Relief Fragment with Parts of Heads of Prisoners

Relief Fragment with Parts of Heads of Prisoners

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The mortuary temple of Mentuhotep II at Deir el-Bahri combined innovative building ideas with a relief decoration that was largely based on prototypes from the Old Kingdom pyramid temples in the Memphite area. Utterly destroyed by stone robbers in antiquity, the decoration is only preserved in thousands of fragments. This fragment comes from a scene in which the king was shown raising a mace in his right hand to smite a group of enemies whom he holds by the hair in his left hand. The faces of two dark skinned enemies (Nubians?) alternate with two of yellowish orange skin color (Libyans or Asians?).

Egyptian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Relief Fragment with Parts of Heads of PrisonersRelief Fragment with Parts of Heads of PrisonersRelief Fragment with Parts of Heads of PrisonersRelief Fragment with Parts of Heads of PrisonersRelief Fragment with Parts of Heads of Prisoners

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.