Relief from tomb of Ny-ankh-nesuwt

Former TitlePlayful Jousting on the Nile

CultureEgyptian

Dateca. 2345-2320 B.C.E.

MediumLimestone with paint

DimensionsOverall: 37 × 104 × 1 5/8 inches (93.98 × 264.16 × 4.14 cm)

Credit LinePurchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust

Object number30-14

On View

On view

Gallery Location

Collections

Ancient Art

Terms

DescriptionThree horizontal registers are filled with scenes of human activity, animals, and hieroglyphs. The low-relief sculpting is painted. The top register reads proper right to left. Thirteen men gather papyrus plants, carry large baskets filled with papyrus, and make rope and build a boat from the plants. A symmetrical pair of men, facing each other as they tie a rope around a basket, creates a unique breake in the scene's formal arrangement. Boatmen battle in the middle register. Fourteen men on four papyrus skiffs travel on a band of water, likely representing the Nile. Each skiff holds a crew of three to five men wearing fishermen's loincloths. On the far right side, a man strides onto land with two handfuls of lotus blooms. Only the upper half of the lower register remains. One man leads a bull, and three men carry lotus flowers and large fish. Whole and sliced-open fish also appear. Hieroglyphs serving as captions appear throughout much of the relief.Gallery Label

Gallery Label

This relief and several others once lined the walls of the funerary chapel that stood over the burial chamber of Ny-ankh-nesuwt, a high-ranking Egyptian official.

On the top tier, servants gather papyrus plants from which they make rope and a boat. In the middle tier, boats carry fowl, containers of food and a young cow. The servants on these boats may be fighting each other to be the first to bring Ny-ankh-nesuwt this grand meal. On the lowest tier, figures bring cattle and fish. According to ancient Egyptian belief, these carved servants would magically come to life and feed Ny-ankh-nesuwt in the hereafter.

In 2014 the museum's conservators found that the blocks that make up the relief had not been safely joined together by earlier restorers. It took more than two years to take them apart and then securely join them.

Provenance

Tomb of Ny-ankh-nesuwt, Saqqara, Egypt;

With Jacob Hirsch (1874-1955), Geneva, no. 426, by April 1929-1930;

Purchased from Hirsch, through Harold Woodbury Parsons, by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1930.

Published References

“The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City Special Number,” The Art News 32, no. 10 (December 9, 1933): 59.

The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Handbook of the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1933), 114-15.

James Breasted, Geschichte Aegyptens (Zurich: Phaidon-Verlag, 1936), fig. 204.

The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, The William Rockhill Nelson Collection, 2^nd ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1941), 12.

William Stevenson Smith, A History of Egyptian Sculpture and Painting in the Old Kingdom (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 208, 338, 339, fig. 221.

Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4^th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 16.

Ross E. Taggart and George L. McKenna, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. 1, Art of the Occident, 5th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 22.

Gerard Roquet, “Niveaux de représentation du code graphique égyptien: phonétique et phonologique,” Livre du centenaire de l’IFAO (1880-1980) 76, no. 32 [1980].

Andrey O. Bolshakov, “The Scene of the Boatmen Jousting,” Bulletin (Société d’Égyptologie, Genève) 17 (1993): 32-33, no. 26, 33-38.

Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 104, 111.

Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 7, fig. 12.

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