Surveyor's Stake from a Foundation Deposit for Hatshepsut's Temple

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Egyptian foundation ceremony was called "the stretching of the cord." This refers to the ritual of dedicating a temple, but it also describes the action of laying out the temple's ground plan by driving stakes into the earth and stretching a piece of cord between them. The stake (22.3.246) and a mallet (22.3.245) in this photograph are from one of the foundation deposit delineating the perimeter of Hatshepsut's temple at Deir el-Bahri.

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