featured: ancient egyptian

gold, ca. 1353–1323 B.C.

From the permanent collection of The Met, this is the gold finger ring of King Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti. The catalog states, "The hieroglyphs on this ring may be read as an ideogram. The two seated figures are probably Akhenaten (left) and Nefertiti (right) as the deities Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture). They were father and mother of the earth and sky, which are symbolically represented by the earth hieroglyph (below) and by the sun disk flanked by two sacred cobras (above)."