Relief fragment with a cobra on the royal head

Relief fragment with a cobra on the royal head

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The temple of Mentuhotep II at Deir el-Bahri combined innovative building ideas with a relief decoration that was largely based on prototypes from the Old Kingdom pyramid temples in the Memphite area. Utterly destroyed by stone robbers in antiquity, this decoration was preserved in thousands of fragments. The relief fragment here depicts the king himself. Preserved are part of his head and headdress; the protective rearing cobra (uraeus) is at his forehead.

Egyptian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Relief fragment with a cobra on the royal headRelief fragment with a cobra on the royal headRelief fragment with a cobra on the royal headRelief fragment with a cobra on the royal headRelief fragment with a cobra on the royal head

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.