Egyptian Wooden Models (continued)

Figure 1 - Cow Giving Birth, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto

     Middle Kingdom wooden models show slices of daily life in ancient Egypt. Some are true works of art (the wooden statues of the servant girl from the tomb of Meketre I showed in an earlier post for instance). Others are of lower artistic quality, but are still interesting in their own right.

Figure 2 - Cuts of Beef Drying, Metropolitan Museum

     Figure 1 shows a wooden model of a cow giving birth. Egypt having an agriculturally based economy, most ancient Egyptians would have been familiar with farm animals giving birth and a statue of this sort was probably included in a tomb to magically ensure that the tomb owner would have an abundance of cattle in the afterlife.

     Figure 2 shows another wooden model of what might happen to the calf after it had grown up. A nobleman's store house has many cuts of beef hanging up to dry so that they could be preserved for later use as food.