Highlights of the Manchester Museum 21: The Stela of Princess Isis
Ancient Egypt|February/March 2020
This finely wrought limestone slab (Acc. no. 1781) once formed the upper part (the curved ‘lunette’) of a larger stela commemorating the daughter of King Ramesses VI (c. 1143-1136 BC), a princess named Iset – or Isis.
Campbell Price
Highlights of the Manchester Museum 21: The Stela of Princess Isis

The stela was excavated by men working for the archaeologist Flinders Petrie at the site of Coptos, with financial support from Manchester industrialist Jesse Haworth.

It shows the Princess wearing the elaborate headgear of later Ramesside royal women, adoring two ‘great’ gods – a form of the sun god, Ra-Horakhty (‘by whose shining all is illuminated’), and the god of rebirth, Osiris (‘who awakens complete’). In the Ramesside Period, Ra and Osiris were sometimes shown twinned together as if to represent day and night, life and death – the totality of existence.

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