The people of western Asia associated Egypt with status, wealth, and power, and artists from the region frequently borrowed elements of Egyptian iconography. This Syrian cult image of a major Asiatic solar god includes an Egyptian sun disk on the deity's head. The style, including the penetrating eyes, long nose, sensitively modeled mouth, and elaborate beard, is typically Syrian.
Catalogue Description:
Seated statuette of male figure; wearing horned helmet (horned in bold relief) capped by sun-disk, calf-length mantle with heavy rolled border and fringed hem; extending arms forward (left hand badly eroded; right hand gone); face with long shallowly arching eyebrows, long almond-shaped eyes (left-eye preserves traces of original inlay), short hooked nose, small horizontal mouth, full pointed beard extending onto cheeks; deep cavity in chest apparently deliberate and not result of faulty casting.
