Relief of king's head in blue crown, head of child god on opposite side

Relief of king's head in blue crown, head of child god on opposite side

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Small Late Period and Ptolemaic reliefs or sculptures that depict a subject in a partial or unfinished way but are themselves complete objects constitute a special class of object. Guidelines like those for artists are often prominently exhibited as part of the object, although, in fact, many instances can be noted where the object simply could not serve as a suitable model for a traditional formal Egyptian representation. Personifications of kingship, figures that may represent the now emerging demigods Imhotep and Amenhotep Son of Hapu, and popular gods like Harpokrates or Isis, are heavily represented within the corpus. Taken together, the figures represented and the other features indicate the reliefs and sculptures of this class, sometimes called by Egyptologists "sculptor’s models / votives," were the material of a donation practice, perhaps connected with the prolific temple building of these centuries. Unfortunately there is little to illuminate us about the mechanics of such a donation practice. A king in a khepesh crown appears on one side of this relief, and on the other a child-god is, unusually, shown in sunk relief.

Egyptian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Relief of king's head in blue crown, head of child god on opposite sideRelief of king's head in blue crown, head of child god on opposite sideRelief of king's head in blue crown, head of child god on opposite sideRelief of king's head in blue crown, head of child god on opposite sideRelief of king's head in blue crown, head of child god on opposite side

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.