Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access) · statue

The King's Acquaintances Memi and Sabu

Source of record: Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access) — catalogued by the holding institution. View the original record →

Description

Limestone, paint

AI image analysis claude-haiku-4-5

Machine-generated from the object's image on May 2026. Not curatorial; treat deities, names, and signs below as the model's best reading, not authority.

A limestone double statue depicting two figures in Egyptian style: a larger male figure wearing a linen kilt and headdress standing beside a smaller female figure in a fitted sheath dress, both carved from the same block.

This Old Kingdom limestone sculpture presents a formal portrait group of two figures rendered in the classic Egyptian style. The larger figure, identified as the male subject, stands frontally with arms at his sides and wears a linen kilt with pleated detailing and a striped cloth headdress. His companion, a smaller female figure, stands beside him wearing a fitted sheath dress that clings to her form. Both figures exhibit the idealized proportions characteristic of Old Kingdom statuary, with careful attention to anatomical detail including defined musculature on the male figure and formal posture. The base of the sculpture contains hieroglyphic inscriptions. The work demonstrates the hierarchical scale convention of Egyptian art, where the primary subject is rendered at larger scale than accompanying figures. The stone surface shows minimal damage, preserving fine details of facial features and body carving.

funerary Old Kingdom, likely 4th-5th Dynasty good
Materials limestonetraces of paint
Signs Hieroglyphic inscriptions on base ×8
Visible text "Hieroglyphic text visible on the base of the statue; specific signs not clearly legible in photograph"

Connections

Found at Giza

Cross-references (4)

  • Wikidata-Q Q29385735 tier-1
  • Collection-QID Q160236 tier-2 (wikidata-mediated)
  • Inventory-Number 48.111 tier-2 (wikidata-mediated)
  • MET-Object 543899 tier-2 (wikidata-mediated)
About this record's data
  • From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access).
  • AI-inferred — the image-analysis panel (deities, names, signs) is machine-generated and may be wrong.
  • Approximate location — most map points are plotted at the site centroid, not the exact findspot.
  • Inferred links — cross-references marked with a match method other than explicit-source-field were matched by us, not stated by the source.