Papyrus Marsh

Hugh R. Hopgood

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Excerpted from a scene that showed Qenamun fishing in the papyrus marshes, this fragment conveys a sense of life and movement -- as the marshes lay at the edges of the Egyptians' ordered world, they were associated with the undifferentiated and thus lively and chaotic realm which surrounded and threatened the cosmos, but from which all life ultimately sprang. The umbels of the papyrus plants are regimented, the open blossoms arranged carefully in three rows with a row of unopened buds below, yet the artist has used different sizes for the blooms, tilted them ever so slightly this way and that, and overlapped the flowering heads and their stalks in a seemingly random fashion. The ducks that fly at the top are almost identical in form and position, but again minor variations imbue the scene with life. Note also the individual birds, including an egret, visible at the bottom of the fragment.

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