An Alabaster Figure of a Woman, Southern Arabia, Qatabân, circa 3rd/1st Century B.C.

standing on a high rectangular base with her forearms extended, the right hand open, the left hand clenched, and wearing a long dress, her oval face with small rounded chin, full lips, long straight nose, inlaid eyes with incised cosmetic lines in relief, and finely arched grooved eyebrows.

Guido Cetti Collection, Massawa, Eritrea, circa 1925
Tribolati Collection
Münzen & Medaillen AG, Basel, November 1964
Andre Emmerich, New York, October 1965

Carlo Conti Rossini, "Iscrizioni sabee," Rendiconti della reale Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, serie sesta, vol. 1, Rome, 1925, p. 182, illus.

very good overall; note small chip on nose, small chips, nicks and scratches elsewhere, shallow chip on back corner of base, proper right little finger chipped at the end, tiny piece of alabaster reattached near corner of proper left eye, a flaw or vein in stone behind proper left upper arm may have caused a loss which has been filled with a stucco-like material either in antiquity or modern times
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The present statuette is most likely to come from Timna`, the main necropolis of the Kingdom of Qatabân, on the western and southwestern slopes of Hayd Ibn `Aqîl in Yemen (see Ray L. Cleveland, An Ancient South Arabian Necropolis, Baltimore, 1965). In the 1920s it was a prominent part of the Guido Cetti Collection, which, although little known, ranks as one of the most important early 20th Century private collections of South Arabian sculpture in the round, second only to that of K. Muncherjee (dispersed at Sotheby's in London in 1931). Guido Cetti owned a large mussel fishing operation based in the Italian colony of Massawa, on the Eritrean coast of the Red Sea (see H. Müller-Jena, Die Kolonialpolitik des faschistischen Italien, Essen, 1939, p. 400). According to a 1965 letter by Abram Lerner, then curator of the Hirshorn Collection in New York, a Bruno Cetti "and his brother" (presumably Guido) made frequent trips to South Arabia to buy spices; on one trip Bruno brought the entire collection home to Massawa, most of the way on mule back.

As the Cetti collection appears in a 1925 photograph it included nine standing alabaster figures, all inscribed except for the present example. The fifth one from the left is now in the Liverpool Museum, inv. no. 1965.161 ( K.A. Kitchen, "The Lady Di`amat and friends from Wadi Beihan, S. Arabia," Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, vol. 5, 1994, pp. 169ff., figs. 3B-4). Of the five figures from the Cetti Collection acquired from Herbert Cahn by Andre Emmerich in 1964/1965, the second one from the left in the photograph was with Peter Gimpel in 1978, then in the collection of J.F. Carroll in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in the 1980s (F. Bron, "Deux statuettes qatabanites," Semitica, vol. 35, 1985, p. 98, pl. IXb), and is now in the Staatliche Museum für Völkerskunde, Munich, inv. no. 93-317 040 (Yémen. Au pays de la reine de Saba', Paris, 1997, p. 160, illus. in upper right corner). Of the four other figures in his possession Andre Emmerich sold two to Joseph Hirshorn in 1965, and one to the Swiss collector Marcel Ebnöther in 1978.