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Walters Art Museum (Egyptian) · statue

Funeral Stela of Nefer-Khabet

Source of record: Walters Art Museum (Egyptian) — catalogued by the holding institution. View the original record →

Description

<p>At the end of the Old Kingdom, the authority of the king and court had eroded, and Egypt split into at least two distinct regions. Without a great royal court to patronize workshops, artists and artisans worked for local governors and officials. Lively regional styles developed, usually showing elongated, fluid figures with features such as the hands, eyes, and ears emphasized. Here, the inscriptions are an invocation to Anubis, god of embalming and mummification, requesting funerary offerings of food and drink for the deceased.This stela, carved in sunk relief, depicts a woman named Nefer-khabet. She wears a long, narrow, tight-fitting garment, a long wig, a collar, an armlet and a bracelet, and anklets. Her skin is painted pale yellow, her garment is pale blue, and her various pieces of jewelry are painted a darker shade of blue. She faces to the right and holds a blue lotus blossom with her left hand in front of her face, while her right arm hangs down at her side. In front of her is a short, small table heaped with offerings (two basins and two loaves, a shoulder of meat, vegetables, and more loaves); beneath it are ewer and a basin. More offerings (two baskets with food, four pottery jars on stands, loaves, and bunches of onions) are placed to the right of this table. The offerings are painted in red, yellow, and pale green, and are surrounded on three sides (all except the bottom) by a thin black rectangular border. Three rows and one column of inscription in blue are placed above her and to her right. Surrounding the scene on three sides (except for the bottom) is a border consisting of pale green, yellow, red, and black boxes, with an outline of black around them. The stela is broken on all four sides, breaking off three areas (upper left, lower left and right) of the colored-block border. The yellow, green, red, blue, and brown colors are well preserved.</p><p>For the latest information about this object, <cite><a href='https://purl.thewalters.org/art/22.85' rel='external'>Funeral Stela of Nefer-Khabet</a></cite>, visit the Online Collection of the Walters Art Museum.</p>

AI image analysis GPT-5.4-nano

Machine-generated from the object's image on Jul 2026. Not curatorial; treat deities, names, and signs below as the model's best reading, not authority.

A limestone funeral stela with an offering or mortuary scene: a standing male figure faces a large register of offerings and hieroglyphic text.

The object is a roughly rectangular, weathered limestone stela fragment with traces of dark pigment/painting along the incised design. In the lower left, a nude or lightly dressed standing man (the deceased) holds one arm in a gesture toward his chest while the other is extended, facing right toward a wall-like or architectural arrangement. To the right and across the central and upper fields are carved hieroglyphic signs and mortuary imagery, including stacked/outlined offering elements and a larger central motif that appears to include a shrine or platform with a cavity/table-like form. The overall composition is organized into horizontal bands/registers: an upper strip of signs and a larger middle field packed with hieroglyphs and decorative elements, consistent with a funerary text and offering presentation. No clear cartouche is legible from the provided image resolution.

funerary unclear (likely Late Period to Greco-Roman based on stela style, but not confident) fragmentary
Materials limestonetraces of paint (dark pigment)
Signs multiple hieroglyphic signs (unreadable at this resolution) ×30

Inscriptions (1)

Inscription #1

English description

[Translation] An offering which the king gives to Anubis, who is upon his mountain, the mi-wet, the lord of the necropolis, in all his places: offerings, to the sole royal ornament, the revered one, Nefer-Khabet

Connections

Deities Anubis

Cross-references (2)

  • Walters-AccNum 22.85 tier-2
  • Walters-id 16662 tier-2

Similar inscriptions · by content embedding

About this record's data
  • From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Walters Art Museum (Egyptian).
  • AI-inferred — the image-analysis panel (deities, names, signs) is machine-generated and may be wrong.
  • Approximate location — most map points are plotted at the site centroid, not the exact findspot.
  • Inferred links — cross-references marked with a match method other than explicit-source-field were matched by us, not stated by the source.