In the 7th century BCE, the Kushite king Tanwetamani commissioned his “Dream Stela”, which was to be erected in the Amun Temple of Jebel Barkal. The lunette of the stela features a dualistic artistic motif whose composition, meaning, and significance are understudied despite their potential to illuminate important aspects of royal Kushite ideology. On the lunette, there are two back-to-back offering scenes that appear at first glance to be nearly symmetrical, but that closer inspection reveals to differ in subtle but significant ways. Analysis of the iconographic and textual features of the motif reveals its rhetorical function in this royal context. The two strikingly similar but meaningfully different offering scenes represented the two halves of a Kushite “Double Kingdom” that considered Kush and Egypt together as a complementary geographic dual, with Tanwetamani presiding as king of both. This “Mirrored Motif” encapsulated the duality present in the Kushite ideology of kingship during the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, which allowed Tanwetamani to reconcile the present imperial expansion of Kush with the history of Egyptian activity in Nubia. The lunette of the Dream Stela is therefore political art that serves to advance the Kushite imperial agenda.

中文翻译：

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帝国艺术：Tanwetamani 梦碑的二元性


公元前 7 世纪，库什特国王 Tanwetamani 委托建造了他的“梦想石碑”，该石碑将竖立在 Jebel Barkal 的阿蒙神庙中。石碑的半月形具有二元艺术主题，尽管其具有阐明皇家库什特意识形态重要方面的潜力，但其构成、含义和意义尚未得到充分研究。在半月形上，有两个背靠背的销售场景，乍一看几乎是对称的，但仔细观察就会发现它们之间存在微妙但重要的差异。对主题的图像和文本特征的分析揭示了其在皇家背景下的修辞功能。这两个惊人相似但又截然不同的祭祀场景代表了库什“双重王国”的两半，该王国将库什和埃及视为互补的地理二元，坦维塔玛尼担任两者的国王。这个“镜像主题”概括了第二十五王朝期间库什王权意识形态中存在的二元性，这使得坦威塔马尼能够将库什目前的帝国扩张与埃及在努比亚的活动历史相协调。因此，梦石碑的半月形是一种政治艺术，旨在推进库什特帝国的议程。