The Kunsthistorisches Museum (Continued)

Figure 1 - Painted Ceiling in the museum

     The Egyptian collection of the museum is housed in the North wing of the museum. You go up the stairs and past the Sekhment statues and enter the first gallery, which has a ceiling painted to look like the ceiling of of an ancient temple, with a row of representations of the vulture goddess Mut spreading her wings over the visitors.

Figure 2 - Copy of Middle Kingdom tomb paintings

     The far wall, is decorated with a copy of the paintings in a Middle Kingdom tomb at Beni Hasan. This is the famous tomb of Khnumhotep, that shows a group of foreigners coming to Egypt to trade, with the foreigners being clearly labeled as "Hyksos". The Hyksos traders are shown between the large figure of the Egyptian Nomarch Khnumhotep (on the far right) and the column which blocks part of the view of the paintings). The original tomb dates to a period prior to the Hyksos "conquest" of Egypt and I have long argued that this shows the "Hyksos" entered Egypt peacefully and stayed in increasingly large numbers until they were able to establish a separate kingdom in the Nile Delta during the Second Internediate Period.



Photos Copyright 2012 by John Freed