Ba-bird

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The ba is an aspect of a person's non-physical being. After death, the ba was able to travel out from the tomb, but it had to periodically return to the tomb and be reunited with the mummy. The ba was usually represented as a bird with a human head, and sometimes with human arms. Ba bird statuettes are among the wooden statues that might accompany a burial in the Late and Ptolemaic Periods. Sometimes they were prepared for attachment to a coffin or certain kinds of stelae. This small beautiful ba-bird is crowned with a sundisk, and wears a gold diadem and red fillet often seen on divine beings. It wears a large broad collar, and a djed-pillar amulet is suspended from its neck. The coloring is vivid, the wings are beautifully variegated, and gilding is applied over the face, collar, and disk.

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