Statue of Princess Redji

In the 3rd Dynasty, at the start of the Old Kingdom, builders at Saqqara raised the Step Pyramid of King Djoser, the first monumental stone building in Egypt. Stone statues of private people were still a young art, and this granodiorite figure belongs to their early generations. The museum thinks it may come from the cemetery at Saqqara, though it puts a question mark beside that. The inscription on the base calls her a king's daughter, and gives her name as Redji.

The statue was never meant as a likeness. It was a substitute body, set in the tomb to keep her whole for eternity, and so it shows an ideal figure. The museum points to the marks of its time, the stiff upright pose, the very short neck and the heavy, voluminous wig. Her few hieroglyphs are listed in a 1995 inventory of the inscriptions known from the 3rd Dynasty.