Reflections of Women in the New Kingdom: Ancient Egyptian Art from the British Museum

In Egypt’s New Kingdom, a woman’s image might survive on a statue, a stela or an object placed in a tomb. Such works can preserve names, titles and relationships, but they were shaped by artistic conventions too. A depiction of a wife, daughter or religious figure is evidence of how a society chose to represent women, not a direct record of everything those women experienced.

Egyptologist Gay Robins works through that distinction in this catalogue of ancient Egyptian art from the British Museum, prepared for a 1995 exhibition at Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum. The objects bring questions of family, status and religious roles into focus while showing how carefully images must be read before they can be used to reconstruct women's lives.