Desert Scene with Antelope

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The antelopes are shown in their desert habitat. The two animals whose heads are preserved are feeding on a plant with spiky leaves. The animals are eating quite calmly, so it is unlikely that they are part of a hunting scene. The three antelopes in the upper group seem to be rearing up on their hind legs, perhaps to grab at leaves high on a tree; the front hooves of two of them are visible in the upper right. Presumably the antelopes were part of a scene depicting sunrise. Two representations in the royal tomb at Amarna show wild animals stirring and gamboling under the rising sun outside the temple where the king and his family are performing the morning ritual. A similar image from a temple of this period has been found at Thebes. The size of the animals on this relief suggests that the scene would have been monumental in scale and prominent in the structure that it decorated.

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