Blue as a Hippo

Blue as a Hippo

I have no doubt that this Blue Egyptian hippo replica is a bestseller at the Louvre giftshop. Available at full scale, the animal is also offered in a range of pins, keychains, purses, stuffed animals, and refrigerator magnets. Who wouldn’t want to come away with this figure from a Theban tomb that once passed through the hands of the great Egyptologist Auguste Mariette and the halls of the Bulaq Museum in Cairo before arriving at the Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre. Its faience is adorned with plant motifs—lotus and shining pondweed (potamogeton lucens), apparently (Sully, room 636, E 7709 A). We are moved by the Egyptian hippo because it is a mammal like us, because it is amphibious, and because the figurine gives it a clumsy air—but faced with the blue animal in the Louvre we forget that this is a ferocious and dangerous beast. The Egyptian artist of the Twelfth or Thirteenth Dynasty has tamed it for us.