In ancient Egypt, a tomb was not simply a place for the burial of remains, but rather the site of quite literal rebirth. Here, the individual’s soul was born again, into the afterlife. But surprisingly, the ancient Egyptians believed that to make this rebirth possible for a woman, it was necessary that she briefly turn into a man, in order to conceive the fetus of her reborn self. Guided by new research inspired in part by feminist scholarship, our collection exhibition A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt explores how this process was thought to take place.
Dressed in a finely pleated, linen garment and shown with the golden skin of a goddess, the Lady of the House and Singer, Thenet, has already been reborn. Now in the afterlife, she worships and makes offering to a falcon-headed Re-Horakhty, a god associated with the cycles of the sun which mirror the cycles of life.
Stela of the Lady of the House and Singer, Thenet. Provenance not known Third Intermediate Period, Dynasty 22, circa 945–712 b.c.e. Wood, paint Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.1385E