Tomb of Iti and Neferu: Iti with His Greyhound

In southern Egypt in these years, a man of power was shown with his hunting dogs. At Thebes, a short way down the Nile from Gebelein, the 11th-Dynasty ruler Intef II had himself carved on his tomb stela with his dogs around him, each one given its name, and part of that stela survives in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Here, on a wall of his own tomb, Iti is painted with his greyhound.

Only the lower part of the scene is left, Iti's legs and the hem of his kilt, with the slender hound beside his feet. This panel is one of 36 sections of painted plaster that were taken off the tomb walls in 1914 and fixed onto canvas in Florence. Of those, 29 went on show in Turin, and the other seven were known only from old photographs. One of those missing seven has since turned up in the storerooms of the University of Turin's museum of anthropology.