The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of December 19, 2025

Beige, limestone stele with three bands carved with various flattened figures, all in profile. The central and largest band centers a seated god with a crescent and disk headdress. Two winged, flanking goddesses frame him, making a diamond shape with their wings. Two figures stand right, heavily worn, and another left. In the band above, baboons bow towards a central crescent and disk. The band below features a row of figures, some heavily worn away.

Stele of the High Priest of Ptah, Shedsunefertem

945–924 BCE

Egypt, Third Intermediate

(1069–715 BCE), Dynasty 22, reign of Shosheng I (943–922 BCE)
limestone, originally painted and gilded
Overall: 86.8 x 78.5 cm (34 3/16 x 30 7/8 in.)
Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust 1914.669
Location: On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Oct 6, 2025 - Jan 19, 2026

Did You Know?

The eye and eyebrow of the young sun-god Ra (at center) were once inlaid.

Description

This stele of Shedsunefertem, the High Priest of Ptah, is rich in religious symbolism. In the center of the top register is a disk and crescent, originally gilded. At either side a baboon raises its arms in adoration. The Egyptians believed that the jabbering of the baboons at dawn was a hymn of praise to the sun god Ra in a secret language only the king understood. It begins, "Praising Ra when he shines on the horizon." Directly below in the middle register a child god is seated on a lotus flower. In Egyptian mythology the sun arose out of the primeval waters at the dawn of creation in a lotus flower. Winged figures of Maat, goddess of Truth, stand protectively at either side. The damaged figure of the high priest himself, wearing the panther skin and jackal-collar of his office, appears at the far right, worshipping the god Ptah, whose consort, the lioness-headed goddess Sekhmet, appears on the far left. The figures in the bottom register are colleagues who appear here as dependents under the powerful high priest's protection.
  • Purchased from Khawam Brothers, Cairo, by Lucy Olcott Perkins through Henry W. Kent, April 23, 1913, with 1914.662, 1914.542, and 1914.663
  • Williams, Caroline Ransom. "Stela of a High-Priest of Memphis." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 5, no. 8/9 (1918): 67-69. Reproduced: Front Matter; Mentioned: pp. 67-69 www.jstor.org
    Williams, Caroline Ransom. "The Egyptian Collection in the Museum of Art at Cleveland, Ohio (Continued)." The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 5, no. 4 (1918): 279. www.jstor.org
    Moret, Alexandre. The Nile and Egyptian Civilization. London: Kegan Paul, French, Trubner and Co., 1927. p. 202, pl. VII 1. archive.org
    Tait, G.A.D. "The Egyptian Relief Chalice." The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 49, no. 4 (1963): 134–5, fig. 7. www.jstor.org
    Schulman, Alan R. "Two Unrecognized Monuments of Shedsunefertem." Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 39, no. 4 (1980): 308, fn. 8d. 544334
    Berman, Lawrence M., and Kenneth J. Bohač. Catalogue of Egyptian Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999. Reproduced: p. 258; Mentioned: p. 258-260
    Jurman, Claus. Memphis in der Dritten Zwischenzeit: eine studie zur (selbst-) Repräsentation von eliten in der 21. und 22. Dynastie. 2020. Reproduced; Tafel 114-116, D-060
    Oppenheim, Adela. "Re." In Divine Egypt, edited by Diana Craig Patch and Brendan Hainline, 62-75. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 71, no. 45
  • Divine Egypt. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (organizer) (October 6, 2025-January 19, 2026) https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/divine-egypt.
  • {{cite web|title=Stele of the High Priest of Ptah, Shedsunefertem|url=false|author=|year=945–924 BCE|access-date=19 December 2025|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1914.669