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Period: New Kingdom
Dynasty: Dynasty 18 Reign: Joint reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III Date: ca. 1479–1425 B.C.
Geography: Egypt, Upper Egypt; Thebes, Deir el-Bahri, Hatshepsut Hole, MMA 1922-1923
Medium: Limestone, paint

Dimensions: h. 10.8 cm (4 1/4 in); w. 12 cm (4 3/4 in); th. 1.7 cm (11/16 in)

The hippopotamus on this ostracon was painted with the sure hand of a skilled artist who had no need of a grid.

Other ostraca in the collection were clearly made as templates to be used when transferring an image to the wall of a tomb or a temple, or as practice pieces. The purpose for this sketch and others is less clear.

Broadly speaking, the Egyptians viewed the world in terms of the opposing forces of order and chaos, and they recognized these forces in the creatures around them.

In its benign aspect, the hippopotamus, standing upright, was used to represent the goddess Taweret (26.7.1193), the protector of children and pregnant women.

But the hippo could also be a dangerous, destructive beast, and the Egyptians had great respect for its power. In its destructive aspect, the hippo was a stand-in for Seth, the god of chaos, and scenes of the king, or the god Horus, or even a deceased tomb owner harpooning a hippopotamus can be read as depictions of the triumph of order over chaos.

In this small painting, however, the animal is not shown in an agressive pose. In this case the image may simply be what meets the eye: a representation of a hippopotamus.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's earliest roots date back to 1866 in Paris, France, when a group of Americans agreed to create a "national institution and gallery of art" to bring art and art education to the American people.

On March 30, 1880, after a brief move to the Douglas Mansion at 128 West 14th Street, the Museum opened to the public at its current site on Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street. The architects Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould designed the initial Ruskinian Gothic structure, the west facade of which is still visible in the Robert Lehman Wing. The building has since expanded greatly, and the various additions—built as early as 1888, now completely surround the original structure.

The Museum's Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue facade and Great Hall, designed by the architect and founding Museum Trustee Richard Morris Hunt, opened to the public in December 1902. The Evening Post reported that at last New York had a neoclassical palace of art, "one of the finest in the world, and the only public building in recent years which approaches in dignity and grandeur the museums of the old world."

By the twentieth century, the Museum had become one of the world's great art centers.

Today, the Museum's two-million-square-foot building houses over two million objects, tens of thousands of which are on view at any given time.

The Museum's collection of ancient Egyptian art consists of approximately twenty-six thousand objects of artistic, historical, and cultural importance, dating from the Paleolithic to the Roman period (ca. 300,000 B.C.–A.D. 4th century). More than half of the collection is derived from the Museum's thirty-five years of archaeological work in Egypt, initiated in 1906 in response to increasing Western interest in the culture of ancient Egypt.

www.metmuseum.org/en/about-the-museum/history-of-the-muse...

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Fantasy 03 by Viveca Lammers