#Upcycle Your Idol!

Who’s your art doppelganger? Is it someone awesome from a work of art that broadened your mind? Congratulations!

Prince Merenptah of the 13th century BC Egyptian royal family (let’s just call him Prince M) also had an art doppelganger. But he didn’t get it in the usual way. He cheated.

Many of us have a role model. Someone who inspires us. Someone we want to be like. Prince M had a role model too: Pharaoh Amenemhet III, regarded as the all-time best Egyptian ruler (12th Dynasty.) He was the pharaoh of Egypt’s golden age, a man of the people and the gods. Pretty much the apogee of Egyptian royalty.

Prince M was determined to be just like Amenemhet, and he wanted everyone to see it. So he had his own name chiseled on the back pillar of this larger-than-life statue. Which in those days was the completely normal thing to do.

But he went one better. Instead of making himself look like Amenemhet Prince M turned the tables on him and ordered the statue’s face to be changed. Probably to make Amenemhet look like him!

And just like with clumsy Photoshop corrections, you can see exactly where the statue‘s rough surface has been touched up – a little nose straightening here, some cheek implants there, voila!

Perhaps if you were one child out of more than a hundred (his father Ramesses II put the ‘fertile’ into ‘fertile crescent’) you’d be a bit weird about trying to stand out, too.