Figure (facsimile)

Replica of a figure of a standing woman with crossed hands finely carved from lapis lazuli and dating to Naqada III – early 1st Dynasty (about 3300 – 3000 BC). It was given to the museum on 16 November 1906 along with 431 finds from a season of excavations in Upper Egypt that the museum had sponsored. The story of how the figure was discovered can be compared to the challenge of finding a needle in a haystack. The body was found by an archaeologist called James Quibell who was working at Hierakonpolis between 1897-1899 on behalf of the Egyptian Research Account run by London based archaeologist, Prof. Flinders Petrie, who presented the headless figure to the Ashmolean Museum; where it remained incomplete until in 1906 when Garstang’s assistant, Harold Jones, found the missing head whilst doing some spot digging under the wall structures in the area of the Main Deposit in the temple (find no. 519) for the Liverpool Institute of Archaeology. The complete figure can now be seen at the Ashmolean (Ash.E.1057).