Stele of Senusret and Dedet

This stela is shaped like a doorway. Under a cornice of painted leaves, its lower half is a false door, the carved entrance through which Egyptians imagined the dead coming out to receive their offerings, framed by columns of hieroglyphs. On the crossbar above it sits a pair of painted eyes of Horus, and above that stand the couple, Senusret with a short beard, a staff and a folded cloth, and Dedet in a long wig, holding a lotus flower to her face, with food piled between them. The Louvre dates it by its style to the reign of Amenemhat II. In 2011 the Egyptologist Alexander Ilin-Tomich linked it to a small group of stones now in Berlin, Munich, Lyon, Dijon and Saint-Omer, which he gave to a single workshop. False doors with eyes on the crossbar, he argued, were typical of the region of Memphis and the Faiyum, so that workshop was possibly at Saqqara, even though this stela was probably found much farther south, at Abydos or Thebes. It came to Paris in an early 19th-century collection, was sold at auction there in December 1822, and entered the Louvre's inventory in 1825.