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Opulence in Ancient Egypt may have had its heyday in the late Ptolemaic Kingdom, a critical transition period between the pharaonic kingdom’s Hellenistic rulers and their subsequent Roman conquerors. The Metropolitan Museum of Art once had a critical gap in its otherwise incomparable collection of artifacts detailing Egyptian historian until it recently acquired the illustriously gilded coffin of Nedjemankh, a high-ranking priest of the ram-god Heryshef of Nen-nisut.
After months of planning, curators have reorganized one of its central Egyptian galleries for an exhibition celebrating their new golden masterpiece, purchased in 2017. Attracting museumgoers with its glittering title item, Nedjemankh and His Gilded Coffin outlines how the polytheistic ancient Egyptian religion survived three centuries of foreign rule before fusing its formal traditions with the aesthetics of Coptic Christianity.
Conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, Egypt’s ruling class already had followed Greek customs for centuries before Cleopatra’s death and the Ptolemaic dynasty’s capitulation to Rome in 30 BCE. Nevertheless, ancient customs continued to influence Egypt’s broader population, during the Ptolemaic period, especially with regard to religious practices.
