Male god

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The god's elegant features are carved in a style belonging to the reign of the pharaoh Amenhotep III (see 56.138). In his massive fist the god holds a was-scepter, signifying dominion, and in his missing right hand he would have held the ankh hieroglyph, meaning life. Though attributes or an inscription that would identify this god are missing, the statue was almost certainly one of the series of divine statues erected by Amenhotep III in his vast mortuary temple in western Thebes. These represented the congregation of the Egyptian gods in attendance at the king's 30 year festival, or heb-sed. The site of this temple is identified by the colossi of Memnon, two monumental seated statues representing the king which stood in front of the entrance pylon of the temple. Amenhotep III celebrated three Heb-sed’s and constructed a palace city for this purpose at the site of Malqata, a mile or so south of his mortuary temple. This site was excavated by the Museum’s Egyptian Expedition in the early twentieth century, and objects from these excavations are on view in galleries 119 and 121.

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