Furniture plaque: female sphinx with Hathor-style curls

Furniture plaque: female sphinx with Hathor-style curls

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This figure belongs to a group of carved ivories, mostly furniture elements, probably found at the site of a palace at Acemhöyük in central Anatolia. Most of the ivories depict imagery borrowed and transformed from Egyptian sources, such as the sphinx represented by this plaque, a fantastic creature that combines a human head with a lion’s body, with or without wings. Although the bottom of the plaque is broken away, parts of the creature’s leonine hind leg and tail are still preserved. The sphinx has a hairstyle of long, curled locks similar to that worn by the Egyptian goddess Hathor. She wears a fillet across the forehead, above which three additional short curls rise. One lock is tucked behind a large ear. The eye, hollowed out to receive an inlay (now missing), and nose are prominent, and the mouth and chin are small. The overall gray color indicates that the object was exposed to considerable heat, perhaps during the destruction of the palace. A nearly identical plaque from the same group, depicting a sphinx facing left, is also in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection (36.152.2).

Ancient Near Eastern Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Furniture plaque: female sphinx with Hathor-style curlsFurniture plaque: female sphinx with Hathor-style curlsFurniture plaque: female sphinx with Hathor-style curlsFurniture plaque: female sphinx with Hathor-style curlsFurniture plaque: female sphinx with Hathor-style curls

The Met's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art cares for approximately 7,000 works ranging in date from the eighth millennium B.C. through the centuries just beyond the emergence of Islam in the seventh century A.D. Objects in the collection were created by people in the area that today comprises Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean coast, Yemen, and Central Asia. From the art of some of the world's first cities to that of great empires, the department's holdings illustrate the beauty and craftsmanship as well as the profound interconnections, cultural and religious diversity, and lasting legacies that characterize the ancient art of this vast region.