Shears

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This piece is remarkable for its rich inlays. Both sides of each blade are decorated with three registers of figures. Whoever created the design clearly had a sense of humor; when the shears are closed, the top register brings a dog face-to-face with a cat on one side and a lion on the other. The combination of atypical iconography (the dogs and lions or the plants at the base of the blades) and rather loose interpretations of Egyptian elements and figural style marks the shears as being in an "Egyptianizing" rather than an actual Egyptian style. Perhaps they served a ritual function at an Isis sanctuary at ancient Trebizond on the Black Sea, the site where they are said to have been found.

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