
Francesca Hickin
Head of Department
This auction has ended. View lot details
£2,000 - £3,000
Our Antiquities specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.
Find your local specialist
Head of Department

Associate Specialist
Provenance:
French art market.
Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 25 November 1997, lot 105.
Private collection, Europe.
Exhibited:
APM, Archaeological Museum of the University of Amsterdam, 17 November 2006-25 March 2007.
Published:
C.A.R. Andrews and J. van Dijk (eds), Objects for Eternity: Egyptian Antiquities from the W. Arnold Meijer Collection, Mainz, 2006, p. 89, no. 2.11.
For a discussion of the funerary symbolism of locust/grasshopper amulets cf. C. Andrews, Amulets of Ancient Egypt, London, 1994, p.66; the Pyramid Texts refer to the ascent to heaven in the form of grasshoppers. Grasshoppers, due to their fecundity, may also have been associated with fertility, while their plentiful swarming activities could have been linked to abundance and wealth.
There is a New Kingdom necklace composed of almost identical carnelian grasshopper amulets on view at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, acc. no. 1987.105.