Relief Fragment from the Tomb of Khety

Khety was a high official during the reign of Montuhotep II at the beginning of the Middle Kingdom and was buried in a finely decorated tomb (TT311) near the mortuary temple of the king. It was excavated in 1923 by the Met Museum and some pieces from it are now in the Met.

This piece is from the entrance corridor, but it wasn’t removed by the excavators – instead some time in antiquity (after the tomb was no longer in active use for remembering Khety) the nice white limestone he’d used to line its corridor was hacked out for re-use.

This piece seems to’ve been intended to have a second life as some sort of bowl or platter, you can see it’s hollowed out at the top with a nice curved rim. But for some reason the person working on it discarded it before it was finished, perhaps due to the crack across the body?

Which is nice from our perspective, because it means that the desert hunting scene carved on it hasn’t entirely vanished! In the remaining section we can see a gazelle (avatar of chaos) being brought down by Khety’s arrows and hunting dog as he imposes order on the world.