Stela of Khonsuirdis and His Wife Worshipping Osiris and Isis

Khonsuirdis, the man raising his hand before Osiris, lists his titles on this stela, and his father, Padimehyt, is given exactly the same ones. Both held the same three priestly offices, both carried a title the Louvre renders as great combatant, and both were scribes of the ploughlands of the estate of Amun, the god of Thebes, whose temple owned farmland across Egypt. Posts like these often passed from father to son, and the stela records the family's hold on them alongside the prayer.

He and his wife stand with one arm raised in worship before Osiris, in his white crown and shroud, and Isis, who wears the hieroglyph of her own name on her head. A winged sun disc with two cobras spreads across the rounded top. The figures are carved in raised relief, while the offering formula below is cut into the stone.

The stela comes from Abydos, the town where Osiris was believed to be buried. The Louvre dates it by its style to the end of the 25th Dynasty or the start of the 26th, the decades when the Kushite kings from Nubia lost Egypt to Assyrian armies and a family from Sais in the Delta took the throne. It reached the museum in 1827, and Champollion included it that year in his catalogue of the new Egyptian galleries.