Tutankhamun's Treasures - Gilded Wooden Statue Shrine


Gilded Wooden Statue Shrine with Scenes of Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamun
Reign of Tutankhamun 1336-1326 BCE
Height 50.5 cm (19.88 inches)
Grand Egyptian Museum #GEM 199-1 (Previously JE 61481)


The Global Egyptian Museum website has more info:
"This small shrine, made of wood and covered with thick gold, rests on a silver-plated sledge. The exterior and the double doors are decorated with scenes showing the king and his wife hunting and enjoying life.

"The scenes on the double doors are surrounded by friezes of decorations, royal cartouches, and rekhyt birds. Rekhyt birds are lapwings or plovers with human arms, that symbolize all the people ruled by the king.

"Inside the shrine, an ebony pedestal and back pillar bearing the king's name indicated that it had once housed a statue, perhaps that of the goddess Weret-Hekau, Great of Magic, who is mentioned several times in the texts, or a statue of the king himself."


Height: Roughly 20 inches tall (50.5cm); Width: Roughly 12.5 inches (32 cm)


Ankhesenamun hands Tutankhamun an arrow and points to the abundant prey...


Alison Roberts explains the central scene:
"The queen's gesture highlights the return to Hathor's traditional rites after Akhenaten's reign."
"Ankhesenamun shakes a naos sistrum and offers her menit-necklace to Tutankhamun, empowering him with Hathor's solar attraction. Royal women in Akhenaten's reign were never shown holding a menit, though the necklace's new design here clearly displays Amarna influence. Now, for the first time, the counterpoise terminates in an aegis, featuring a female head crowned with a solar horned headdress and human hands holding out Ankh-signs of life, echoing the Aten's raying hands bestowing 'life' in Amarna cult scenes."
Alison Roberts, _Golden Shrine,Goddesss Queen: Egypt's Anointing Mysteries_, (Northgate Publishers 2008), page 19


Close up of that scene....
Here, the scene is clearly re-stablishing that it is the solar deity Hathor who is bestowing life.


Hans Ollermann shares two scenes of the loving couple.
(He allows "educational non-commercial use")