Lapis lazuli was a favourite gemstone of the ancient Egyptians. Intense dark blue in colour and lightly flecked with gold-coloured inclusions, the opaque gem was highly-prized by the pharaohs, as evident from the treasures found in their tombs and temples. The colour blue in all its hues was similarly favoured.

The name lapis lazuli derives from the Latin, lapis for stone and the Persian, lazhward for blue. The Egyptian Book of the Dead says that lapis lazuli, shaped as an eye and set in gold, was an amulet of great power.

Lapis spoke to this ancient people of the heavens, the divine, of life-giving properties. The bodies of their gods were said to be made of it. For this month’s featured object, Egyptologist Dr Helen Whitehouse from the Ashmolean Museum has chosen a figurine made of this beautiful stone.

It is an unusual figure of a woman, 8.9cms high, dated to around 3300–3000 BC, the Early Dynastic period, found by British archaeologists in the temple enclosure at Hierakonpolis. Dr Whitehouse chose it, she says, because “it has an archaeological history as extraordinary as its form is unique.

“In antiquity, it was made of two separate pieces,” she explained. “The head, carved from a more deeply blue piece of lapis lazuli, had been attached to the body at the neck by means of a wooden peg fitted into drilled cavities.”

They peg together perfectly, she explained, but why the figure was made with a separate head is inexplicable.

Was it to replace a broken one? Or because the piece of stone was not sufficiently large to carve head and body as one?

The pieces came to light during different excavations at Hierakonpolis. The body was found in the 1898 season’s work of James Quibell and Frederick Green’s excavations funded by Oxford University — the head eight years later during the 1906 Liverpool University expedition of John Garstang and Harold Jones. Hierakonpolis was a settlement and necropolis 80 kilometres south of Luxor in the Nile Valley, which flourished during the late Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods (c.4000-2686 BC). This spanned the end of prehistoric Egypt when Upper and Lower (southern and northern) Egypt were unified under one king (around 3100 BC). The city was associated with the hawk-god Horus, its name meaning ‘City of the Falcon’, and was connected in tradition with the first rulers of Egypt.

Incidentally, the Hierakonpolis excavations have yielded hundreds of objects. Some were found grouped by type, mace heads, ivory and stone statuettes and the like, in what became called the ‘Main Deposit’.

Among them were the ceremonial ‘Scorpion Macehead’ and the ‘Two-Dog’ Ceremonial Palette now in the Ashmolean, highlights of its extensive Predynastic Egyptian collection, which is the best outside Cairo.

Carved ivory women were found at the site. But while many of these stand nude in a specific pose, legs together, right arm at their sides, left folded under their breasts, and have long hair flowing down their backs, the lapis lazuli woman has ‘unparalleled’ short, tightly-curled hair. Her face is dominated by large eyes deeply cut for inlaying, and the position of her hands and arms also differs. What is more, her legs end in a straight edge at ankle-level. A drilled cavity there may have served to attach feet or a base. Her unique features have led to many suggestions, one that she was a spoon handle, another that she is not Egyptian at all but comes from somewhere along the trade route between Iran and Egypt.

Whether so or not, she does tell us something about trade in those times (trade then was akin to barter; Egypt had no monetary economy until much later).

Dr Whitehouse explained: “Even in Predynastic times, sizeable pieces of lapis lazuli were being imported for the creation of prestigious objects. They must have travelled along a complicated trade route.”

Lapis lazuli does not occur naturally in the deserts of Egypt, unlike many stones used by the ancient Egyptians. It had to be imported, either directly from its source in north eastern Afghanistan, or indirectly as tribute or trade goods.

Evidence is accumulating for trade links with the Levant, by which luxury commodities like this lapis lazuli woman would have entered Egypt, says Dr Whitehouse. But however she reached her destination “she remains a beautiful enigma” and, along with other Hierakonpolis treasures, will be on show in the new Predynastic-Early Dynastic display when the museum reopens in November.