Relief Depicting the Purification of Queen Kiya (?)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This fragment is from a scene showing a royal woman undergoing a ritual of purification. The zigzag lines represent water being poured over her head from a jar held by the small hand at the upper left of the relief. The woman originally wore a Nubian wig similar to the one carved on a canopic jar lid from this period (see 30.8.54). Later the wig was filled in with gypsum plaster, which was modeled and recarved into the elaborately dressed sidelock of hair worn by Akhenaten's daughters, but some of the plaster has fallen out. Judging by the facial features and the original wig, the figure probably was intended to represent Queen Kiya, a beloved secondary wife of Akhenaten. This queen seems to have died several years before the end of the king's reign, and her images were invariably altered to represent one of his older daughters, as on this relief.

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