Amenhotep, overseer of builders of Amun : an eighteenth-dynasty burial reassembled

• Published in: Metropolitan Museum Journal Vol. 48; pp. 7 - 36
• Main Author: Reeves, Nicholas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.01.2013

In 1930, following a contested will and much legal wrangling, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was at last able to take full and formal possession of the varied collection of paintings, sculpture, and other "objets d'art" that had been bequeathed to it 15 years previously by the New York lawyer and businessman Theodore M. Davis (18381915). For the Department of Egyptian Art, the securing of this legacy proved a particular coup, further consolidating the Museum's claim to be a repository not merely for a wide range of Egyptian antiquities but for some of ancient Egypt's finest surviving works of art. Over the years, perhaps inevitably, scholarly interest in this collection has tended to focus on Davis's peerless array of excavated finds, with the many excellent pieces he acquired from dealers attracting significantly less attention because of the perceived lack of research potential. The present discussion of one specific group of Davis purchases seeks to redress that imbalance and to challenge the prejudice that lies at its root. The items in question are: a cartonnage headpiece of traditional form with richly gilded face, prepared as embellishment for the mummy of an unidentified man during the first half of the Eighteenth Dynasty, ca. 14271400 B.C.; a second gilded mask, less conventional in design and seemingly later in date, which had formed part of the funerary equipment of an unnamed woman; and two sheets of a papyrus Book of the Dead. [Abridged Publication Abstract]