Relief fragment with king Khufu's cattle

Relief fragment with king Khufu's cattle

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

These cattle with long, lyre-shaped horns are probably offerings for the funerary cult of Khufu. Such cattle were kept in herds that grazed in open grasslands in the Nile Delta or at the desert margin. The inscriptions over their backs mention the pharaoh's name but are otherwise difficult to translate; they seem to refer to outlying or foreign lands. The austere but very sensitive style of relief carving and the gently rounded outlines, which let the figures blend beautifully with the background, are typical of Khufu's reign.

Egyptian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Relief fragment with king Khufu's cattleRelief fragment with king Khufu's cattleRelief fragment with king Khufu's cattleRelief fragment with king Khufu's cattleRelief fragment with king Khufu's cattle

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.