Padiiset's Statue

{{Short description|Ancient Egyptian sculpture}}

{{Infobox artifact

| name = Padiiset's Statue

| image = 100px

| image2 = 100px

| image_caption = Padiiset's Statue in the Walters Art Museum, showing the front and back views

| material = Basalt

| size =

| writing = Egyptian hieroglyphs

| created = 1780–1700 BC (Inscription: 900–850 BC)

| discovered = 1894

| location = Walters Art Museum

| id = 22203}}

Padiiset's Statue or Pateese's Statue,[https://books.google.com/books?id=8jJvSOigpEcC&pg=PA54 Lemche], p.54 also described as the Statue of a vizier usurped by Padiiset, is a basalt statue found in 1894 in an unknown location in the Egyptian deltaChassinat, 1901, p.98: "Au commencement de 1894, on découvrit, dans une localité du Delta dont je n’ai pu savoir le nom, une statuette en basalte noir légèrement mutilée." [translation: "At the beginning of 1894, a slightly mutilated black basalt statuette was discovered in a locality in the Delta whose name I have not been able to know."] which includes an inscription referring to trade between Canaan and the Peleset (Philistines) and Ancient Egypt during the Third Intermediate Period.[http://art.thewalters.org/detail/33246/statue-of-a-vizier-usurped-by-pa-di-iset/ Statue of a vizier usurped by Padiiset, at the Walters Art Museum][https://www.jstor.org/stable/3854926 The Statuette of an Egyptian Commissioner in Syria, Georg Steindorff, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Jun., 1939), pp. 30-33]: "At the beginning of the year 1894 was found, reputedly in the Delta, a slightly damaged statuette of black basalt..."[https://books.google.com/books?id=B2eNV68WU3YC&pg=PA65 The Philistines in Transition: A History from Ca. 1000-730 B.C.E., Carl S. Ehrlich, p65] It was purchased by Henry Walters in 1928, and is now in the Walters Art Museum.

It is the second – and last – known Egyptian reference to Canaan, coming more than 300 years after the preceding known inscription.{{sfn|Drews|1998|p=49a|ps= :"In the Papyrus Harris, from the middle of the twelfth century, the late Ramesses III claims to have built for Amon a temple in ‘the Canaan’ of Djahi. More than three centuries later comes the next—and very last—Egyptian reference to ‘Canaan’ or ‘the Canaan’: a basalt statuette, usually assigned to the Twenty-Second Dynasty, is labeled, ‘Envoy of the Canaan and of Palestine, Pa-di-Eset, the son of Apy’."}}

The statue is made of black basalt and measures 30.5 x 10.25 x 11.5 cm, and was created in the Middle Kingdom period to commemorate a government vizier. Scholars believe that a millennium later the original inscription was erased and replaced with inscriptions on the front and back representing "Pa-di-iset, son of Apy" and worshipping the gods Osiris, Horus, and Isis.Helmut Brandl, Untersuchungen zur steinernen Privatplastik der Dritten Zwischenzeit: Typologie - Ikonographie -Stilistik, mbv-publishers, Berlin 2008, pp. 218-219, pls. 122, 180b, 186a (doc. U-1.1).

The inscriptions read:

Ka of Osiris: Pa-di-iset, the justified, son of Apy.

The only renowned one, the impartial envoy of Philistine Canaan, Pa-di-iset, son of Apy.