Cleveland Museum of Art (Egyptian) · statue
Head of Sekhmet
Description
[Egypt, Thebes(?), New Kingdom (1540–1069 BCE), Dynasty 18, reign of Amenhotep III (1390–1352 BCE)] This lioness head once belonged to a grand statue of the goddess Sekhmet, "the powerful one," probably seated and wearing a tight dress. Possibly appealing to her healing aspect, Pharaoh Amenhotep III, often described as “beloved of Sekhmet,” commissioned and dedicated hundreds of large granodiorite Sekhmet sculptures in his Theban mortuary temple. Thus, this head likely comes from Thebes, perhaps later moved across the Nile—like many such sculptures—to the temple of Mut, a related deity, at Karnak. Behind her stylized ruff, Sekhmet wears a wig, once crowned with a sun disk and uraeus, the stylized cobra symbolizing royal or divine power.
Connections
Deities
Sekhmet
Cross-references (2)
- Wikidata Q79479159 tier-1
- CMA-id 96303 tier-2
About this record's data
- From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Cleveland Museum of Art (Egyptian).
- 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.