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, Akhenaten, 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 Armana. For reasons yet unknown, the figure of the Queen Nefertiti appears in these reliefs far more often than that of the king. Ironically, the Aten temples were dismantled anciently 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: 21.5 x 24.3 cm (8 7/16 x 9 9/16 in.)
• Collection: Egypt - New Kingdom
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1976.4

A detail from the museum

Even though all we see is a fragment of the head we know it is Nefertiti by the double uraeus or serpent symbol on the headband, which was only worn by the queen.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Chevrier, Henri, "Rapport sur les travaux de Karnak 1953-1954," Annales du Service des Antiquités de l'Égypte (ASAE) 53 (1956).
• Kozloff, Arielle P. "Nefertiti, Beloved of the Living Disk." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 64, no. 9 (1977).
• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1976." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 64, no. 2 (1977).

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.