A block of limestone with four ears carved into it, one pair stacked atop the other. A statue of a snake with a woman’s head where a reptilian face ought to be. A figurine resembling a horse of a sort, with bony paws instead of hooves. A sculpture of a tall falcon guarding a man. A bronze depicting a cobra-eel-human hybrid.
These are the kinds of oddities one expects in a contemporary art setting right now, at a time when a new surrealism has fully taken hold. But these examples are, in fact, more than two millennia old, and they all appear in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s soon-to-open “Divine Egypt,” which suggests that the ancient Egyptians kept it weird.
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I didn’t even mention the show’s strangest work, by the way: a gargantuan block of quartz diorite that’s carved into the shape of a scarab, the elegance of its smoothed back seemingly at odds with its two fearsome mandibles just below. This beetle is meant to represent Khepri, a god associated with the morning sun, and ancient Egyptians would’ve known as much. Yet I’d wager that even to the Egyptians acquainted with that association, this depiction would’ve appeared alien, not entirely of this world.
There are plenty of works here that look a bit more familiar to contemporary eyes than that scarab: cat-shaped coffins and sculptures of pharaohs, faience amulets and golden pendants. But “Divine Egypt,” which opens October 12, contains quite a lot that defies easy explanation. That’s a consequence of lost history, to be sure: Present-day curators, relying on partial records buried by the passage of time, are still working to fill in the gaps that limit our understanding of ancient Egypt. Yet this wide-ranging exhibition about the multitude of gods worshipped across this ancient civilization’s various dynasties, also suggests that unknowability was baked into all this art, which helped make these deities appear as though they functioned differently from the rest of us.
Installation view of “Divine Egypt,” 2025, at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknowability may be the reason audiences have always flocked to the Met for its ancient Egyptian art shows—or so said the museum’s former director, Thomas Hoving, anyway. Asked why well over one million people came to the Met’s King Tut show in 1978, Hoving speculated that “the majesty and mystery of the ancient past” got visitors in the door. By some measures, the Tut show was the first Egyptian art blockbuster—an unmatched success during its day, and one rarely imitated in the years since.
“Divine Egypt,” the first large-scale Egyptian art show at this museum since 2012, is no Tut blockbuster. It is a decidedly low-key affair, albeit quite a large one, with 210 or so priceless pieces included. (Some 140 of those works are from the Met’s extensive Egyptian art holdings; curiously, none of the rest are on loan from Egypt itself.) The exhibition may be set in one of the Met’s biggest special exhibition spaces, but few of the objects are themselves monumental. Many of them are gorgeously wrought amulets and figurines that could easily be held in the palm of one’s hand, were they not encased in glass.
Curator Diana Craig Patch, working with research associate Brendan Hainline, has produced an exhibition that does not announce itself as the event that it is, then. But it is a grand occasion, of course, and it’s exactly the kind of show the Met does best, with a clarity of purpose that’s rare in big shows of this kind.
Installation view of “Divine Egypt,” 2025, at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
The show is about the 1,500 gods worshipped in Egypt, though Patch mercifully focuses on only around 25 of them. In thrilling mini-sections that are organized nonchronologically, the curators show how the gods were molded and remolded, depending on when or where you were in ancient Egypt. Iconographies were remixed, remade, and subverted. Deities even became fused together.
[See more images of the show here.]
The curators kick things off with an area devoted to artifacts that would have been accessible only to pharaohs, meaning that they were not available for consumption by the public. Here, you can track how iconographies defined Egypt’s deities: Horus, for example, was the god of the sky, and he was often represented with falconine qualities. You can find him in one limestone statue here, rigidly seated upright with an arm behind the back of King Haremhab, who’s posed as if he’s Horus’s buddy. You can also find Horus in a gorgeous metagraywacke sculpture in which a tiny King Nectanebo II stands between his splayed talons.
With other gods, things were less straightforward. In the section about Hathor, goddess of motherhood, dance, and joy, ask yourself: What’s in a face? In one column fragment here, dating to the 4th century BCE, Hathor’s face is human with cow’s ears. In a statue nearby, from the 15th century BCE, she’s turned totally bovine, with almond-shape eyes formed from rock crystal. And in yet another object in the same gallery, a minuscule pendant dating from sometime between the 12th and 7th centuries BCE, Hathor is transformed into Bat, an entirely different cow goddess with a triangularly shaped forehead and golden peepers.
It becomes clear that for ancient Egyptians, the gods were shapeshifters. That much is obvious from a blue-glazed faience amulet showing a falcon-headed crocodile dating from sometime between the 7th and 1st centuries BCE. The bird’s head may be—you guessed it—a reference to Horus. But the long, scaly back? That’s a reference to Sobek, god of the Nile, and perhaps even specifically to Soknopaios, a version of this deity that was worshipped in the Fayum region.
Statue group of the god Horus and the king Haremhab, ca. 1323–1295 BCE.
Anna-Marie Kellen/©Metropolitan Museum of Art/Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
As the gods transcended temples only pharaohs could enter, reaching the public through objects held in shrines and toted around in processions, the deities continued to change form. Their images could act as the inspiration for board games—do not miss a playing surface here based on Mehen’s curled, serpentine body—and as the influence for certain death rites, with the goddess Bastet’s feline attributes generating an array of cat-themed artifacts, including a mummified cat that happens to look a lot like the baby from Eraserhead.
The mummified cat certainly does bespeak the sense of mystery evoked by Hoving back in 1978, but it doesn’t contain much majesty. That’s not such a bad thing. One success of “Divine Egypt” is that it shows that the gods’ enigmatic presence was not entirely incompatible with everyday life—that these deities were memorialized not only in gigantic temples and heavy sarcophagi, but in easily transportable objects that asserted their strangeness on a much smaller scale.
To that end, I recommend spending a little time with some of the show’s littlest artifacts. My favorite among them is a Hathor pendant that dates from the 8th century BCE, when the Nubian kings ruled Egypt. The goddess’s head is rendered in lush gold leaf atop a carefully hewn block of rock crystal, and its owner, a queen of Piye, knew that this crystal once contained an object of high importance—a “magical substance,” perhaps, or maybe a prayer wrapped in gold, the curators propose. Today, all you can see is the brown residue that object left behind. Two millennia on, the amulet still contains riddles that resist being unraveled.