Two Boats with Female Mourners (c. 667–647 BCE): Art, History and Details

Two Boats with Female Mourners (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:

This relief depicts part of the flotilla accompanying the funerary boat. The setting could be either the brief voyage across the Nile to the cemetery on the west bank or the traditional voyage downstream to Abydos, the sacred city of Osiris, where in earlier times final rites for the dead were performed. Both of the boats preserved here are filled with professional female mourners whose task it was to proclaim the virtues of the deceased and to lament his departure. This composition is certainly copied from a lost, probably painted, original of Dynasty 18.

Object facts

• Title: Two Boats with Female Mourners
• Date: c. 667–647 BCE
• Culture: Egypt, Late period (715–332 BCE), Dynasties 25–26
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: limestone
• Dimensions: Overall: 58.2 x 91 cm (22 15/16 x 35 13/16 in.)
• Collection: Egypt - Late Period
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1951.282

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.
• 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.