Plaque painted with names of Ramesses IV on one side and as a scribal palette on the other

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Whether all ancient Egyptian kings were literate or not, only rarely did they show themselves writing. The oblong plaque is inscribed on one side with Ramesses IV’s cartouches, and on the other, it is decorated to resemble a scribal palette, with areas of red and black ink and a slot to which the reed pens were placed (see, for example, 16.10.298). Mostly, kings emphasized the monumental texts they had inscribed on stelae and temple walls. A few kings, however—especially of the New Kingdom—highlighted papyri and ink. Scenes of royal literacy also appear in this period on temple walls, on which the king writes alongside Thoth, the divine scribe, especially when inscribing his own name on the leaves of a sacred tree (the Ished tree). Through its text and decoration, this plaque might be evoking these various notions of writing,

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