Art: Split King

The Fifth Dynasty, a period of the Old Kingdom that lasted from about 2450 to 2290 B.C., is a puzzling blank in Egyptology. Little of its art has survived; its pyramids were jerry-built and unprepossessing; the surviving clues to its history are so meager that few of its pharaohs can even be identified. One who can be was King Ny-user-ra, who ruled from about 2370 to 2360 B.C. Few statues of Ny-user-ra were known; one of them was in the Cairo Museum. It gave no hint of his appearance, since head and torso were missing, but it was certainly he, because his name was carved on the granite base beneath the striding legs. But where was the King's top half? Recently, the Brooklyn Museum's curator of ancient art, Dr. Bernard V. Bothmer, announced triumphantly that he had found it 5,844 miles from Cairo, displayed in the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester.

Putting this third-millennium Humpty Dumpty together again was an impressive feat of memory and scholarship. In 1970, Dr. Bothmer found a granite carving in the National Museum of Lebanon in Beirut that he was able to identify as an effigy of Ny-user-ra. Checking archives for other monuments of the obscure King, he turned up a reference to the lower half of the broken Cairo statue, which had its left arm hanging by its side but no trace of a right arm. The Rochester bust, he remembered, was close in style to the statue of Ny-user-ra in Beirut, and it had its right arm raised gripping a mace.

"At that point," says Bothmer, "it clicked. If the broken statue of Ny-user-ra in Cairo had no arm on its right hip, the arm must have been raised. That described the Rochester fragment." At Bothmer's request, Cairo made a plaster cast of its piece and shipped it to New York. When Bothmer placed the Rochester bust on Ny-user-ra's legs, it fitted exactly. The completed statue is now on display at the Brooklyn Museum —and the Pharaoh looks a lot more pharaonic in one piece than in two.