Relief from the Palace of Apries in Memphis

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

These blocks belonged to a monumental gateway dismantled and buried in antiquity. The gateway was decorated with at least seven scenes modeled on early depictions of important rituals of kingship. This scene depicts the Festival of the White Hippopotamus, which celebrated the rare appearance of such an animal. The large figure of the king wears a special stole and grasps a staff. Opposite him fits a block now in Brussels, which shows the hippopotamus itself. On the lower right, two men gesture and dance in celebration. Officials with Old Kingdom titles and costumes surround the scene. The style of the relief is complicated. The sophisticated smooth cheeks and profile of the king, perceptible here even though incomplete, contrast with the pouchy cheeks and round chins of the secondary figures. The raised surface is voluminous, but not modeled in detail, giving the depictions an imposing quality. This relief was found near a structure usually ascribed to Apries, but the king's serekh name-rectangle is left empty and so does not provide a certain date. Still, the reliefs can be shown to mark a particular moment in the development of art in the Late Period that can have occurred only in the reign of Apries or his successor, Amasis.

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