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Cat. 1 Stela of Tjenti and Nefret, Old Kingdom Cat. 2 Tomb Wall Fragment Depicting Donkeys, Old Kingdom Cat. 3 Tomb Wall Fragment Depicting Offering Bearers and Butchers, Old Kingdom Cats. 4–5 Side Panels from the Chapel of Merettetiiyet, First Intermediate Period Cat. 6 Relief Fragment Depicting Ipi and Fowling in the Marshes, First Intermediate Period Cat. 7 Stela of Amenemhat and Hemet, Middle Kingdom Cat. 8 Stela of Amenemhat and Yatu, Middle Kingdom Cat. 9 Lintel Fragment Depicting Iniuia and Iuy Worshiping Deities, New Kingdom Cat. 10 Stela Depicting the Funeral of Ramose, New Kingdom Cat. 11 Fragment of a Stela of Neferhotep, New Kingdom About Relief Plaques Cat. 12 Relief Depicting a God, Ptolemaic Period Cat. 13 Plaque Depicting a Queen or Goddess, Ptolemaic Period Cat. 14 Plaque Depicting a Quail Chick, Ptolemaic Period Cat. 15 Plaque Depicting a Ram, Ptolemaic Period Cat. 16 Double-Sided Plaque Depicting a Lion and Birds, Ptolemaic Period

Cats. 4–5 Side Panels from the Chapel of Merettetiiyet
Cat. 4

Relief Fragment Depicting Merettetiiyet with Offerings


First Intermediate Period, Dynasty 10, about 2050 BCE

Ancient Egyptian

Teti Pyramid Cemetery, Saqqara, Egypt

Limestone with traces of pigment; 73.4 × 57 × 12 cm (28 7/8 × 22 7/16 × 4 3/4 in.)

The Art Institute of Chicago, W. Moses Willner Fund, 1910.223

Cat. 5

Relief Fragment Depicting Merettetiiyet with Offerings


First Intermediate Period, Dynasty 10, about 2050 BCE

Ancient Egyptian

Teti Pyramid Cemetery, Saqqara, Egypt

Limestone; 71.1 × 61 × 14 cm (28 × 24 × 5 1/2 in.)

The Art Institute of Chicago, W. Moses Willner Fund, 1910.224

The interior walls of private tomb chapels were usually decorated with scenes of the deceased surveying activities of the tomb owner’s estate and of offerings being brought to him or her. This pair of reliefs comes from a tomb chapel that was made for a woman named Merettetiiyet. Originally comprising three stone slabs, these reliefs condensed the elements often found in larger mastaba tombs, which were created for the Old Kingdom’s most elite individuals.1

The chapel’s focal point was a false door. In ancient Egypt, false doors functioned as permeable boundaries between this world and the next where the souls of the deceased could come to partake of offerings that had been left for them. The two panels in the Art Institute’s collection originally faced each other, joining at a ninety-degree angle with the chapel’s false door (fig. 1).[1] Together, these three carved stone panels were erected on an undecorated stone block and set into the east mudbrick wall of a mastaba tomb in Saqqara.[2] Such small chapels were numerous at the site, with chapel owners like Merettetiiyet competing for the prayers and offerings of priests and other visitors to the cemetery.[3]2

Fig. 1


False Door of Merettetiiyet, First Intermediate Period, Dynasty 10, about 2050 BCE. Ancient Egyptian, Teti Pyramid Cemetery, Saqqara, Egypt. Limestone; 73 × 92 × 10 cm. Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst, Munich, GI. 108. Photograph courtesy of the Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst. The false door of Merettetiiyet once stood between the two panels (cats. 4–5).

Here, a column of (now fragmentary) hieroglyphs carved onto the narrow face of each panel proclaim the name of the chapel owner, who is represented below in shallow raised relief walking toward her false door (figs. 2–3).[4]
3

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Fig. 2


Side of cat. 4. The exterior faces of Merettetiiyet’s panels preserve part of her name and, at the bottom, an image of her walking into the chapel that complements the decoration on the false door.

J2378 Int Press 300ppi 3000px Srgb Jpeg

Fig. 3


Side of cat. 5.

The primary decorated surfaces of the two panels mirror each other in the arrangement of their decoration, but not always in their content. A border of once-painted banded blocks runs along the edge furthest from the false door, with the rest of the surface divided vertically into registers.[5] In both panels, the fragmentary upper registers, which were better preserved when excavated (fig. 4), depict offering bearers, who represent the living, active people who will service Merettetiiyet’s cult, approaching the false door where they will leave their gifts.[6] In the middle register, additional goods and offering bearers are shown. On the left-hand panel (cat. 4) a female offering bearer (now fragmentary) is followed by two men grappling with a bull as they lead it to be slaughtered, guiding it with the aid of a rope that ties the animal’s horns to its hind leg. An exclamation captioning the scene reads: “Fall for her kas!”[7] On the right-hand panel (cat. 5), a woman supports an offering on her head as she accompanies a gazelle, while a man balances a tray of food on his right shoulder, grasping a floral bouquet in his other hand. Behind this pair, static, detailed depictions of specific goods are shown: a beaded broad collar, two round packages of eye paint set into a grinding bowl, and a rectangular chest with three containers.[8]4

Fig. 4


Excavation photograph of cats. 4–5. From J. E. Quibell, Excavations at Saqqara (1906–1907) (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1908), pl. X. The side panels from Merettetiiyet’s tomb chapel were already fragmentary when discovered. The current location of some of the smaller fragments is unknown.

The main inscription on the left-hand panel (cat. 4) identifies the chapel’s owner as the “one who is revered before Anubis, Who Is upon His Mountain, Who Is in the Wrappings, Merettetiiyet.” A similar inscription appears on the opposite slab.[9] On each panel, this line of hieroglyphic text is written in the same orientation as Merettetiiyet, who is shown immediately below facing approaching visitors with her back to the false door, as if her spirit has just emerged. In both representations, Merettetiiyet is seated on a chair with a cushioned backrest and feet carved to resemble a lion’s paws, wearing a mid-calf-length sheath dress. A section of hair tucked behind her ear falls in front of her necklace, ending just at the top of her dress. On the left-hand panel (cat. 4), she holds a closed lotus bud in her lap; on the right-hand panel (cat. 5), she raises a large open lotus flower to her face. On both panels, Merettetiiyet extends her right hand toward a footed offering table piled high with goods, including long loaves of bread, legs of beef, and lettuce. At the far edge of the scene on the right-hand panel, a man—rendered on a smaller scale to denote his less important status in relation to Merettetiiyet within the composition—presents a goose. The far edge of the lower register on the left-hand panel instead depicts a second table piled high with foodstuffs. Within the tableaux, hieroglyphs call for “a thousand of bread, a thousand of beer, a thousand of oxen, a thousand of fowl,” with the addition of “a thousand of alabaster and a thousand of linen” on the right-hand panel.5

Depictions of the deceased seated, or more rarely standing, behind a table laden with food offerings to sustain them in the afterlife are a regular feature of ancient Egyptian funerary monuments (compare cats. 1, 7–8). On Merettetiiyet’s reliefs, the formulaic nature of the scene allows for a close stylistic comparison of the two panels that reveals that—although part of the same monument—they were produced by different artists (fig. 5). This is most evident in the image of Merettetiiyet, notably in the proportions of the ear, (which is more elongated on the left-hand panel) and the treatment of the exposed breast (which is larger with a more prominent nipple on the left-hand panel). On the left-hand panel, Merettetiiyet’s anklets, bracelets, and beaded broad collar are shown in significantly more detail than was employed in the simply outlined necklace on the right. And on the left-hand panel eight thick bread loaves stand on Merettetiiyet’s offering table, while on the right the loaves are slenderer and far more numerous.6

FPO Cats4 5 Fig4a copy

Fig. 5


Details of the primary figure of Merettetiiyet on the left panel (cat. 4) and right panel (cat. 5) reveal the stylistic differences in the two reliefs, including the treatment of the ear, breast, and jewelry.

The Chapel Owner Merettetiiyet

The name Merettetiiyet means the “One Whom Teti Loves Has Come.”[10] Her name honors King Teti, the first king of Dynasty 6, who ruled Egypt about 2345–2323 BCE, some three hundred years before Merettetiiyet lived. For centuries after his death, priests continued to serve King Teti’s cult at his Saqqara pyramid complex, located not far from where Merettetiiyet’s tomb chapel was later constructed. That Merettetiiyet’s name honors that monarch suggests that members of her family served as priests in the King Teti’s cult.[11]7

Little else is known about the life of Merettetiiyet. The inscriptions in her funerary chapel do not assign her a title, and no family members are named. The omission of a husband is not an indication of her marital status given how consistently husbands are not shown in tombs of women from the late Old Kingdom into the Late Period.[12]8

Date

In the Old Kingdom (Dynasties 3–8), Saqqara was the necropolis for the capital city Memphis, so it served as the main burial site for the royal family and their retainers. The Old Kingdom style in the Memphite region, exemplified by the reliefs in cats. 2–3, was generally uniform because of the site’s proximity to the royal workshops. At the end of Dynasty 8, the royal court moved south to Herakleopolis. At about that time, new artistic styles emerged that are characteristic of the First Intermediate Period (Dynasties 9–11).[13] This chapel has several stylistic features that are characteristic of Dynasty 10. The configuration of the offerings, with the strongly horizontal arrangement of the foreleg of beef placed directly on top of the tall loaves of bread, is a feature of Herakleopolitan Period (Dynasties 9–10) funerary scenes.[14] So too is the orthography of some of the inscriptions.[15] The presence of a pair of wedjat eyes on the lintel of the false door indicates a date in Dynasty 10.[16]9

Rediscovery

The sections of Merettetiiyet’s funerary chapel were among several false doors and side panels excavated by the British Egyptologist James E. Quibell between 1905 and 1907 in north Saqqara, east of King Teti’s pyramid.[17] The two side panels were subsequently sold by the Egyptian Antiquities Service, entering the Art Institute’s collection in May 1910.[18]10

Provenance

4.
The Art Institute of Chicago, acquired in 1910.11

5.
The Art Institute of Chicago, acquired in 1910.12

Publication History

4.
J. E. Quibell, Excavations at Saqqara (1906–1907) (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1908), 18, 73, pl. X.2.13

Art Institute of Chicago, Thirty-Second Annual Report: June 1, 1910–June 1, 1911 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1911), 19, 62.
14

Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 29, 30 (ill.), 31–32, 35, 39n1–2.15

Caroline Ransom Williams, “The Chicago Art Institute Egyptian Collection,” review of A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection, by Thomas George Allen, American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 41, no. 3 (April 1925): 204–5.16

Bertha Porter and Rosalind L. B. Moss, Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Reliefs, and Paintings, vol. 3, Memphis, pt. 2, Saqqâra to Dahshûr, 2nd ed., revised and augmented by Jaromír Málek (Oxford: Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, 1981), 563.17

Nadine Cherpion, Mastabas et hypogées d’Ancien Empire: Le problème de la datation (Brussels: Connaissance de l’Égypte Ancienne, 1989), 153, 164, 170, 175, 177, 230, 240. 18

Khaled Abdulla Daoud, Corpus of Inscriptions of the Herakleopolitan Period from the Memphite Necropolis: Translation, Commentary and Analyses (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005), 164–65, 326, pl. XCIV.19

Khaled Daoud, Necropoles Memphiticae: Inscriptions from the Herakleopolitan Period (Alexandria: Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 2011), 304; 305, fig. 115; 306.
20

5.
J. E. Quibell, Excavations at Saqqara (1906–1907) (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1908), 18, 73, pl. X.3.21

Art Institute of Chicago, Thirty-Second Annual Report: June 1, 1910–June 1, 1911 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1911), 19, 62.22

Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 29, 30 (ill.), 31–32, 35, 39n2.23

Bertha Porter and Rosalind L. B. Moss, Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Reliefs, and Paintings, vol. 3, Memphis, pt. 2, Saqqâra to Dahshûr, 2nd ed., revised and augmented by Jaromír Málek (Oxford: Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, 1981), 563.24

Khaled Abdulla Daoud, Corpus of Inscriptions of the Herakleopolitan Period from the Memphite Necropolis: Translation, Commentary and Analyses (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005), 164­–65, 326, pl. XCIV.25

Khaled Daoud, Necropoles Memphiticae: Inscriptions from the Herakleopolitan Period (Alexandria: Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 2011), 304–6.26

Entry by

Notes

  1. Merettetiiyet’s false door is now in the collection of the Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst, Munich, Gl.108.
  2. J. E. Quibell, Excavations at Saqqara (1906-1907) (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1908), 18. Merettetiiyet would have been buried in a shaft below the chapel.
  3. For the density of monuments at the site from the late Old Kingdom through First Intermediate Period, including further references, see Julia C. F. Hamilton, “Satinteti’s Offering Table: A Reused Block from Princess Watetkhethor Zeshzeshet’s Chapel in the Teti Pyramid Cemetery, Saqqara,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 108, nos. 1–2 (2002): 97–98.
  4. At the bottom of the false door are six additional images of Merettetiiyet standing in various poses.
  5. While only traces of color remain, other examples painted in alternating sections of red, yellow, white, and black suggest the original color palette used here.
  6. In addition to the missing fragments, the lower portion of the right panel has a badly abraded surface.
  7. For this reading, see Caroline Ransom Williams, “The Chicago Art Institute Egyptian Collection,” review of A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection, by Thomas George Allen, American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 41, no. 3 (April 1925): 204. In this review of the then recently published handbook of the collection, Williams corrects Thomas George Allen’s interpretation of the text as the name of the woman on the right. For Allen’s treatment see, Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 31. Williams’s understanding of the inscription follows that of Adolf Erman, Reden, Rufe und Lieder auf Gräberbildern des Alten Reiches (Berlin: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1919), 10.
  8. The current location of another fragment depicting two bracelets above these jars (see fig. 4) is not known.
  9. The inscription on the right-hand panel (cat. 5) omits the second epithet of Anubis, reading simply the “one who is revered before Anubis, Who Is Upon His Mountain, Merettetiiyet.”
  10. Even though Teti’s name appears here as an element in the writing of nonroyal Merettetiiyet’s name, it is enclosed within an oval cartouche in accordance with the conventions for writing the names of Egyptian kings.
  11. Private names that incorporated the name of King Teti are well attested in the late Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period. For this phenomenon and further references, see Hamilton, “Satinteti’s Offering Table,” 100–101.
  12. Ann Macy Roth, “The Absent Spouse: Patterns and Taboos in Egyptian Tomb Decoration,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 36 (1999): 37–53. The absence of husbands in the tombs of their wives does not reflect a general taboo against depicting men in this context because young and adult sons of the tomb owner are shown, as are male offering bearers, like those who appear on both of Merettetiiyet’s side panels. No completely satisfying explanation exists for this custom.
  13. On the development of the southern style and its gradual reversion to the Memphite style, see Gay Robins, Beyond the Pyramids: Egyptian Regional Art from the Museo Egizio, Turin, exh. cat. (Atlanta: Emory University Museum of Art and Archaeology, 1990).
  14. Yannis Gourdon, “Éléments de datation d’un groupe de stèles fausses-portes de la Première Période Intermédiaire,” in Des Néferkarê aux Montouhotep: Travaux archéologiques en cours sur la fin de la VIe dynastie et la Première Période Intermédiaire; Actes du colloque CNRS-Université Lumière-Lyon 2, tenu le 5–7 juillet 2001, ed. Laure Pantalacci and Catherine Berger-el-Naggar (Lyon: Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée, 2005), 172–74, 177; Khaled Abdalla Daoud, Corpus of Inscriptions of the Herakleopolitan Period from the Memphite Necropolis: Translation, Commentary and Analysis (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005), 185.
  15. Typical of Dynasty 10 orthography are the following features on the main inscription on the left-hand panel: the omission of the initial reed leaf in the phrase the “one who is revered”; the omission of a determinative in the writing of the name Anubis; and the oval pustule hieroglyph 𓐎 added to the god’s epithet “Who Is in the Wrappings.” On these features, see Gourdon, “Éléments de datation,” 167; Khaled Abdulla Daoud, “Abusir During the Herakleopolitan Period,” in Abusir and Saqqara in the Year 2000, ed. Miroslav Bárta and Jaromír Krejčí (Prague: Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Oriental Institute, 2000), 202–3.
  16. Daoud, Corpus of Inscriptions of the Herakleopolitan Period, 185. For further discussion of the features that point toward a Dynasty 10 date for the chapel of Merettetiiyet, see ibid., 165.
  17. J. E. Quibell, Excavations at Saqqara (1905–1906) (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1907); J. E. Quibell, Excavations at Saqqara (1906–1907) (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1908). Merettetiiyet’s reliefs were uncovered during the 1906–7 season. Other reliefs now in the Art Institute’s collection (1910.225, 1910.230 [cat. 6], 1910.232) also originated from these excavations. Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 27–35. An additional fragment (formerly Art Institute of Chicago 1910.229) is now ISAC Museum E17364.
  18. On the role of the Egyptian Antiquities Service in the art market, see Fredrik Hagen and Kim Ryholt, The Antiquities Trade in Egypt 1880–1930: The H. O. Lange Papers (Copenhagen: Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2016), 45–52.

How to Cite

Ashley F. Arico with contributions by Emily Teeter, “Cats. 4–5 Side Panels from the Chapel of Merettetiiyet,” in Ancient Egyptian Art at the Art Institute of Chicago by Emily Teeter and Ashley F. Arico, ed. Ashley F. Arico (Art Institute of Chicago, 2025), https://doi.org/10.53269/9780865593213/20.

© 2025 by The Art Institute of Chicago. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

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