Inlay

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A quantity of faience hieroglyphs and border elements was found in the tomb or courtyard of Nespekashuty. These are displayed in galleries 127 and 130. They are of similar size and manufacture, so seem to have belonged to a single object, likely of wood. Some of the signs belong to the standard offering formula, others mention Osiris and Anubis, so they certainly suggest an item of funerary furniture - a box, a screen, or a coffin although coffins are not usually inlaid in faience and remnants of Nespekashuty's were painted. Unfortunately, there are no signs indisputably pointing to Nespekashuty's names or titles. Although it seems likely that the fairly elaborate piece of equipment to which they testify belonged to the main burial of this tomb, and not to the Third Intermediate Period burials found in the courtyard or to the material apparently cleared from the Hathor Shrine at Deir el Bahri or to the other sets of late shabtis found in the vicinity of the tomb, it cannot be proven that they belong to Nespekashuty's equipment. Possibly the ongoing reexcavation of Kushite and Saite tombs in the Theban necropolis and also in the Saqqara area will eventually provide a better understanding of what kind of funerary equipment supplied the burials of the period, providing better context for these inlays.

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