Cosmetic Spoon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Decorated spoons were especially popular in the courtly circles of the New Kingdom. In their forms and ornament, allusions were made to themes and myths of rebirth and renewal, though their actual use is poorly understood. This ivory spoon, its symmetry enhanced by a fine interplay of shapes and lines, is datable to the nineteenth dynasty. The discoid bowl of the spoon represents the life-giving sun. The handle decoration consists mainly of a compressed version of the shrine sistrum, a rattle that is the emblem of Hathor, the great goddess of fruitfulness. In the sistrum Hathor wears as headgear a small volute-framed shrine with a cutout doorway where the rattling elements were strung. Here the shrine is reduced to a framed cutout, still flanked by volutes, above her triangular face and cow's ears. The overall composition is a small visual conceit. Most simply it is a reinterpretation of the symbolic imagery of mirrors, in which the sun and Hathor are also associated. But here the sun-disk is perhaps actually being assimilated to the percussion housing of the sistrum or it may even be thought of as a divinity appearing in the doorway of the shrine sistrum.

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