Home / Artworks / Yuny and His Wife Renenutet
Yuny and His Wife Renenutet
Unknown artist (ancient Egypt), ca. 1299–1290 BCE
This statue shows a man named Yuny and his wife Renenutet sitting side by side. The Metropolitan Museum dates it to about 1299 to 1290 BCE, in the reign of Seti I, during the 19th Dynasty of the New Kingdom. It is made of limestone with paint and stands about 85 centimetres tall.
Pair statues like this show a couple as a unit, and usually the woman's arm rests around the man's shoulder in a sign of affection and partnership. The museum's catalogue keywords for this object include menat and music. A menat was a type of beaded necklace linked in Egyptian religion with the goddess Hathor and with music, and it appears in images of women who served in temples.
The statue was found in Middle Egypt, in excavations led by Khashaba in 1913, and was bought by the Metropolitan Museum with Rogers Fund money in 1915. We have kept this entry close to what the museum record says, since the people it shows are known to us mostly through such objects.
From the museum record
| Artist | Unknown artist (ancient Egypt) |
|---|---|
| Date | ca. 1299–1290 BCE |
| Medium | Limestone, paint |
| Size | H. 84.5 × W. 54.5 × D. 73 cm (33 1/4 × 21 7/16 × 28 3/4 in.) |
| Museum | The Metropolitan Museum of Art |
| Credit line | Rogers Fund, 1915 |
| Accession number | 15.2.1 |
| Licence | Open Access (CC0) |
Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art collection record. Facts such as dates, sizes and credit lines come from that record. The write-up above was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the museum record and standard references. Spotted a mistake? Tell us.
