Cairo Museum Hatshepsut Sphinx

Cairo Museum 008
Originally uploaded by random field notes

In a similar way to the Hatshepsut statue at Karnak which i posted recently- this sphinx tells us all we need to know (of its origination) by the damage we see.

Again the beard and nose have been attacked, as has the uraeus on its forehead. Hatshepsut originally commissioned this sphinx and it was re-used/ inscribed by Thutmose III.

As this piece is located at the front of the Egyptian Museum, this photograph does not fall under the same rules as the indoor artifacts (photography ban).

One of three sphinxes in Cairo (actually these are the only three "intact" sphinxes I've located- there is also a sphinx head). These will provisionally be noted in the Hatshepsut Database as Sphinx A,B,C and D.

Other Hatshepsut Sphinxes can been seen today in Berlin, Metropolitan Museum (MMA)  and at Deir el Bahri.

Regards,

Stuart

Egyptian Museum, Cairo

The EMC is the latest museum added to the growing database. It's been a headache as they do not have a dedicated online database such as the Petrie Museum, British Museum, MMA, etc.

So far 100 items have been recorded for the Egyptian Museum. That number might double once ALL items have been recorded, but finding these items is problematic. It took a full day yesterday to locate the 100 items- some of which do not have acquisition numbers/ museum numbers, some have a very general description so is difficult to obtain the quality of information which fit the database template.

I am working overtime on this museum, pulling resources from everywhere i can find them- Porter and Moss, Flickr, Google, Wiki, Global Egyptian Museum, Hatshepsut from Queen to Pharaoh exhibition book/reports, etc.

I hope that the new museum (GEM) at Giza will do me a huge favour and have an online catalogue. I will even volunteer to help them do this. For now there is a lot of research to be done for this one museum. If any of you have any ideas which may help, please feel free to contact me.

Regards,
Stuart  

Hatshepsut - Cairo Museum

It had to come up sooner or later. The best museum in the world- if you happen to have an interest in all things Ancient Egypt.

In their collections, they of course have items from the reign of Hatshepsut.

One such item is a head of an Osiride statue of Hatshepsut, seen here:

http://www.egyptarchive.co.uk/html/cairo_museum_28.html

Note the false beard, mentioned earlier.

This would have come from the excavations at Deir el Bahri in the late 1800s- early 1900s as a "share of the spoils".

Stuart