a greek dog on egyptian soil

www.mfa.org Egypt Exploration Fund by subscription

This terracotta dog is all of 1 15/16" x 1 5/8", but the roughness of his modeling gives him a big presence.  Isn't it amazing how a few well-placed pushes and pulls on a lump of clay create something that's unmistakably a dog? 
He lives at the Boston MFA, where they don't have a date of manufacture listed for him, but they know where he was found (by the great Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, no less).  He's from Naukratis, which was a Greek trading post in the Nile Delta established in the 7th century BC.  The British Museum has a research project about Naukratis; you can read more about it here.  If you search the research project catalog for "dog" you'll see this guy and a number of his fellows pop up, as the project worked with museum collections worldwide.  I learned there that he might be a representation of Sirius the Dog Star, whose rising happened around the yearly flooding of the Nile.