The sacrificial bearer
Time period: Middle Kingdom, Dynasty 12, beginning of the reign of Amenemhat I
Date: about 1975-1981 BC. M
Geographical origin: Taybeh, Al-Asasif Al-Janoubiyah, the tomb of Muqtir (Mukt-Ra) Muktar.
Ingredients: wood, gypsum, paint
Dimensions: (46.5 x 16.5 x 112) cm
Venue: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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An angelic face that suggests calmness and sobriety, elegance and arrangement in clothing and decorations, calm colours and wonderful beauty, very coordinated decoration in terms of colour and shape, giving a realistic and almost complete perception of women’s clothes and decorations in ancient Egypt.
The woman walks forward with her left leg and carries a basket full of pieces of meat on her head. In her right hand, she holds a live duck by its wings. Personal iconography is well known from Old Kingdom inscriptions where rows of offering bearers are depicted. Place names were often written next to these shapes identifying them as personifications of offerings that would provide sustenance for the tomb owner’s soul forever. The woman is adorned with jewellery and wears a dress adorned with a pattern of feathers, the type of dress often associated with goddesses. Thus, this statue and its companion in Cairo may also be associated with the funerary goddesses Isis and Nephthys, who are often depicted at the feet and head of coffins, protecting the deceased.
All accessible rooms of the Mekttri-Maqtari (Mukt-Ra) tomb were looted in antiquity. Still, in the early 1920s, the Metropolitan Museum’s excavator, Herbert Wenlock, cleaned up the accumulated debris to obtain an accurate outline of the tomb. During this cleaning process, the hidden small room was discovered, filled with 22 models of gardens, workshops, boats, a funeral procession almost completely preserved, and two statues, one and the other, in the Egyptian Museum.
In the division of the finds between the Egyptian government and the Metropolitan Museum, half of the contents went to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and half to New York. For information, the Metropolitan Museum contained huge amounts of wonderful Egyptian antiquities unique to the museum and were supposed to be in the Egyptian Museum.