Priests Performing Funeral Rites (c. 667–647 BCE): Art, History and Details

Priests Performing Funeral Rites (c. 667–647 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

A priest and two attendants perform ceremonies for the deceased. Originally, there probably existed (to the left) certain offerings. It is an exact copy of a scene in the Temple of Deir el Bahari made some seven centuries earlier where the figures are reversed.

Object facts

• Title: Priests Performing Funeral Rites
• Date: c. 667–647 BCE
• Culture: Egypt, Late period (715–332 BCE), Dynasties 25–26
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: limestone
• Dimensions: Overall: 36.2 x 48.2 cm (14 1/4 x 19 in.)
• Collection: Egypt - Late Period
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1951.286

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Recent Acquisitions Press Release,” January 1952, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
• Wunderlich, Silvia. "A Group of Egyptian Reliefs of the Saïte Period." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 39, no. 3 (March 1952): 44-47, 49-50.
• Berman, Lawrence M., and Kenneth J. Bohač. Catalogue of Egyptian Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.