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Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

Construction of the Kunsthistorisches Museum by Gottfried Semper and Carl von Hasenauer, commissioned by Emperor Franz Joseph I, began in 1871 and was completed in 1891. The museum was to become one of the most important monumental museum buildings of the 19th century in Europe. It was designed to bring together and house the art and treasures collected by the Habsburg family over several centuries.
 
http://www.khm.at/en/visit/collections/egyptian-and-near-eastern-collection/
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The exhibition area is divided into four major themes: funerary cult, cultural history, sculpture and relief, and the development of writing. The halls display stone columns from the 18th dynasty, large statues and many unique and impressive objects. Highlights of the museum's exhibition include the Kaninisut Offering Chapel from the Old Kingdom, numerous sarcophagi and coffins, burial objects such as shabtis, sarcophagi and coffins, votive stelae, examples of the Book of the Dead, divine figures, pottery, objects of daily life such as clothing and cosmetics, and masterpieces of sculpture such as the Reserve Head from Giza.
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I would like to express my sincere thanks and gratitude to Dr Helmut Satzinger, Professor of Egyptology, University of Vienna, former Keeper of the Egyptian and Near Eastern Collection, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, who so kindly gave his time and effort during my visit to the museum.
All photographs were taken by Lenka Peacock in 2010 and are © Kunsthistorisches Museum.
I would also like to thank Jan Kunst from Holland for his constructive comments, corrections and additions to the following text, and to Ingeborg Waanders, also from Holland, for her expertise, support and encouragement.
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Stele to Meretseger
From Deir el-Medina
New Kingdom, 19th-20th dynasty
Limestone, painted
Height: 20.7 cm
Width: 14.2 cm
Thickness: 3.3 cm
Meretseger was the goddess associated with the pyramidal top of al-Qurn. She presided over the entire Theban necropolis. Her name means "she who loves silence". Meretseger was mainly worshipped by the craftsmen of the royal necropolis.
The upper register: remains of a male figure standing on the right making an offering in front of a table. Meretseger, depicted as a goddess with a female body and a cobra's head, is seated on her throne on the left side of the table, holding an ankh in her right hand and a sceptre in her left. The inscription reads: "Merest[sic]eger, Mistress of the West. Made by the apprentice Sha[...?]"
The lower register: The ten snakes represent the cobra goddess Meretseger. Only seven snakes are visible because the stela is in a fragmentary state - the lower left part is broken off.
Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Egyptian - Oriental Collection
Inv AE_INV_122
Provenance: 1824 [1821] gift of Carlo Antonio Fontana
Stele of Khonsu
New Kingdom
20th dynasty, reign of Ramesses III., 1198-1166 BC
From Deir el-Medina (probably)
Limestone, light, fine
Height: 14.2 cm
Width: 9.4 cm
Thickness: 3 cm
This round topped stele is divided into two registers. The upper part is in raised relief and depicts a ram in the form of a criosphinx facing to the left. His head is adorned with a composite crown. In front of the ram there is a lotus-shaped table with loaves of bread. The ram almost certainly represents the god Amun-Re.
The lower register is executed in sunk relief and depicts three striding men. The arms of the first man on the right are raised in worship, while the other two men hold palettes and a lotus flower in their left hands.
The lower left corner of the stele is missing.
Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Egyptian - Oriental
Collection
Inv AE_INV_8212
Provenance:
1821 purchase by E. A. Burghart in Egypt
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Stele of Pamerihu
New Kingdom
19th dynasty, about 1304-1201 BC
From Deir el-Medina (probably)
Limestone
Height: 18.95 cm
Width: 12.4 cm
Thickness: 4.6 cm
The round-topped stele is a votive relief by the sculptor Pamerihu, who probably lived in Deir el-Medina and worked for the royal wife Ahmose-Nefertari (c. 1570-1505 BC). She was the wife of the founder of the 18th Dynasty, Ahmose I (1570-1546 BC) and the mother of King Amenhotep I (1525-1504 BC), the first king to be buried in the Valley of the Kings.
Ahmose Nefertari and Amenhotep I are often depicted together on monuments in Deir el-Medina. Both were worshipped in the settlement.
Ahmose Nefertari is seated on a throne facing right in front of a table with a libation pot. She is dressed in a flowing, pleated gown, more typical of representations of elite women of the Ramesside period (c. 1295-1069 BC) than of the period in which the queen lived. On her head she wears the vulture headdress of the goddess Mut, consort of the god Amun of Thebes, surmounted by a solar disc and ostrich feathers. The cobra on her crown and the flail in her hand indicate her royal status. The lotus flower was often held by deceased women as a symbol of rebirth. There is a cartouche of Ahmose Nefertari within the hieroglyphic inscription consisting of 2 vertical columns in the right upper part of the stela. Another inscription is written in black ink at the bottom of the stele. It consists of 2 horizontal lines of hieroglyphs and contains an offering formula. The inscription is partially faded.

Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Egyptian - Oriental Collection
Inv AE_INV_158
Provenance: 1821 gift of C. A. Fontana
Figured ostrakon of the goddess Meretseger
New Kingdom
19th-20th dynasty, about 1315-1081 BC
From Deir el-Medina (probably)
Painted limestone
Height: 11.3 cm
Length:  16.6 cm
Thickness: 2.9 cm
This piece of limestone depicts the goddess Meretseger in the form of a coiled snake in front of an offering table, flanked on either side by a jug with an entwined lotus on a stand. Her headdress consists of two high feathers and a sun disc. Three tall papyrus stems lean over the back of the snake.
Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Egyptian -
Oriental Collection
Inv AE_INV_8304
Provenance: 1948 Purchase
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Shabti of Sennedjem
New Kingdom
19th dynasty, around 1300 BC
From Deir el-Medina, Tomb 1 of Sennedjem
Limestone, painted
Height: 28.3 cm
Width: 9.95 cm
Depth:  8.8 cm
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Sennedjem lived in Deir el-Medina during the reigns of Seti I (1291-1278) and Ramesses II (1279-1213 BC). He was buried with his wife, Iyinofreti, and their family in a tomb in the western necropolis of the village, which was found intact and contained mummies of three generations of Sennedjem's family along with burial objects and the furniture from his home that had been used during his lifetime. One of Sennedjem's titles was "Servant in the Place of Truth".

Shabtis functioned as representatives of the dead, their masters, and were expected to take their owner's place in performing manual labour in the afterlife. This finely painted limestone shabti from Sennedjem depicts a mummiform figure holding agricultural tools. The inscription is skilfully painted in eight horizontal lines of black pigment on a white background around the mummiform body and legs. The hieroglyphs include the name of the owner and parts of Chapter 6 of the Book of the Dead (Shabti spell) in Middle Egyptian.
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Translation:
"Illuminated is the Osiris, the one who hears the voice in the Place of Truth, Sennedjem true of voice. He says: Oh Shabti, when one commands and apportions the Osiris, the one who hears the voice in the Place of Truth, Sennedjem true of voice, for any work which is to be done in the realm of the dead, then distinguish yourself as a man of duty there, in tilling the fields, watering the banks, and moving sand from east to west. When one commands and apportions you to do this, every day, then you shall say every time: I am here, behold me, every time. The Osiris, the one who hears the voice in the Place of Truth, Sennedjem true of voice"

(Hieroglyphic inscription, transliteration and translation from CD Egyptian Treasures in Europe - 1000 Highlights Multilingual Version v 1.0. 1999 ed.)

Although the shabti serves as a representation of the person, the features of the figure are standardised, so we cannot consider this to be a portrait of Sennedjem.

Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Egyptian - Oriental Collection
Inv AE_INV_6614
Provenance: 1901 Purchase

Another shabti of Sennedjem is in the collection of Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge see photo and description here
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Papyrus Ambras
New Kingdom
20th dynasty, Year 6 of whm-msw.t Ramesses IX
Location: in substance from Thebes
Height: 20.9 cm
Length: 41.2 cm
List of documents written in hieratic script
Rectangular papyrus sheet in horizontal format with two columns in horizontal lines: the right column consists of nine lines, the left column of twelve lines. Towards the end of the 20th dynasty, dwindling state resources led to shortages in the distribution of rations, perhaps not only to the community of workmen at Deir el-Medina. The resulting poverty of the Theban population, combined with diminishing fear of the authorities, had a predictable result: by 1064 BC all the major royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been looted. The workmen of Deir el-Medina were among the convicted tomb robbers. There are 4 key texts from which we derive information about the tomb robberies: Papyrus Abbott (=Papyrus BM 10221), Papyrus Leopold II and Amherst, Papyrus BM 10053 and Papyrus BM 10052.
The second column of the Papyrus Ambras lists several documents - statements and acts of investigation - relating to tomb robbery and the involvement of the workmen in it. Among them are a receipt for the gold, silver, and copper identified as stolen by the workers of the necropolis, a statement regarding the copper object sold by the robbers from the Valley of the Queens, an interrogation act of the coppersmith Wares who broke into the tomb of a nobleman, and also an interrogation act of the tomb robbers Pay and Qaha Sethemhab.
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Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Egyptian - Oriental Collection
Inv AE_INV_3876 (Papyrus Nr. 30)
Provenance: over 1875 Ambras
Acquisition: the name of the papyrus comes from the name of the Habsburg Ambras collection, which contained other art and ethnographical objects. The collection derived its name from the place where it was kept until 1806 - in the castle Ambras in Innsbruck.
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Wooden writing board
New Kingdom
19th dynasty, about 13th century BC
Probably from Deir el-Medina
Wood coated with fine stucco, polished
Height: 14.8 cm
Length:  18.5 cm
Thickness: 0.75 cm
Wooden tablets like this one were used for writing and drawing exercises. They are called palimpsests. Successive texts were written on them, each one erased to make way for the next. This rectangular wooden tablet is covered on both sides with a layer of white stucco. There is a small hole near the edge for hanging the tablet when not in use. There are two different texts on both sides. The partially damaged texts are written in black ink in hieratic, a cursive script based on hieroglyphs for everyday use (for quickly writing letters and accounts). On one side (called verso here) there are ten horizontal lines, with lines 2-4 and 7-9 arranged in columns. Some text is missing, particularly line 5, because there is a crack in the gesso, which is visible on both sides. On this side of the panel are images of two baboons, the animal of Thoth, the god of writing. They may have been intended as a caricature of the teacher. Below the baboons there are traces of a drawing of a horse's head. The other side (here called the recto) has seven horizontal lines of text.
Translation:
Verso
(1) The chief gardener Menkheper has been appointed to collect the tpy-fish (?) which are outside from the
poor people that are with the watchman Amenemhat:
(4) Bauef-re
(5) ...
(6) Mut (?)
(7) Sepes-tut
2nd column: Regarding that which was found in the house: the representative Ahmose says to the
represented (and) the speaker of the king Semnakht......
3rd column: what the Court meeting said: Menkheper is right. The guardian Ahmose is wrong.

Recto
(1) What the official Amenhotep said:
(2) the royal scribe Minmose said to the scribe Pai the following: "you were brought this message saying I
have been informed by you what you have sent about this, namely: (I) have taken the people that were
taking shelter/were hiding/were seeking protection with the overseer of personnel Nakht away. Why did you
take this action? Did I not assign those people to you after you told (me) "I will not do anything bad?"

(both translated by Ingeborg Waanders from Holland and Lenka Peacock using the German text of El-Kholi and his transcriptions into hieroglyphs, p. 60-62)

Dating:
The inscription on the tablet can be dated to the early 19th dynasty. Paleographic features such as the characters for
p (in pn), mn (in Imn), m (hr-m) and the plural strokes can help us to date the document.
Lexical features that aid dating are the negation bn and the preposition m-dj.
Several Middle Egyptian grammatical features appear in the text, such as the form sdm.n=f and the negation nn (rather than the Late Egyptian bn). Personal names such as Amenemhat, Menkhepere and Ahmose were common from the 18th dynasty onwards.
(El-Kholi, 62)

Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Egyptian - Oriental Collection
Inv AE_INV_3924
Provenance:
1877/78 purchase by E. Bergmann Egypt
Sources:
1. Kessler, D.: Die kultische Bindung der Ba-Konzeption. 2. Teil: Die Ba-Zitate auf den Kultstelen und Ostraka des Neues Reiches IN: Studien zur altagyptischen Kultur 29, 2001 153, Anm. 34
2. Huttner, M.: Die Votivstele des Vorarbeiters Chons IN: Gottingen Miszellen 178 (2000), 59-63
3. Wessetzky, Vilmos: Une stele dediee a Meresger. Bulletin du Musee Hongrois de.s Beaux-Arts 78, 1993, 15-19
4. Adel Mahmoud: Msw-hr = The sons of the Toms (IN: M. Eldamaty: Egyptian Museum Collections around the world. Studies for the Centennial of the Egyptian Museum Cairo, 2002) 774. PM I 2,2 737
5. Papyri und Ostraka aus der Ramessidenzeit mit Ubersetzung und Kommentar von Mohamed Salah El-Kholi.
Siracusa : Museo del Papiro, 2006.
6. Parkinson, Richard: Cracking codes : the Rosetta Stone and decipherement
London : British Museum Press, 1999.
7. Taylor, John H.: Death and afterlife in ancient Egypt
London : British Museum Press, 2001.
8. The Cairo Museum masterpieces of Egyptian art / edited by Francesco Tiradritti
London : Thames & Hudson, 1998.
9. McDowell, A.G.: Village life in ancient Egypt : laundry lists and love songs
Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999.
10. CD Egyptian Treasures in Europe - 1000 Highlights
Multilingual Version v 1.0. 1999 ed.
11. http://www.globalegyptianmuseum.org/record.aspx?id=5591
12. http://www.khm.at/en/visit/collections/egyptian-and-near-eastern-collection/
Further bibliography
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