Stela of Pakaresy and Iset at the Funerary Meal

Early in the 18th Dynasty, in the generations after Egypt had driven out the Hyksos, the foreign kings who had ruled the north, a couple named Pakaresy and Iset had this small limestone stela carved. It shows them as they hoped to sit forever, facing each other across a table heaped with loaves and food, with a prayer for offerings written above them.

Iset, mistress of the house, wears a long wig and lifts a lotus flower to her face to breathe in its scent. The lotus closes at night and opens again in the morning sun, and the Egyptians linked its perfume with rebirth. Pakaresy, painted a darker red, as men usually were, holds a ewer. Look under her lion-footed chair. There lie a mirror and a little case for kohl, the black eye paint, her own toilet things kept beside her for eternity.

In the rounded top two great eyes of Horus look down on the couple. The stela was given to the Louvre in 1887, and in 2002 it travelled to Marseille for an exhibition on perfume and cosmetics in ancient Egypt.