Portrait head of a late Ptolemaic ruler (Ptolemy IX?)

The fleshy face, bulging brow, and large, somewhat hooked nose of this colossal marble portrait, said to have come from Memphis in Egypt, are features typical of Ptolemy VIII, sometimes called physkon ("pot belly" in Greek), and his sons, Ptolemies IX and X, Hellenistic kings of Egypt in the second and early first centuries B.C. Most scholars agree that the head bears the closest resemblance to Ptolemy IX (reigned 116-107 and 88-80 B.C.) and must once have rested atop an immense statue of that king. The head is virtually unique among surviving ancient sculpture because of the extensive preservation of added stucco, used here mainly to fashion the hair and beard but also, more unusually, to reshape the end of the nose. In this case, the stucco was added at a later date, when the head was cut down from a slightly larger portrait; the stucco allowed the sculptor to alter the appearance of the head more dramatically than by merely recarving the stone. Such reworking was an economical way of recycling high-quality stone, avoiding the costly process of obtaining a freshly quarried block. At the same time, the transformation of one person's image into that of another often held ideological significance, symbolically erasing the memory of a detested figure and replacing it with a more genial likeness. This portrait of Ptolemy IX was probably recarved from one representing either his father, Ptolemy VIII, with whom he had a troubled relationship, or his brother, Ptolemy X, who usurped the throne from him for a period of nearly twenty years.