Among the most evocative wooden figures of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom are the offering bearers: small, brightly painted attendants created to ensure that the dead would never lack nourishment in the afterlife. This elegant female figure, dating to the 12th Dynasty, carries a basket laden with loaves and meat upon her head. Said to have come...
This finely painted fragment comes from the tomb of Sobekhotep, “Overseer of the Seal“; the highest treasury official under king Thutmose IV. It forms part of a grand tribute scene in which foreign envoys bring precious offerings to Egypt’s court. The men shown here are Asiatics from Syria–Palestine, known to the Egyptians as Retjenu or...
During early excavations of the worker’s village of Deir el-Medina, numerous anthropoid busts of limestone and clay, referred to as “ancestor busts” were found. French Egyptologist Bernard Bruyère (10 November 1879 – 4 December 1971), proposed the idea that these “ancestor busts”, rather than being funerary items or temple tributes, would have actually been a...
Nubian women and children depicted within the procession of tribute for king Thutmose IV (Tomb of Horemheb, TT78) This scene is depicted within the Tomb of Horemheb, not the later king with the same name, but an Official of King Thutmose IV. Horemheb held many titles, including; “Great Confidant of the Lord of the Two...
