View of the silver pharaoh (3 photos)

The silver sarcophagus of Psusennes I is remarkable not only an impressive mass of the base material (silver in Egypt was considered more precious than gold), but also by the fact that it is decorated with the highest craftsmanship and subtle artistic taste: gold is present only on the nemes belt and in the figure of Ouraeus, the main part of the sarcophagus is covered with engraving in the style "rishi", although it also has several large images of deities:





But the special charm of this funeral portrait, and precisely thanks to the monochromatic brilliance of silver, inlaid eyes give:



Merciless time (and the humid climate of Lower Egypt) turned into dust and decay the mummy of the pharaoh. It is not known whether the one who imagined to become imperishable, like the gods, to go through all the obstacles of the Other World, in order to Afterlife Court to be either justified, or to lose all hope for being.



But this look from the depths of millennia can tell us more than all the treasures of Tanis: it is the gaze of a ruler who realizing his mortality, he loudly declares that he believes in otherness and knows that before an impartial divine court will be responsible for how kept and protected, managed and supported the beloved land on the banks Nile.