Offering table

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Discovered at Lisht North, this offering table was originally dated by the excavators to the Ramesside Period, but comes instead from the mid-12th Dynasty. The upper surface is carved with an inset panel framed at the bottom by the hieroglyph for offerings, hetep, which echoes the shape of a mat on which offerings of food and drink would have been placed in earlier tombs. Within the panel, which opens into a shallow spout on one of the long sides, are images of ritual vessels and foodstuffs. The rectangles, which are unusal features, may represent clusters of long conical bread loaves arranged in alternating directions to form quadrilaterals. Such details might have been rendered by zigzag lines drawn over the rectangles in ink that has since faded away. The absence of inscriptions might indicate that the text was added only in ink. This offering table originally would have been placed in a tomb chapel; water poured over it would have served to activate the purification rituals and food offerings in order to nourish the spirit of the deceased. It would also have served as a magical substitute to provide eternal sustenance for the tomb owner in the event that his or her actual cult ceased to be carried out.

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