Horus Archer of Egyptian Mythology — Print & Oil Painting

Under the beak, a human chin. The falcon head is a helmet, hammered in pale metal with a hooked bill and a blank disc for an eye, and the artist has left just enough of the wearer visible at the throat to give the figure away: a man dressed as a god rather than the god himself.

Everything below the mask is textile and leather. A blue headcloth is wound around the helm and falls in heavy folds over one shoulder, a linen kilt hangs to the knee, the bracers are scaled and buckled, the belt is hung with small bronze fittings. He stands barefoot in loose sand with a long bow held low in the left hand.

The shield propped against his hip is the most carefully painted object here. It is tall and round-topped, edged in copper, and its face carries three devices in gold and lapis: a winged disc across the top, a wedjat eye in the middle, an ankh below. Those signs are real. The winged disc is Horus of Behdet, worshipped at Edfu as the solar and protective form of the god, and the wedjat is the eye Horus lost to Set and had restored, which is why Egyptians wore it for healing.

Behind him the camel quietly changes the century. Harnessed in linen and strapped with skulls, it belongs to a desert Egypt of the Persian and Ptolemaic periods rather than the pharaonic one, since camels came into wide use here long after the pyramid age. The picture is a composite and does not pretend otherwise, and the dust haze does the rest, flattening the dunes into a single gold band.

Part of our Egypt collection. Set it beside the black armoured Horus and you have the same falcon head read twice, once in open sunlight and once almost entirely in shadow.