Kitchen Tender being Rowed

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Many outings of Egyptian nobles culminated in a picnic. On the menu for Meketre's boat trip were roasted fowl, dried beef, bread, beer, and some kind of soup. Meat and bread were carried on another model of a tender, now in Cairo. Here, the beer is prepared and the soup cooked. A blackened trough may have contained burning coal for roasting the fowl. A man tends a stove on which soup simmers. On either side, a woman grinds grain. Brewers inside the cabin are shaping bread loaves, then working them through sieves into large vats. One brewer stands in another vat, where he tramples the dates that provide the sugar for the fermentation of the beer. The oars of this boat are fixed to the sides; to avoid damaging the oars while the boats were transported and deposited in the model chamber, all oars of Meketre's boats were secured in this manner.

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