Week 7: Restoration Reflections from Afar

The Sphinx and I Hello Reader, This week’s blog post is a bit different. I wasn’t able to make it into the Bonnet House due to being sick and needing some time to rest. I had only planned to go in on Wednesday, since Katie was going to be out of the office on Thursday, but unfortunately, I wasn’t well enough to go in at all. Even so, I had an unexpected opportunity to think about museum work in a different context. Some art I saw at the MET Over the weekend, I took a spontaneous trip to Manhattan with my mom and spent a day at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. While I saw many incredible pieces of art and historical artifacts, one stood out to me above the rest: the colossal Sphinx of Hatshepsut , located in Gallery 131 next to the Temple of Dendur. The statue, originally from Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, depicts Egypt’s first female pharaoh with the body of a lion and a human head. She wears the royal nemes headcloth, a false beard, and the uraeus cobra on her brow,...