Stela of Lady Tachemes Worshipping Ra-Horakhty

On the lady's head, above her wig, sits a small pale cone. Cones like it appear on banquet guests and on the dead in Egyptian painting for centuries, and they were long explained as lumps of scented fat that melted in the heat and perfumed the hair. In 2019 archaeologists working at Amarna published the first real ones, two hollow cones of a wax-like material found on the heads of people buried in a cemetery of ordinary townspeople. Whatever they meant, they were real objects.

The lady is Tachemes, as the Louvre reads her name, with a question mark. She stands in a pleated dress and a broad collar, her hands raised before the falcon-headed Ra-Horakhty, who sits enthroned with the sun disc and a cobra on his head, holding the flail and the crook, an offering table between them. The sign for the sky runs across the top, held up by two was sceptres, the pillars of heaven, and a winged sun disc fills the rounded top. Painted in grey, red, black, blue and green on a wooden board about 25 centimetres high, the stela is dated by its style to the 22nd Dynasty, in Egypt's Third Intermediate Period.