Kneeling Statue of Amenhotep II Offering Two Vases

On a stela he set up beside the Great Sphinx at Giza, Amenhotep II boasted of his strength. He said he could shoot an arrow through a copper target a palm thick, and row his ship faster and farther than 200 sailors of the navy could row theirs, claims that some Egyptologists doubt. In this granite statue from the temple of Amun at Karnak, the same king kneels.

He holds out two small round jars, the nu vessels in which liquids such as wine or milk were offered to the gods. The museum dates the statue to his reign, from 1425 to 1400 BC. The pose was still fairly new. It first appears under Hatshepsut, a few decades before him, and through the rest of the New Kingdom it became one of the usual ways of showing a king serving a god in person.