Hathor / Bat emblem

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The face and horns of this early goddess face have the wig, collar and naos acquired when the Bat emblem was combined with Hathor’s sistrum in the Middle Kingdom. The wig with curls was worn by queens and private women from the Middle Kingdom to the early New Kingdom, and was adopted to adorn the Bat face when in that period it was first incorporated into the sistrum emblematic of Hathor. A small uraeus crowned with a sun disk appears in the doorway of the naos. Traces of color appear on the small ivory – blue in the collar and hair, red in the space between the volutes and the naos, and bits of gesso(?).

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