Fragmentary Stela with an Offering Scene before King Mentuhotep II

The king seated on this stone is Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II, the Theban ruler who brought Egypt back under one crown after a long period of division and so opened what historians call the Middle Kingdom. He wears the red crown and the short royal beard and holds a staff. A man in a kilt and a broad collar stands before him offering a vessel, and another follows with jars slung from a yoke across his shoulders.

The stela was cut down from a larger slab at some point, and the Louvre records that the king's Horus name was still visible on it before that happened. For this king the detail matters, because Mentuhotep changed his Horus name more than once during his long reign, and it can help place a monument within it. What survives is his throne name, Nebhepetre, with lines of a conventional autobiography in sunk hieroglyphs beside figures carved in raised relief. The fragment came to the Louvre in 1881 as a gift from the Société de Numismatique, a Paris society of coin collectors.