The Metropolitan Museum of Art is preparing to unveil "Divine Egypt," its first major ancient Egyptian exhibition since 2012, featuring an extraordinary collection of artifacts that reveal the mysterious and often surreal nature of ancient Egyptian religious art. Opening October 12, the exhibition presents approximately 210 priceless pieces, including 140 works from the Met's own extensive Egyptian collection, focusing on the diverse pantheon of gods worshipped throughout ancient Egypt's various dynasties.
The exhibition showcases remarkably unusual artifacts that might seem at home in contemporary surrealist art galleries. Among the standout pieces are a limestone block carved with four ears arranged in pairs, a serpent statue with a woman's head, a horse-like figurine with bony paws instead of hooves, a sculpture of a towering falcon protecting a man, and a bronze depicting a cobra-eel-human hybrid. These works demonstrate that ancient Egyptians embraced the weird and otherworldly in their religious art.
Perhaps the most striking piece in the exhibition is a massive block of quartz diorite carved into the shape of a scarab beetle, representing Khepri, the god associated with the morning sun. The sculpture features an elegantly smoothed back contrasting sharply with two fearsome mandibles below, creating an appearance that would have seemed alien even to ancient Egyptians familiar with the deity's symbolism.
While the exhibition includes more recognizable artifacts such as cat-shaped coffins, pharaoh sculptures, faience amulets, and golden pendants, "Divine Egypt" contains numerous objects that defy easy explanation. This mystery partly stems from lost historical records, as present-day curators work with incomplete documentation buried by time. However, the exhibition suggests that this unknowability was intentionally built into the art to make the deities appear fundamentally different from mortals.
The exhibition's appeal connects to a long tradition of successful Egyptian art shows at the Met. Former museum director Thomas Hoving once speculated that over one million visitors came to the Met's King Tut exhibition in 1978 because of the "majesty and mystery of the ancient past." That show became the first Egyptian art blockbuster, achieving unmatched success that has rarely been replicated since.
"Divine Egypt" takes a decidedly different approach from the Tut blockbuster, presenting a more low-key but comprehensive examination of ancient Egyptian religious art. Curator Diana Craig Patch, working with research associate Brendan Hainline, has created an exhibition with remarkable clarity of purpose. Rather than focusing on monumental objects, many of the featured pieces are exquisitely crafted amulets and figurines small enough to hold in one's palm, though they remain safely encased in protective glass.
The exhibition explores approximately 25 gods from the estimated 1,500 deities worshipped in ancient Egypt, organizing them into thematic sections arranged non-chronologically. This approach allows visitors to understand how gods were continuously molded and remolded depending on time period and geographic location within ancient Egypt. The curators demonstrate how iconographies were remixed, remade, and subverted, with deities sometimes becoming fused together into hybrid forms.
The exhibition begins with artifacts accessible only to pharaohs, unavailable for public consumption, allowing visitors to track how iconographies defined Egypt's deities. Horus, the sky god, appears in multiple forms throughout the show. In one limestone statue, he sits rigidly upright with an arm behind King Haremhab's back, posed like the pharaoh's companion. In another gorgeous metagraywacke sculpture, a tiny King Nectanebo II stands between Horus's splayed talons.
The section devoted to Hathor, goddess of motherhood, dance, and joy, particularly illustrates the shapeshifting nature of Egyptian deities. In a column fragment from the 4th century BCE, Hathor appears with a human face and cow ears. A nearby statue from the 15th century BCE shows her as completely bovine with almond-shaped eyes formed from rock crystal. Yet another object, a minuscule pendant from between the 12th and 7th centuries BCE, transforms Hathor into Bat, an entirely different cow goddess with a triangular forehead and golden eyes.
The exhibition makes clear that ancient Egyptians viewed their gods as shapeshifters, evident in pieces like a blue-glazed faience amulet showing a falcon-headed crocodile from between the 7th and 1st centuries BCE. The bird's head likely references Horus, while the long, scaly back refers to Sobek, god of the Nile, possibly specifically to Soknopaios, a version of this deity worshipped in the Fayum region.
As the gods transcended temples restricted to pharaohs and reached the public through shrine objects and processional displays, the deities continued evolving. Their images inspired board games, including a playing surface based on Mehen's curled, serpentine body, and influenced death rites, with the goddess Bastet's feline attributes generating various cat-themed artifacts, including a mummified cat that bears an uncanny resemblance to the baby from the film "Eraserhead."
One of "Divine Egypt's" key successes lies in demonstrating that the gods' enigmatic presence was compatible with everyday life. These deities were memorialized not only in gigantic temples and heavy sarcophagi but in easily transportable objects that asserted their strangeness on a much smaller, more intimate scale.
Among the exhibition's smallest artifacts is a particularly captivating Hathor pendant from the 8th century BCE, created during the Nubian kings' rule over Egypt. The goddess's head is rendered in luxurious gold leaf atop a carefully hewn block of rock crystal. Its original owner, a queen of Piye, knew that this crystal once contained something of high importance—perhaps a magical substance or maybe a prayer wrapped in gold, as the curators propose. Today, visitors can only see the brown residue that mysterious object left behind, ensuring that two millennia later, the amulet still contains riddles that resist being unraveled.
