 Æ25 8.07g axis 11h  Egypt, AlexandriaHadrian, laureate, draped bust from behind.  Rev., Isis enthroned to r., suckling Harpokrates.  Lotus-bud crown.   See above, Curtis: "like Cologne 1046, AE 24, 8.65 gr., same year, same types but without the oinochoe behind throne and palm branch before."

Offline moonmoth

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Re: Isis
« Reply #39 on: May 31, 2007, 01:55:16 pm »
An interesting thing about Pat's coin - one of several! - is the obverse legend: AYT KAI TPAIAANA CEB. Interesting both because Hadrian is given only the name of his adoptive father, and because of the four As in the name.  That must be easy to overlook - I found quite a decent page on Alexandrian coins of Hadrian that mis-transcribes a similar coin to show TPAIANA.  I don't know Greek (except for words that might appear in coin legends and plant names!) - is this usual?

Bill
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Offline curtislclay

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Re: Isis
« Reply #40 on: May 31, 2007, 02:07:54 pm »
The intended legend is AVT KAI - TRAI ADPIA CEB = IMP CAES TRAI HADRIA AVG.
Curtis Clay

Offline moonmoth

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Re: Isis
« Reply #41 on: May 31, 2007, 02:14:47 pm »
Thanks yet again, Curtis.  That shows once more that in deciphering legends, it helps if you know what to look for!  Though that must have its dangers.
"... A form of twisted symbolical bedsock ... the true purpose of which, as they realised at first glance, would never (alas) be revealed to mankind."

Offline curtislclay

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Re: Isis
« Reply #42 on: May 31, 2007, 02:33:24 pm »
Knowing what to look for is indeed dangerous. 

Consider Postumus' earliest obv. legend with spelling POSTIMVS, misread POSTVMVS for centuries because that's what every observer expected!
Curtis Clay

Offline moonmoth

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Re: Isis
« Reply #43 on: June 01, 2007, 04:06:22 pm »
Has anyone found a reason for the addition of plumes to the crown of Hathor as worn by Isis?  Plumes were not part of Hathor's crown.  Two plumes and a sun-disk, with no horns, belong to Amon-Ra, a sun god, so this may be yet another syncretism.  But the disk, plumes and horn crown is is certainly the item worn on several of the coins posted by Congius, much reduced in relative size compared with the basic Crown of Hathor, and also the item shown in isolation on several Seleucid coins as well as one of the coins posted by Ben.


"... A form of twisted symbolical bedsock ... the true purpose of which, as they realised at first glance, would never (alas) be revealed to mankind."

Offline archivum

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Re: Isis
« Reply #44 on: May 18, 2008, 04:02:04 pm »
The following array of Asia Minor Isis issues from ca. 200 AD (not a die-duplication in the lot!) will attest to the reach and the breadth of the Isis-cult far outside Egypt (I count 16 other AM mints with similar Serapis-Isis issues in Isegrim, which spells it "Sarapis") *:


-- Serapis / Isis, AE 20 4.37 g, from Saitta, Lydia, unpublished with anepigraphic obverse (cf. Herakles anepigraphic / Isis AE 5.35 g, also Saitta, BMC 13, not in Isegrim);

-- Serapis / Isis, AE 18 3.05 g, from Bria, Phrygia, SNG von Aulock 3520;

-- Serapis / Isis, AE 18 4.63 g, from Bageis, Lydia, Lindgren 1.715;

-- Serapis / Isis, AE 18 3.36 g, from Tripolis, Lydia, SNG von Aulock 3311-12;

-- Isis / Harpokrates standing with altar to left, AE 12 1.68 g, from Aegae, Aeolis,

https://www.forumancientcoins.com/board/index.php?topic=39393.msg251929#msg251929

   * There's an interesting parallel issue from Augusta Traiana in Thrace:  http://www.acsearch.info/record.html?id=73481
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Offline Robert_Brenchley

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Re: Isis
« Reply #45 on: May 18, 2008, 05:22:30 pm »
London had a Temple of Isis, attested by an altar which mentions a 3rd Century rebuilding.
Robert Brenchley

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Offline archivum

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Isis Sails for the Balkans
« Reply #46 on: May 23, 2008, 10:10:04 am »
Considering how many Isis issues there were from the Balkans, it's surprising how scarce most of those types are now:

-- Commodus laur. head r., AY KAI MAR AYRH KOMODOS / Isis standing l. with sistrum and situla, Philippopolis, Thrace, AE 24, not in RPC or in Varbanov;

-- Commodus laur. head r.,  [AYT K]AI KOMODOS / Isis standing l. with sistrum and situla, NEIKOPOLITWN PROS ISS [sic], Nikopolis ad Istrum, Moesia Inferior, AE 18, not in RPC or Varbanov;

-- Commodus radiate head r., [KAI AYRHLI] KOMODOS A / Isis standing l. with sistrum and situla, ADR[IANOPOLEITWN], Hadrianopolis, Thrace, AE 22, RPC http://rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/coins/10569 (not pictured), Varbanov (Bulg.) 1675, prob. same reverse die;

-- Septimius Severus laureate head r., AYT K L SEP SEYHROS PER / Isis Pharia sailing r., E in field, KALLATIANWN, Kallatis, Moesia Inferior, AE 26, Varbanov (Bulg.) 421, same dies

* Compare similar, but larger, Nikopolis reverse from A. Pius (coinarchives) here pictured in Congius message above.                         
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Offline slokind

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Re: Isis
« Reply #47 on: May 23, 2008, 06:27:49 pm »
Her barque being late Antonine and Severan patronage of the cult, I think.  Not that it was new.  But I have the impression of its prevalence--in the century, say, from c. 160 to c. 240?  Perhaps I should make that a bit longer, from late Hadrianic on.  Pat L.

Offline archivum

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Re: Isis
« Reply #48 on: May 27, 2008, 12:09:36 pm »

   With the growing syncretism of 1st-2nd c. writers like Plutarch I suspect it was tempting to start to treat Isis as a more wholesome version of Kybele; anyway we can see from this 17th-c. print how far such syncretism went eventually (from Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus [Rome, 1652]; Isis' titles as gathered by Kircher equate her with the Mother of the Gods or Kybele, Minerva, Venus, Juno, Proserpina, Ceres, Diana, Mother Earth or Rhea, war-goddess Bellona, Hecate, the Moon, and the "polymorphous Daemon").
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Offline Heliodromus

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Re: Isis
« Reply #49 on: March 18, 2021, 01:35:46 pm »
Just adding a specimen picture, from Sulla80 on CoinTalk, to this archive since it clarifies a couple of details.

- The figure on Isis's knee has wings confirming the identification as Horus (Harpocrates)
- The object that Isis is holding is very clearly just a wreath
- As is common on these, but made more clear here by the clean engraving of the wreath and Isis's torso, Horus does not appear to be breast feeding (i.e this is not a depiction of Isis Lactans), but rather reaching up towards Isis's face

Ben

 

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