NARRATOR: This relief, and the others along the walls of this room, come from a cemetery near a village called Lisht, located about thirty miles south of Cairo. The ancient city associated with this cemetery, now covered by many feet of agricultural land at Lisht, was the capital of Middle Kingdom Egypt. The figure in the center is King Amenemhat I, the first ruler of the Twelfth Dynasty.

From 1906 to 1934, the Museum excavated the cemetery that lies west of Lisht, where this relief was found. It originally belonged to a small temple the king had built in connection with his pyramid. Dorothea Arnold, who is Lila Acheson Wallace Curator in Charge of the Department of Egyptian Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes the scene.

DOROTHEA ARNOLD: What we have here is the upper part of the depiction of one of the rituals of the Heb Sed, of the thirty years’ jubilee of the king. The king is seen in the middle—you see his head and shoulders. He is actually running. He’s striding with his legs far apart. And that was an important part of the thirty years’ jubilee. If you want to say it in a mundane way, he showed his strength, that he after thirty years could still run. But, of course, you have to take it much more ritually….And of course he needed the help of the gods.

NARRATOR: Some of that help came from Horus, the falcon-headed god to the left of the king. Horus was the god of kingship, so of course he was an important part of the pharaoh’s ritual rejuvenation. To the right of the king, is the jackal-headed deity, Anubis. He is present here in his role of lord of the cemetery, where this relief was originally erected. On the far right and left, you see two female figures. These are the goddesses of Lower and Upper Egypt, Nekhbet and Wadjet, and they represent the presence of the entire country at this ritual.