Talatat: Portrait of Nefertiti (c. 1353–1347 BCE): Art, History and Details

Talatat: Portrait of Nefertiti (c. 1353–1347 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The son of Amenhotep III, Akenhaten, brought about the short-lived "monotheistic" revolution in Egyptian religion near the end of Dynasty 18. The young king constructed a temple complex to the Aten, the Sun Disk, at Karnak—from which this relief comes—before he moved his capital to El Amarna. For reasons yet unknown, the figure of the Queen Nefertiti appears in these reliefs far more often that that of the king. Ironically, the Aten temples were dismantled to be used as foundations and fill for additions to the Great Temple of Amun, whom the Aten had briefly displaced.

Object facts

• Title: Talatat: Portrait of Nefertiti
• Date: c. 1353–1347 BCE
• Culture: Egypt, Karnak, New Kingdom (1540–1069 BCE), Dynasty 18, reign of Akhenaten (1351–1334 BCE)
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: painted sandstone
• Dimensions: Overall: 22 x 22.7 cm (8 11/16 x 8 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Egypt - New Kingdom
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1959.188

A detail from the museum

This relief comes from the short end of a talatat, a limestone block of standardized size used during the 18th Dynasty reign of the Pharaoh Akhenaten in the building of the Aton temples at Karnak and Akhetaten. The standardized size and their small weight made construction more efficient.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Windmuller-Luna, Kristen. "An Obsession with Heads: The Impact of African Arts, Anthropology, and Photography on the Works of Alberto Giacometti," Medium (May 2022).
• "Annual Report for the Year 1959." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 47, no. 6 (1960).
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Martha L. Carter. Egyptian Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, Ohio: The Museum, 1963.

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.