Magical Figure

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

These tablets of unfired clay with attached crude faces were found as a group by the Museum's excavators at Lisht South in loose surface sand west of the mastaba of Senwosretankh, a high official and possibly the architect of the pyramid complex of Senwosret I (ca. 1961–1917 B. C.), east of which he erected his own very elaborate mastaba tomb (see acc. nos. 33.1.2 and other pieces). The mud figures and little coffin (acc. no. 33.1.66) that had contained some of them must have been buried, however, considerably later than the early twelfth dynasty tomb close to which they were found. In fact, during the thirteenth and following dynasties people deposited a number of objects in the by then sacred area around a legendary ruler's pyramid and its dependant monuments, believing conceivably that potent magical powers could thus be released. These flat mud figures, for instance, are inscribed in now much-faded red paint with the names of men identified as enemies (most of them Egyptians but some with foreign names). Their deposition may have been thought to effect their destruction.

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