Funerary Cone of the Royal Herald Intef

Funerary Cone of the Royal Herald Intef

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This cone has the impression of a stamp seal inscribed for the royal herald Intef who served during the joint reign of Thutmose III and Hatshepsut. He was owner of tomb TT 155 in the Dira Abu el-Naga cemetery of Western Thebes. Hundreds of stamped pottery cones like this one have been found in the non-royal cemeteries of the Theban necropolis. More than six hundred different stamps have been recorded. Although a few cones are inscribed with the names of identifiable tomb owners like Intef, most record the names of people whose tombs cannot be identified. During the 1926-27 field season, the Museum's excavators uncovered a Middle Kingdom tomb (MMA 110) with rows of unstamped cones embedded along the upper edge of the façade (see fig. 1). It is quite likely that stamped cones, which date to the New Kingdom and later, were used in the same way, identifying the tomb owner by name and title. Intef's tomb facade appears to have been decorated with cones stamped with two slightly different inscriptions. The Museum owns one of each type. On this cone, Intef is honored by the god Osiris "the great god." On the other, he is honored by Anubis "who is upon his mountain." The impressions on these cones are round, similar in size, deeply pressed into the surface, and lack lines to seperate the columns of text. The stamp on this cone is type 139 in A Corpus of Inscribed Egyptian Funerary Cones compiled by Norman de Garis Davies and published by M. F. Laming Macadam in 1957 by Oxford University Press. (CHR)

Egyptian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Funerary Cone of the Royal Herald IntefFunerary Cone of the Royal Herald IntefFunerary Cone of the Royal Herald IntefFunerary Cone of the Royal Herald IntefFunerary Cone of the Royal Herald Intef

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.