Two vast feet on a pedestal are the remains of what would once have been a monumental statue. This colossus depicted Amenhotep III, who ruled Egypt for nearly 40 years in the early fourteenth century BCE when it was at the height of its power, prestige, and cultural achievement.

The statue would have stood about 8m tall, but for all its monumentality, it was but one small element in Amenhotep’s vast funerary temple at Thebes (Smith 1998: 154–56).

Though merely a fragment, the feet are extraordinarily eloquent of the essence of kingship. To be placed on a pedestal seems to belong to the vocation of rulers, conceived as standing between heaven and earth as guarantors of the good order of their realms. But to guarantee this order, rulers’ feet are essential equipment—they must be ready to put a foot down from time to time, to stamp out any trouble, and even, if it comes to it, to put the boot in.

On the pedestal beneath Amenhotep’s elegant feet, hieroglyphic names of the nations south of Egypt are carved in relief. Around the pedestal’s base are busts of prisoners, hands tied behind their backs. They are linked one to another by the stem of a plant (papyrus) symbolic of Upper Egypt, which winds around their necks.

The statute was made for one of his predecessors, and has simply been reinscribed for Amenhotep. Yet although his standing atop the subjected people of the south does not represent his own direct achievement, but rather an inherited role, it reasserts his readiness to fulfil that role.

Pharaohs are usually depicted without sandals, but used sandals have been found in their tombs, and they surely wore them beyond the confines of palaces and temples. And such is the use to which human feet, especially kingly feet, are put, that even sandaled feet need washing. So too the feet of the disciples. When James and John had requested of Jesus that he ‘grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory’ (Mark 10:37), the others were ‘indignant’, not on account of the request, but because James and John got in first. The disciples may have sought thrones not pedestals, but they still needed to learn that sharing in Christ’s Lordship consisted in washing the feet of others, not in putting these others under their own feet.

References

Smith, W.S. 1998. The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt, 3rd edn rev. by W.K. Simpson (New Haven. Yale University Press)