Khafre Enthroned

Common card · No. 455830

Khafre Enthroned is a Ka statue of the pharaoh Khafre, who reigned during the Fourth Dynasty of ancient Egypt. It is now located in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Made of anorthosite gneiss, a valuable, extremely hard, and dark stone, it was brought 1,000 km (620 mi) down the Nile River from the "Khafre quarries" west of Gebel el-Asr. The statue was carved for the Pharaoh's valley temple near the Great Sphinx, a part of the necropolis used in funeral rituals. This sculpture, depicted in-the-round (versus relief sculpture), shows Khafre seated, one of the basic formulaic types used during the Old Kingdom to show the human figure. Mummification played a huge role in the Egyptian culture, a 70-day process to ensure immortality for the king. Starting in the 3rd millennium BCE, if the king's mummy was damaged, a ka statue was created to "ensure immortality and permanence of the deceased's identity by providing a substitute dwelling place for the ka". Khafre rigidly sits on his royal throne,...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0