Two-Sided Plaque with Gazelles

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This two-sided plaque is decorated with incised scenes, depicting a pair of gazelles on each side. Residues of green glaze suggest it was once pale blue-green in color. Dorcas gazelles can be recognized here, with their distinctive lyre-shaped horns bent backwards in a slight S-shape. They are depicted with different attitudes that are related to the gazelle’s behavior in the context of the desert hunt. Although it is difficult to reconstitute the appearance of the object to which it belonged originally, faience bowls and chalices with similar incised scenes representing the desert and the marshes were produced in the Late Periods, reminiscent of the New Kingdom and its "bucolic" representations of nature.

Egyptian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met collection of ancient Egyptian art consists of approximately 30,000 objects of artistic, historical, and cultural importance, dating from about 300,000 BCE to the 4th century CE. A signifcant percentage of the collection is derived from the Museum's three decades of archaeological work in Egypt, initiated in 1906 in response to increasing interest in the culture of ancient Egypt.

Metropolitan Museum of Art