Slab Stela of Two Women at a Funerary Meal

Two women sit side by side on this slab of limestone, each on a stool with legs carved like a bull's and each facing a table of offerings. They wear long dresses and heavy wigs falling in three masses, and each holds her left arm bent across her chest. Hieroglyphs around them give their names, which the Louvre reads as Nytneb and Nytoua, together with lists of the offerings they were to receive.

Both names are built on Neith, a goddess much honoured in Egypt's earliest dynasties, when several royal women also bore her name. The slab is dated by its style to the 2nd or 3rd Dynasty, roughly 2900 to 2675 BC, and the Louvre records it as coming from Saqqara, the cemetery of the capital, Memphis.

The scene is the funerary meal, the dead person seated before a table of bread, in an early form, when this image was only beginning to become the standard picture of a tomb owner. Here it appears twice on one stone, two scenes joined edge to edge. The Louvre bought the slab in 1977, and traces of red, green and yellow paint survive on it.