Last week, my wife and I took the train (this is America, it really is the train—Amtrak’s singular, once a day Pennsylvanian route) up to New York City for a couple of days to do some general sightseeing. As I touched on in my Susanna Moodie entry, despite living in the same state for most of the first half of my life, because of the distance involved, I’ve only been to NYC a couple of times prior to this—both of which were many years ago now. To give you a reference for how long ago even the most recent of those was, the last time I was in the city, I was looking at colleges and my family took a photo together on the observation deck of the World Trade Center.

Suffice to say that it’s been over twenty years since my last visit, which is also the number of years it’s been since I was last at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so that was my activity ask for the trip. So after a day of wading through gale-force winds on the Liberty Island loop, even my less art-inclined spouse was perfectly happy to walk around something indoors.

Dear readers, I had forgotten how BIG the Met is. I know it doesn’t have anything on the Louvre, etc, but it’s still massive. As a result, I wasn’t sure if a lot of what I saw I’d forgotten about, or I had simply not made it to that part of the museum the last time. Anyway, I thought today I’d share some of what I saw in some extra special museum entries (to make up for the half entry I did last month). I don’t have a great over-arching narrative at play here, though many things that caught my eye tie back to my books and other subjects we’ve talked about, which will hopefully be illuminating. And also y’all know me—what catches my attention might be something other people might pass over on their own trip (understandable—there is so much to see…), so with any luck I might be able to point out something you didn’t even know the Met had.

But because of even the sheer amount of stuff that I was able to cram into one visit, for all our sakes, this is going to take more than one post. Left to my on devices, I decided to concentrate the vast majority of my day in wings that I probably didn’t see much of last time when I was here with my family in tow: mainly the Egypt and Greece/Rome wings on the first floor, and Asian Art up on the second; with time spent in Medieval Art, European painting 1300-1800, and American Art to round up. Because of their prominence on this blog, I’m planning on showing you just some of the Egypt wing this week, with a solo Greece and Rome entry next time around, and then doing a hodgepodge of the rest in a third, but we’ll see how we get along. With so much to get to, let’s dive right in!

I spent almost two hours in the Egypt wing, and I still felt like I was rushing. According to the Met, their Egyptian collection contains over 26,000 separate objects, and it certainly felt that way as I wound my way through the catacomb of forty gallery rooms on that side of the floor.

While not the flashiest objects in the wing, the Met has a large collection of pottery from the predynastic Naqada periods of Egyptian history, when the earliest Egyptian cultures were centered in Upper Egypt around the horseshoe bend in the Nile above Thebes. This period and its artifacts always interest me because Naqada is the Arabic name of the Egyptian city of Nebut/Nebyt, better known to my readers in Greek as Ombos, the place where all my God’s Wife protagonists end up congregating in. By the late Ptolemaic period/early Imperial period of my books, Naqada is barely more than a village, but in the predynastic era, it was one of the earliest major Egyptian cities and the main cult center for the god Set during the time he enjoyed his most widespread worship. On the largest pot above (second from the right), you can see a depiction of another major predynastic deity, the goddess Bat—recognizable by her arms curled over her head in a gesture meant to resemble cow’s horns, as she was a celestial cow goddess. During the Middle Kingdom (2040-1782 BCE), Bat would be integrated with Egypt’s other cow goddess, Hathor, and her separate worship would largely cease. But you can usually pick out a depiction of Bat from Hathor not only by the date of an object, but because Bat’s “horns” will curve inward, while Hathor’s curve outward. Some scholars speculate that this might reflect a change in the breeds of cow being raised in Egypt between the Naqada Period and the Middle Kingdom.

As you can imagine, Egyptian wood objects are rarer in preservation than those of other materials, though Egypt’s desert climate does make them more plentiful than similar artifacts from ancient cultures in wetter environments. Still, wooden items from as far back as the Old Kingdom (2686–2181 BCE) are unusual, so this funerary statue of a man named Kaipunesut is a major find for archaeologists. It was found in the mastaba (a flat-roofed tomb common of the period for non-pharaohs) of Kaipunesut’s brother, Kaemheset, at Saggara, and it is typical of the skillful, evocative portraiture of the few surviving wooden sculptures we have from this time. But more interestingly, one of the titles carved on Kaipunesut’s belt tells us that he was a royal carpenter, which suggests that Kaipunesut himself might have carved this portrait of himself in acacia wood to accompany his brother into the afterlife.

Considering how much we’ve talked about the ethics of displaying remains with the comparatively microscopic Egyptian collection of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, it was genuinely jarring to walk around the Met’s collection and be confronted with mummies willy-nilly all over the place. I know that like other large institutions such as the British Museum, mummies are probably seen as a major public draw to the Met, but watching humble CMNH grapple with this issue for years and ultimately choosing to stop displaying their mummies in favor of refocusing their collection on Egyptians as they lived rather than on just their dead bodies has really opened my eyes to the possibilities of what museums can do with these collections outside of mere prurience. The Met has so many artifacts—almost more than a person can take in a single, thoughtful visit. Wouldn’t it be a better use of their massive international prestige to become a trailblazer on this issue among the major museums? Anyway, as cool as mummies are, this is my call to the Met to join other progressive institutions and stop displaying their human remains.

To move to an object famous enough for me to gasp when I saw it, here is one of the more well known statues of Hatshepsut, the only openly reigning woman pharaoh of the New Kingdom (1550–1069 BCE) (there are a ton of theories about Nefertiti), and one of only a handful of female rulers in Egypt prior to the Ptolemies. Unlike some statues from her reign which are more ambiguous about her gender (using traditional male symbols like the false beard, etc), here Hatshepsut is beardless and shown with breasts and a noticeably feminine face, though she still wears the masculine nemes head cloth as a symbol of her pharaonic authority. Originally from her temple at Deir el Bahri, the Met’s own expedition excavated the statue’s head and what we have of the torso from a quarry near Thebes in the 1920s, but the lower body and throne were only obtained later from the Agyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung in Berlin at a later date, which I did not know. It was a good reminder though to pay attention to the descriptions throughout the Egyptian and Classical wings, where many of the relatively whole-looking pieces are often an amalgamation of original pieces jigsawed together, or original pieces held together with sections of 18th/19th century reproductions.

Here is another statue of Hatshepsut in granite holding libation jars, where you can see the remains of a false beard, and a more ambiguously-presenting chest and face. In the background, you can see a limestone head of the pharaoh where she has the full false beard and wears the the double pschent crown, but with a facial profile much more similar to the limestone sculpture. This fluid approach to depicting the pharaoh continued throughout her reign, with the more feminine depictions likely coming later in time as the Egyptian power structure became more comfortable with first a woman regent, then an outright monarch.

Though it was about the time that I reached Hatshepsut, near what I had started to hope was the back end of this seemingly endless maze of galleries that I began to wonder—hey, where is the Temple of Dendur? Luckily, the answer was not too far around the corner, at the true back end of the Egyptian wing.

As we briefly talked about in my entry on lesser-known Egyptian gods, which to this day remains my most popular entry ever (#2 Google result for “weird Egyptian gods”!), the Temple of Dendur was built by Gaius Petronius, Roman praefect of Egypt, on Octavius’s behalf in Dendur, Nubia to honor a local cult to a pair of deified twins, Pedesi (Peteese) and Pihor. Taking a little over a decade to build, likely due to its relatively remote location in Roman Egypt, the small temple was a gift from the modern Egyptian government to the United States in order to preserve it from being submerged in the reservoir of the Aswan Dam in 1965. After a brief consideration as to where to put it, the temple was awarded to the Met by President Johnson. The temple consists of 661 individual limestone blocks and pylons that were disassembled for transport and reassembled in New York, where architects Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo designed a new gallery wing at the museum to hold it. The large, airy room that houses the temple was meant to simulate its original outdoor location, while protecting it from further weathering.

Pedesi and Pihor themselves were posthumously aligned with Isis and Horus, so on the outer walls of the temple, Octavius is depicted offering sacrifices to those gods, as well as Osiris, the third member of their family triad. As he is generally throughout Egypt, Octavius is always shown in the dress of an Egyptian pharaoh, a precedent other Roman emperors would also follow.

Here in a closeup on the right side of the temple doorway, we can see Octavius (R) in the red deshret crown makes a libation to a god in the feathered atef crown, usually a symbol of Osiris.

On the opposite front wall, we see Octavius wears the hedjet crown while offering it and the deshret crown (together symbolizing Upper and Lower Egypt) to Isis.

Here we can see the previous Isis panel in situ on the lowest part of the wall, and above it on the center panel, Octavius sacrificing to Mandulis (Merul/Melul), a local Nubian god that didn’t enter the Egyptian pantheon until the Roman period. On the pylon to the right, you can see Heh, the Egyptian god of infinity.

And for variety, on this wall Octavius wears the elaborate hemhem crown above the pharaonic nemes head cloth—a triple atef crown atop ram’s horns and flanked by two uraei as symbols of protection. Hm in Egyptian means “to shout” or to cry out, so with classic Egyptian doubling for emphasis, “hemhem” suggests prolonged shouting, perhaps in imitation of a battle horn. The hemhem was a relatively late-arriving crown popular among the Nubian pharaohs of the 8th century BCE and the Ptolemies, but it was also the favored crown of Heka, the godly personification of magic. Here, Octavius might be using it to advertise to the locals that he possesses the ruling words of power (literally what hka means) which support his rule of Egypt and therefore his ability to make fruitful sacrifices to the gods on their behalf.

In the Dendur room, the Met also has this truly gorgeous pylon capital of carved papyrus leaves, on which you can still make out traces of the original paints. It comes from the Temple of Hibis, located in the southwestern Egyptian desert at Kharga Oasis. The temple, dating from the 30th dynasty (380-343 BCE), the last native Egyptian ruling dynasty, is the largest and best-preserved structure we have dating from this period or the First Persian period that predates it. It was dedicated to a syncretic form of the god Amun, who combined the local Amun of Hibis with specifically the composite Amun-Ra version of the god worshipped in Karnak. But, perhaps because of its southernly desert location deep in his traditional domains in Upper Egypt, the temple is also notable for having one of the few surviving depictions of Set as the primordial slayer of Apep and nocturnal protector of the sun (Amun/Ra).

After skipping over them to talk about Octavius’ little temple in Nubia, we come back to the Ptolemies, though their section of the galleries is largely intertwined with the Roman period after them. Here we have the torso of a late Ptolemy pharaoh, who by the cartouche belting his kilt, Neos Dionysus, would suggest he’s our very old God’s Wife friend(?) Ptolemy XII Auletes, father of Cleopatra VII and Arsinoë IV; but it is possible that this was a depiction of Ptolemy XV, Cleopatra’s son, Caesarion. The dating is imprecise and it really comes down to whether this statue was a representation of actual youth (Caesarion), or the simulacrum of it (the aging and desperate Auletes).

The museum also has a Ptolemaic era copy of the complete Book of Coming (Going) Forth By Day (The Egyptian Book of the Dead), which they display stretched around the perimeter of their main solo Ptolemy gallery. Below is a detail showing Amit the Devourer.

Among their many Greco-Roman era artifacts (including several fantastic Faiyum funerary mummy portraits from like the one above from the 2nd century CE), the Met has a number of small votaries that demonstrate the cultural blending occurring in Roman Egypt between Roman, Greek, and Egyptian art and religion.

One that is relatively famous is this terracotta statue of a syncretic Isis-Aphrodite from the 2nd century CE, where the artist combines the rigid pose of Egyptian art with the sacred nudity of the Greco-Roman goddess. This blended deity wears her hair in hanging braids like an Egyptian, but their blonde color is decidedly not Egyptian. On the front of her elaborate headdress, though, you can also see the horned sun symbol of Isis.

Here is another Isis-Aphrodite/Venus, this one much more classical in appearance, with the figure wearing Isis’ horned and plumed crown while holding a traditional dressing/undressing pose for the Greco-Roman goddess.

Another is this statuette of Harpokrates, a Greek iteration of Horus the child, who wears what is supposed to be a version of the Egyptian double pschent crown while holding a very Roman cornucopia and possibly a libation jar. Despite having his hands too full to produce his signature “shushing” gesture, you can tell he is supposed to be the childlike Harpokrates by the necklace he wears—it’s a bulla, the protective amulet given to Roman boys that they wore until they came of age.

Lastly, we have this terracotta lamp with a truly interesting syncretism, that of Athena and the Egyptian goddess Neith. The Greco-Roman goddess is depicted, unusually, in a knee-high belted chiton, leaning on Neith’s most recognizable ideogram, an oval shield. Both Athena and Neith are war goddesses, and both are associated with, oddly enough, weaving, which is probably why they were grouped together here. However, aside from this, of the things that I find most delightful about this lamp is how buff the goddess is. Rather than their typical willowy forms, this goddess looks like someone you’d hate to meet on the battlefield and that’s just wonderful.

So that’s just a handful of the objects that stood out to me in the Met’s Egyptian wing. Stay tuned for next time when we go full Greco-(mostly) Roman in the Greek and Roman Art wing!