A child god, probably Harpokrates

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This small statuette of a child god was found in the catacombs of the Falcon Complex in the Sacred Animal Necropolis at North Saqqara, where offerings made in the shrine were buried after an undetermined period. Inscribed material suggests this branch of the catacombs was sealed in about 89 B.C., dating the statuette to that time or earlier. Although child gods are difficult to distinguish from one another in the absence of an inscription or highly specific iconography, the falcon spread across the back of this figure's headcloth tends to support his identification with Horus-the-Child, that is, Harpokrates, as indeed does the particular deposit context at Saqqara, since falcon was the sacred animal of Horus.

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