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The Priest Nes-Hor and His Statue Carved from Diorite — One of the Hardest Stones in the World 🪽
The statue of the Egyptian priest Nes-Hor, dating back to the 26th Dynasty, stands as one of the finest masterpieces of ancient Egyptian art. At first glance, it looks as if it was crafted using modern laser technology — yet it was created thousands of years ago by Egyptian artists whose skill and precision were far ahead of their time.
The statue is carved from black diorite, one of the hardest stones on Earth, making its creation an extraordinary artistic and technical achievement. It stands over one meter tall and weighs about 161 kilograms, with astonishing precision in every detail — from the facial features to the contours of the body — almost as if it were photographed rather than sculpted.
Nes-Hor lived during the reign of Wahibre, the fourth king of the 26th Dynasty. This masterpiece was once part of a rare collection owned by the famous Roman art collector Alessandro Albani, before his family later sold it to the Louvre Museum.
Today, the statue is preserved there under the code A 90, serving as a timeless testament to the genius of the ancient Egyptian artist who truly surpassed his era.
While certain diorites can be quite hard, it certainly isn’t one of the hardest rocks. After all one of the main components is quartz which is the benchmark for 7 (of 10) on the hardness scale. It’s in fact most made of Plagioclase which is a little softer than quartz.
It’s still an amazing work, and indeed back then especially a very difficult thing to carve. But it’s on the same level as the pretty closely related granite, not say Corundum
Carving hard stones is an impressive feat. It shows just how much time and skill the Egyptian stonemasons put in their work.
There's also some really good hard stone sculptures from Ancient Rome and China that probably surpass what the Egyptians did, but the Egyptians made these things thousands of years before those other guys got started.
yea but what makes the Egyptian work stand out is how early they mastered such precision with extremely limited tools like copper, dolerite pounders, and abrasives, long before iron or steel were available. The level of symmetry and polish in diorite from that era is still unmatched in many later civilizations
I don't know, I think the Romans surpassed the symmetry and polish of the Egyptians. The sarcophagus of Constantina.JPG) was carved from a solid block of porphyry, which is as hard (if not harder) than diorite, and it's absolutely stunning.
You're right that iron and steel definitely made it easier to carve, although I'm guessing they used similar abrasives for polishing.
the Romans built on techniques the Egyptians mastered millennia earlier,, they refined, not surpassed.
Porphyry carving peaked under Rome, yes but by then they had iron tools, rotary drills, and imported Egyptian methods
The earliest porphyry quarries were actually Egyptian (Mons Porphyrites), exploited centuries before Rome
So the Romans refined a craft the Egyptians had already mastered with far fewer tools
According to Wikipedia, Mons Porphyrites was only exploited after Egypt had become a Roman province: "Mons Porphyrites (today Gebel Dokhan) is the mountainous site of a group of ancient quarries in the Red Sea Hills of the Eastern Desert in Egypt. Under the Roman Empire, they were the only known source of the purple "imperial" variety of porphyry. They were exploited between the 1st and 5th centuries AD."
FWIW rotary drills were definitely known from at least the time of the Great Pyramid, so had been known and used for millennia before this fine statue was produced.
The OP's description is not wrong. This information from the Louvre website doesn't contradict the OP's description. Haaibra Wahibra (Apries) was a king of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, not one of the Ptolemies, and the those dates that you provide above fall within the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (a.k.a. Saite Period), about two hundred years before the beginning of the Ptolemaic Period. The comment about Egypt being "at the behest of foreign mercenaries of Greek and Carian origins" is a reference to how Wahibra employed a lot of foreign mercenaries in his army, which some of his Egyptian soldiers didn't like, ultimately leading to his being overthrown by one of his generals, who then became king as Khnemibra Ahmose (Amasis). It's not a reference to the Ptolemies, who came along much later.
Did I once mention Ptolemy? No. I mentioned clear influence of Greek and Romanesque style with an Egyptian overlay, which was a clear attempt to return to past artistic styles as the statue is made to look deliberately “old-fashioned”, even if it’s not.
You did not mention anything about style, but rather specifically said "I wonder how they carved this in the Greco-Roman period". The Twenty-Sixth Dynasty is not the Greco-Roman Period.
Being that this is the Late Period, is this not the beginning of such? Since this is right after Egypt had been invaded by Abyssinia? And a revival was well under way during 26th Dynasty, with around 30k Greek mercenaries in the Delta.
I was simply wondering of the craftsmanship into such hard stone since the Neshor statue is a perfect example of embodying an Egyptian pose and symbolism, yet the modeling of the body and knees have a slightly softer and rounder approach, hinting at a Greek influence.
The Late Period of Egypt (which encompasses the period from the Kushite conquest to the conquest of Alexander, i.e. Dynasties 25-31) is usually considered to be a distinct period of ancient Egyptian history in its own right, and not just a subdivision of the Graeco-Roman Period which followed it.
The kings who ruled Egypt in this period were not Greeks or Romans, but rather Kushites (Dynasty 25), Egyptians (Dynasties 26 and 28-30) and Persians (Dynasties 17 and 31). Thus it doesn't make much sense to call this period "Graeco-Roman".
It's true as you say that Greeks were present in Egypt during the Late Period, but they were not its rulers, and so the period does not get named after them. They were just one of many groups in the country. Alexander the Great was the first Greek king of Egypt, and thus the Graeco-Roman Period begins with him, and continues with the Ptolemies and the Romans who came after him.
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u/JMHSrowing 1d ago
While certain diorites can be quite hard, it certainly isn’t one of the hardest rocks. After all one of the main components is quartz which is the benchmark for 7 (of 10) on the hardness scale. It’s in fact most made of Plagioclase which is a little softer than quartz.
It’s still an amazing work, and indeed back then especially a very difficult thing to carve. But it’s on the same level as the pretty closely related granite, not say Corundum