Head of Akhenaten in the blue crown, sign traces behind neck

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

At some point after the end of the Amarna period, statues from the sanctuary of the Great Aten Temple at Amarna were demolished and their fragments left in the area of the sanctuary or in a dump outside the south temenos wall originally used for expendable material that had been used in the cult.The sanctuary and dump areas were excavated in 1891-92 by Howard Carter working for Flinders Petrie. When Petrie received almost all his finds from the Egyptian government, he allotted these sculpture fragments to Lord Amherst who had funded Carter's work. The Museum subsequently accquired most all of this important corpus, some four hundred fragments. Many joins have been made by curators over the decades, and the fragments are now being studied for the information they provide about the statuary that stood in the Aten Temple. In this instance, three fragments of fine marble-like indurated limestone have been joined to reconstitute part of the left side of a head of Akhenaten.

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