Head of an Osiride Statue of Hatshepsut

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This head belonged to a statue that represented Hatshepsut as Osiris, god of the underworld. It was one of four Osiride figures that decorated the sanctuary of Amun in her funerary temple at Deir el Bahri. This head and another in the collection (31.3.154) wear the White Crown of Upper Egypt and were originally at the southern end of the sanctuary. Another head in the collection (31.3.153) wears the Double Crown and came from the northern end. The Osiride statues that decorated Hatshepsut's temple were "engaged" statues - in other words, they were attached to the temple itself. However, approximately 20 years after her death, the statues were hacked off the walls and smashed. The fragments were then thrown into a quarried area next to the temple causeway where they were discovered there during the Museum's excavations in the early Twentieth Century.

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