Section of panel from a naos

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fragment from an openwork shrine panel depicts a goddess spreading her wings in protection of a small kneeling figure of a king. The king sits on a base decorated in the paneled palace-facade motif, and he offers a wedjat eye on a neb basket, the whole topped by a nefer sign. The wedjat eye is one of the 'great offerings' representing all offerings - like the round nu pot or the figure of the goddess Maat - and conveys that all good things are being rendered to the god by the king. The god in question is missing and would have been located in between this element and a mirroring element. The fragment came into the collection with a second fragment of a wooden inlaid goddess that proved to match a shrine fragment in the Louvre. The Louvre fragment can be associated with the pharaoh Seheribre Pedubast, a king who led a rebellion against the Persian ruler Darius in probably 522 BC, that is, shortly after the Persian conquest of Egypt. Another panel of the same king exists in Bologna, and these are thought to come from the Memphite region where Seheribre attained a foothold, although he seems mainly to have operated in Dakhleh Oasis. The museum's panel shows some variations from the panels bearing the king's names, but then variations exist even between the dated panels. If the panels are not all necessarily closely contemporary creations, the glass colors, the cell forms, and style of the figures are in general accord.

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